The Archive Project

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PBF Recommended Reading Dec 11, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we take you behind the scenes at the 2023 Portland Book Festival, which we hosted in downtown Portland on November 4, 2023. The festival featured over 100 writers in more than 50 events throughout the day.

One of the best things about book festivals is the magic of having that particular group of authors all together at the same place at the same time. It might be the only time some of them are at the same event. This makes for great on-stage conversations and connections, but it also means that authors get to connect with each other off stage – in the green room, at the post-fest party, and even going to each other’s events.

Thinking about that magic and that opportunity, we asked six of the festival authors to recommend a book by another author in the festival. The ask resulted in some wonderful cross genre action: A young adult novelist recommends a science journalist and essayist; an adult novelist shares her love for a poet; and a cultural essayist shouts out a memoir; and more.

We’ll hear from:
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of the novel GOOD NIGHT, IRENE
Jennifer Baker, author of the young adult novel FORGIVE ME NOT
Naomi Alderman, author of the novels THE FUTURE and THE POWER
Mitchell S. Jackson, author of FLY: THE BIG BOOK OF BASKETBALL FASHION
Neal Thompson, a festival moderator, author of THE FIRST KENNEDYS and of the Blood & Whiskey newsletter
And Edan Lepucki, author of the novel TIME’S MOUTH

Given the holiday season, we thought you might get some gift-giving inspiration from their recommendations. And you will get a peek behind the scenes at the festival, where authors geek out about their fellow authors.

Each author will share their recommendation and why they chose it, and we’ll hear a bit from the author of book they are recommending. The Archive Project editor and producer Matthew Workman narrates our journey, taking us from the author green room out to the festival stages and finally to the author party – your only chance to join this exclusive festival event.

Find copies of all the recommended books (as well as all the 2023 Portland Book Festival Books)

through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Barbara Kingsolver, in conversation with Jess Walter Dec 04, 2023

Show notes

On this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with Jess Walter. Barbara Kingsovler is the author of seventeen books, including nonfiction, short stories, poetry, and novels. Her novels include modern classics like The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna. Kingsolver is known for socially engaged writing that embraces the psychological and emotional. As she has said, “A good book should be trouble and delight the reader.” And few do that as well as Kingsolver.

Her latest novel is Demon Copperhead, set in rural Appalachia, where Kingsolver was raised and lives today. In the book, she remaps Charles Dickens’ Victorian classic David Copperfield onto her real-life community, to illuminate the poverty, broken social and education systems, the influence of industrial agriculture, and the targeting of Appalachians by Big Pharma, and the consequent pervasive and destructive opioid epidemic.

Like Dickens, she tells the story of a resilient kid caught in the crosshairs. The novel is, in the words of The Times UK, “Like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers.” Indeed, despite the subject matter, this novel is a delight to read from the first line, thanks to Kingsolver’s inventiveness and Demon’s distinctive voice. Many critics praise it as her best book yet.

Find your copy of Demon Copperhead through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

Colson Whitehead, in conversation with Mitchell S. Jackson (Rebroadcast) Nov 27, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we’re reaching back into the archive to 2020, to a virtual conversation with Colson Whitehead from Portland Arts & Lectures. It was, in fact, our very first virtual event of the pandemic and while we are so glad to be back live, it is fascinating to hear again from that time period. We’ve chosen to broadcast this conversation now because Whitehead has just published a new novel called Crook Manifesto.

There are few writers who are both as versatile and accomplished as Colson Whitehead. His subjects have ranged from elevator inspectors, to middle-class Black American suburbia, to the World Series of Poker; he has written noir, a zombie thriller, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, and historical fiction. At the same time, he has won dozens of awards and accolades, most recently culminating in two Pulitzer Prizes—one for The Underground Railroad, and the other for the novel The Nickel Boys.

Whitehead’s significant contributions to literature come about not only because of his mastery of the craft, but also because he has range—he deploys pop culture, history, and a variety of literary techniques. And by doing so, he gives his stories new life, helping readers see sometimes familiar subjects in a new light. His interview here with Mitchell S. Jackson explores Whitehead’s writing craft, inspirations, and thoughts on current events in America.

