Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

Latest Episodes:

Tin House Live : Readings by Garth Greenwell, Michelle Tea, Kaveh Akbar Oct 16, 2019

Show notes

Recorded at the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, today’s episode is a medley of readings from three different nights. Garth Greenwell reads from his upcoming novel Cleanness (FSG January 2020), Michelle Tea from her novel-in-progress, Little Faggot, and Kaveh Akbar the short and long poems “Vines” and “The Palace” respectively.

Rob Schlegel : In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps Oct 02, 2019

Show notes

“Rob Schlegel has a voice you’d follow into the dark woods, knowing full well it’s hard, awful, daily, plain, living truth you’re running toward. The speaker in this book is a heartbreaker of a storyteller—a synesthesiac of mixed feelings, bad news, and wordsmithery. I feel known, caught out, believed in, vulnerable, when I read this book.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

Tin House Live : Revision Panel with R.O. Kwon, Karen Shepard, Danielle Evans, Jamel Brinkley Sep 25, 2019

Show notes

“Finding the Life of the Story: Vision & Revision” was recorded at the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Panelists Karen Shepard, Danielle Evans, R.O. Kwon and Jamel Brinkley talk strategies to draft and revise. Moderated by David Naimon, host of Between the Covers.

Xuan Juliana Wang : Home Remedies Sep 18, 2019

Show notes

“Filled with characters who mirror the chaos and anxiety, exhilaration and despair, desire and fear of the world around them, Home Remedies offers searing portraits of millennial Chinese immigrants. . . . Wang’s shimmering words offer proof that even the most mundane of these lives have the potential to become something extraordinary. . . . A great, explosive talent.”—Nylon Magazine

Ayşe Papatya Bucak : The Trojan War Museum Sep 04, 2019

Show notes

“These are stories that reflect the author’s Turkish heritage and a curiosity about our human search for meaning as profound as it is lyrical. The stories are music. They beguile and illuminate with narratives about yearning and desire, circumstance and courage, resilience and discovery.”—NPR

Brandon Shimoda : The Grave on the Wall Aug 15, 2019

Show notes

“If someone asked me what a poet’s history might look and read like, I would say Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall. It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces—through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, where are you from? I would answer, from The Grave on the Wall.”—Don Mee Choi

Elvia Wilk : Oval Aug 01, 2019

Show notes

“J. G. Ballard meets William Gibson meets Jeff VanderMeer. Oval is an up-to-the-minute story about the twilight zones of corporate design, aesthetics, pharmacy, and bioengineering, where there’s nothing consultants won’t break in the quest for ‘innovation.’ What could possibly go wrong? Find out in Elvia Wilk’s crisp and stylish debut book.”—McKenzie Wark

Max Porter : Lanny Jul 14, 2019

Show notes

“In Lanny Max Porter has expanded on his innovative hybrid mode while remaining faithful to our species-wide tradition of storytelling through myth, magic, and parable, but also through the harrowing minutiae of being alive in the trying hours of a small town ruptured by loss. The result is a powerful yet tender reclamation of the imagination, love, and artmaking—all of it a brilliant defense of the outsider’s tenuous foothold in society.” —Ocean Vuong

Ted Chiang : Exhalation Jul 01, 2019

Show notes

“Ted Chiang has no contemporary peers when it comes to the short story form. His name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Carver, Poe, Borges, and Kafka. Every story is a universe. Every story is a diamond. You will inhale Exhalation in a single, stunned sitting, because true genius doesn’t come along nearly as often as advertised. This is the real thing.”—Blake Crouch, author of Dark Matter

Miriam Toews : Women Talking Jun 14, 2019

Show notes

“An astonishment, a volcano of a novel with slowly and furiously mounting pressures of anguish and love and rage. No other book I’ve read in the past year has spoken so lucidly about our current moment, and yet none has felt as timeless; the always-wondrous Miriam Toews has written a book as close to a Greek tragedy as a contemporary Western novelist can come.”—Lauren Groff