Find your copy of The Nickel Boys through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City.

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson is the critically acclaimed author of The Residue Years, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion,and John of Watts (to be published soon). His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Marie Claire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Jackson’s nonfiction book Survival Math was published in 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, covers race and culture as the first Black columnist in the history of Esquire, and serves as the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the English Department of Arizona State University.

Michael Lewis: Going Infinite Nov 20, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a conversation with Michael Lewis from the 2023 Portland Book Festival. Lewis is the author of 17 books of nonfiction including Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and Flashboys. His books are about unconventional people doing extraordinary things, usually behind the scenes.

Lewis joined Portland Book Festival to talk about his new book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. It’s a book about Sam Bankman-Fried and the eventual collapse of his cryptocurrency hedge fund, Alameda Research, and the exchange he also founded, called FTX. At the time of this conversation, Bankman-Fried had just been found guilty of seven Federal charges, all finance-related, and was awaiting sentencing. It was a trial that many consider the biggest and most important in the world of finance in decades, and was one that was watched closely all across the world.

Lewis had unrestricted access to Bankman-Fried, spending over year reporting as he amassed one of the largest fortunes in the world and then lost everything as his businesses collapsed. The result of that reporting in Going Infinite paints a picture of a Bankman-Fried that is very different than how he was portrayed in the press and by government prosecutors. Lewis offers a perspective on Bankman-Fried and many of his closest colleagues that is rooted in understanding their deeper motives, how they were shaped as a generation, and how and why they made the mistakes they made. His conclusion is both startling and important to reckon with for its consequences in our society, regardless of whether you followed the case closely or not.

Lewis is in conversation with Literary Arts’ Executive Director, Andrew Proctor.

Find your copy of Going Infinite through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. His most recent book is Going Infinite. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit and nonprofit sectors.

Zadie Smith, in conversation with Parul Sehgal Nov 13, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Zadie Smith in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Parul Sehgal.

Smith is one of the preeminent fiction writers of our age. She burst onto the stage in the year 2000 with her debut novel, White Teeth. It was a huge bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and signaled a bold new talent had entered the literary world. Since then, she has published six novels, two collections of stories, and three collections of essays in addition to dozens of book reviews and criticism in some of the most influential publications in the world, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. She has become an important public intellectual and a voice for a generation that came of age around the turn of the millennium.

What is special about this episode is Smith does relatively few public appearances; the last time she was on our stage was more than twenty years ago. The occasion for joining us this fall was the publication of The Fraud. Her new book, a historical novel, is particularly notable as it is a big departure from her previous work, which has been primarily preoccupied by contemporary life. The conversation you are about to hear is remarkable for Seghal’s breadth of knowledge of Smith’s work, and for how this brings out a broad conversation about the power of novels to humanize and complicate the small ethical dilemmas we have every day and the big existential issue of our time. Smith also talks about how she was inspired to take on her first work of historical fiction, in part, because of the ways in which she feels history can often be too easily simplified or “flattened” by what she calls the “narcissism of the present.”

Find your copy of The Fraud through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Zadie Smith is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and playwright, whose work includes the novel White Teeth, winner of the Guardian First Book Prize, and On Beauty, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and her essay collections include Feel Free, winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and has twice been named a Granta 20 Best Young British Novelist. In 2022, she received The Pen/Audible Literary Service Award for her “unparalleled attention to craft and humane ideals,” and helping to “guide future generations of writers and readers to embrace and explore culture across genres and media.” Her sixth novel, The Fraud, will publish in September 2023. She is a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University and lives in London.

Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a book critic at the Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won awards for her criticism from the New York Press Club, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.

We’ve Got This: Eliza Hull & Rebekah Taussig Nov 06, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we share a conversation about something you probably never think about, unless you think about it all of the time: disabled parenting. We’ll hear from Eliza Hull, a contemporary musician, disability advocate, and writer based in regional Victoria, Australia, and the editor of a new anthology, We’ve Got This: Essays By Disabled Parents, which features stories from parents who identify as Deaf, disabled, neurodiverse, or chronically ill. Eliza is joined by one of the anthology contributors, Rebekah Taussig, a writer, educator, and consultant with a PhD in nonfiction and disability studies based in Kansas City. Rebekah shares her story on her Instagram and in her book Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body.

We were so interested in this conversation for many of the same reasons that Eliza put this anthology together: There seem to be a decent number of resources for the parents of disabled children, but really none for disabled parents. And it seems because a lot of people don’t even conceive of the possibility of a disabled parent, but disabled people ARE parents and have as much right to parent as anyone else – and they are good at it.

Eliza and Rebekah are joined by moderator Annie Carl, who owns and runs The Neverending Bookshop in Edmonds, Washington.

Find your copy of We’ve Got This through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Eliza Hull is a musical artist, writer, journalist, and disability advocate based in Victoria, Australia. Her podcast series on parenting with a disability, We’ve Got This, was one of Radio National’s and ABC Life’s most successful series of all time.

Rebecca Taussig, PH.D. is a Kansas City writer and teacher with her doctorate in Creative Nonfiction and Disability Studies. She has led workshops and presentations at the University of Michigan, University of Kansas, and Davidson College on disability representation, identity, and community. She also runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty where she crafts “mini-memoirs” to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in our culture. She lives with two cranky orange cats and one angsty-tender human.

George Saunders & Jess Walter (Rebroadcast) Oct 30, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature one of the highlights of the 2022 Portland Book Festival. It’s a conversation between two of our most accomplished fiction writers, George Saunders and Jess Walter. Their conversation is by turns hilarious, caustic, tender, and profound. Our interviewer for the event was OPB’s own Geoff Norcross, who does his usual masterful job moderating.

Find your copy of Saunders and Walter’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

George Saunders is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven books, including A Swim in a Pond in the Rain; Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the Way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. His most recent book is Liberation Day. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Jess Walter is the author of ten books, most recently the short story collection The Angel of Rome. His other nine include the national bestseller The Cold Millions and the #1 New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins; The Zero, the finalist for the National Book Award; and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award. His work has been published in 35 languages and his short fiction has appeared three times in Best American Short Stories.

Geoff Norcross is the Morning Edition host at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Before coming to Oregon, he was the program director at the NPR-affiliate KNAU in Flagstaff, Arizona. A 25-year radio veteran, Geoff has been on air in New York, Florida, Missouri, Illinois, and West Virginia. He joined OPB in 2008. Geoff has received awards from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. for best interview, the Edward R. Murrow Award for best feature reporting, and the Florida Associated Press Award for the best newscast. Geoff graduated from Bradley University with a degree in communications. Geoff lives in Portland with his wife. When he’s not on the air, you can find him rowing on the Willamette River or running and biking around the southwest hills. If you get up early enough, you might catch him hiking the nearby mountains.

Leila Mottley, in conversation with Mitchell S. Jackson (Rebroadcast) Oct 23, 2023

Show notes

This week’s episode of The Archive Project features a conversation from the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Portland-born writer Mitchell S. Jackson interviewed Leila Mottley about her debut novel, Nightcrawling.

Jackson is the author of the novel The Residue Years and the nonfiction book Survival Math. He is the winner of a Whiting Award and he received the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for his piece on Ahmaud Arbery. Leila Mottley is the former youth poet laureate of Oakland, California. Nightcrawling is her first book, and she was just nineteen years old when it was published last year.

We paired Mitchell with Leila because despite their generational differences—there are thirty years between them and they are, of course, at very different points in their careers—they’ve both written novels about the beauty and the darkness that exist side-by-side in their complicated hometowns: Portland and Oakland, respectively. Leila says in the conversation about Oakland, “There is no where I feel more at home and nowhere I feel less safe,” and that those two feelings can exist at once.

A quick note for listeners: Parts of this conversation touch on mature themes of police brutality and sexual assault that may not be suitable for all listeners.

Find your copy of Leila & Mitchell’s books through

the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Leila Mottley is the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and Oprah Daily. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live. Nightcrawling is her first novel.

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years received wide critical praise. Jackson is the winner of a Whiting Award. His novel also won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, and Esquire Magazine, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was published in the spring of 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time Magazine, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Chicago.

Boys & Girls in America: Melissa Febos & Hua Hsu (Rebroadcast) Oct 16, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, we bring you an event from the 2022 Portland Book Festival, which took place on Saturday, November 5, 2022. The hour is split into two halves of thematically related conversations. Up first, OPB’s Tiffany Camhi interviews writer Melissa Febos about her essay collection, Girlhood; in the second half of the show, OPB’s Jenn Chavez speaks with music critic and New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu about his memoir, Stay True.

We paired Melissa and Hua for this festival event because their books share themes of adolescence and coming of age, of exploring identity through art-making and finding your voice, and of searching for and finding your people, finding belonging and a community. Melissa and Hua each speak about how processing the large and small events and emotions of their lives through writing has been a way they understand their lives and a way to find meaning.

They also both talk about how writing about events or traumas in their past, including revisiting writing from their younger selves, has helped them realize how their relationship to that event or trauma changes over time. I think that you hear in these conversations that for Melissa and Hua, writing about their experiences created a new compassion for their younger, messier, angrier, selves.

Find your copy of Melissa & Hua’s books through the LITERARY ARTS PAGE ON BOOKSHOP.ORG.

Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—LAMBDA Award finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and New York Review of Books. Febos is an associate professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor of English at Vassar College. Hsu serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New American foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family.

Tiffany Camhi is a multimedia journalist focusing on arts, culture and environment reporting. You can hear her throughout the state of Oregon on OPB. She spent six years at KQED Public Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area as a host, producer, reporter and all-around audio gopher. Tiffany is an alumni of the City University of New York, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. When Tiffany’s not on the radio you can usually find her riding a motorcycle…or trying to figure out a way to talk about motorcycles on the radio.

Jenn Chávez is a radio host, announcer and producer with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Jenn has been making radio in Portland for over a decade. Prior to joining OPB in 2017, she hosted and produced the local news radio show “The Five Quadrants of Portland” on XRAY-FM, reporting on issues impacting underrepresented communities. She has a BA in literature and writing from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She spent her younger days as a film-nerdy video store clerk, and remains a source of unsolicited movie recommendations.

Reza Aslan: An American Martyr in Persia (Rebroadcast) Oct 09, 2023

Show notes

This week’s episode of The Archive Project features Reza Aslan discussing his new book, An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville. Aslan was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor at the 2022 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, which took place on Saturday, November 5 in downtown Portland.

Iran has been in the news this fall for a new wave of protests in reaction to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing her hijab “properly” and died while in police custody. The protests have been remarkably widespread, and the government response severe. Aslan asserts this current movement is a fourth Iranian revolution, after 1979, 1953, and the 1906 constitutional revolution his book focuses on.

In An American Martyr in Persia, Aslan describes the events of that 1906 revolution through the story of Howard Baskerville, the son of a preacher and a student of Woodrow Wilson, who found himself in Tabriz, Iran in 1907, working as a Presbyterian minister and teacher. What happened next is well-known to Iranians but almost totally unknown to Americans.

“People ask me, ‘What can we do to help the people of Iran?’ Well, when you ask the people of Iran, ‘What do you need?’ they say, ‘Pay attention, that’s what we need.’ We have the ability to say, ‘We hear you. We’re paying attention. We’re going to shine a light on this for as long as it takes.’ That is far, far more powerful and valuable than you think it is.”

Find your copy of An American Martyr in Persia through the Literary Arts page on Bookshop.org.

Reza Aslan is an acclaimed writer and scholar of religions. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot, No God but God, and editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles, California.