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

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

• 04.01.2024

  Alexis Wright : Praiseworthy

  Today’s guest is one of the most important and celebrated writers in Australia today, Alexis Wright. We look together at the ways Wright reshapes the novel form to honor Aboriginal notions of story, of time, and of scale. To find...

  
• 03.17.2024

  Nam Le : 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

  Over the past fifteen years, Nam Le has published a book in each genre. Best known for his phenomenal 2009 debut story collection The Boat, he followed it with his 2019 debut nonfiction On David Malouf, and now, this year,...

  
• 03.04.2024

  Anne de Marcken : It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

  Writer, interdisciplinary artist, editor and publisher Anne de Marcken discusses her new book It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. Winner of the Novel Prize, and thus published simultaneously in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions...

  
• 02.26.2024

  Canisia Lubrin : Code Noir

  Award-winning poet Canisia Lubrin talks about her debut fiction, Code Noir. The fifty-nine stories in this collection are each prefaced by one of Louis XIV’s fifty-nine “Black codes,” the rules of conduct in France and its colonies regarding slaves and slavery....

  
• 02.05.2024

  Diana Khoi Nguyen : Root Fractures

  Today’s conversation, with poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen, is not to be missed. Both of her books, Ghost Of and Root Fractures, engage with and are shaped by her brother’s absence and the family silence surrounding it. Two...

  
• 01.21.2024

  Álvaro Enrigue : You Dreamed of Empires

  Today’s conversation with Álvaro Enrigue about his latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires, translated by Natasha Wimmer, is set during the relatively undocumented first encounter between Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés. The novel dilates the knife’s edge moment when the Aztec...

  
• 01.10.2024

  Mathias Énard : The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild

  Is Mathias Énard’s latest book formally influenced by the Buddhist Wheel of Time, by Jewish undertaker guilds, by François Rabelais’s scatological and philosophical prose and linguistic wordplay, by Catholic altarpiece polyptych panel paintings, and by the scandalous diaries of a...

  
• 01.05.2024

  Tin House Live : Denis Johnson : 2003

  We are kicking off the new year with a serious blast from the past. A recording from the very first Tin House writers workshop in the summer of 2003 with novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and screenwriter Denis Johnson....

  
• 12.21.2023

  Elle Nash : Deliver Me

  Perhaps it is fitting that today’s episode, with writer and founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine, Elle Nash, is launched on the shortest day of the year, the longest night of darkness. Nash’s new novel Deliver Me explores the ways...

  
• 12.08.2023

  Naomi Klein : Doppelganger : Part Two

  Today’s part two of the conversation with Naomi Klein about Doppelganger highlights the Jewish elements in the book, and looks at them through the lens of Palestine and Israel. We discuss Zionism, Marxism, and the Jewish Labor Bund’s notion of...

  
• 12.01.2023

  Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar : Tone

  In Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar’s Tone they construct a shared voice, that of the “Committee to Investigate the Atmosphere.” Yes, they do this to investigate tone, in the writings of everyone from Nella Larsen to Clarice Lispector, W. G. Sebald...

  
• 11.09.2023

  Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Touching the Art

  Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore returns to Between the Covers to talk about her remarkable new book, Touching the Art. A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is above all a complicated love letter to Mattilda’s grandmother, abstract...

  
• 11.01.2023

  Bhanu Kapil : Incubation : A Space for Monsters

  Bhanu Kapil’s postcolonial feminist road novel Incubation: A Space for Monsters has long been out of print. The book of hers that most engages with the mythos and reality of America, Incubation follows Laloo, a British woman of Indian descent,...

  
• 10.23.2023

  Colleen Burner : Sister Golden Calf

  Colleen Burner’s novella Sister Golden Calf is the story of two sisters on the road set in a world without men. Inspired, in part, by Vanessa Veselka’s essay “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters,” Sister...

  
• 10.14.2023

  Kate Briggs : The Long Form

  Essayist and translator Kate Briggs’ first novel The Long Form is a book about, and happening within, the relationship between Helen and her infant daughter, Rose. What does making a novel baby-centric, not a novel about babies, but where the...

  
• 10.02.2023

  Lydia Davis : Our Strangers

  Today’s conversation with Lydia Davis about her latest story collection, Our Strangers, a collection of 143 stories, is a deep dive into storytelling. These stories, whether incredibly short or quite long, often eschew backstory, exposition, context, or psychological interiority. Sometimes they...

  
• 09.20.2023

  Naomi Klein : Doppelganger : Part One

  Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelganger, is a departure for her. One some of her closest friends even cautioned her against. On the one hand, it is what we’ve come to expect from Klein, a brilliant framing, through the coining of...

  
• 09.12.2023

  Tin House Live : Matthew Zapruder on Story of a Poem

  You could say that Matthew Zapruder’s Story of a Poem is about the revision of a poem, that it follows the life of one poem, from its first phrase to its final draft, and invites us, in the most mesmerizing...

  
• 09.04.2023

  Major Jackson : Razzle Dazzle

  Poet and host of the The Slowdown podcast Major Jackson joins us to talk about Razzle Dazzle, his collection of new and selected poems that captures two decades in the life of a poet. Last year Major also released a...

  
• 08.21.2023

  JoAnna Novak : Contradiction Days

  Five months pregnant, fearful of the future, and creatively blocked, JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the life, writings, and paintings of Agnes Martin. She fashions a three-week intensive writing regimen in northern New Mexico, where Martin lived and painted (and...

  
• 08.09.2023

  Jorie Graham : To 2040

  Jorie Graham’s first appearance on the show in 2021, to discuss her collection Runaway, is one of the most relistened to episodes in the show’s history, a conversation that, with each revisitation, seems to reveal something new about how to...

  
• 08.04.2023

  Tin House Live : Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Surrealism

  Today’s craft talk, “Why So Surrealism” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, was recorded at the 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop. Prompted by a journalist who asked him to talk about how surrealistic and speculative conceits operated in and informed Black fiction,...

  
• 07.26.2023

  Roger Reeves : Dark Days

  Poet Roger Reeves calls the essays in his debut book of prose “fugitive essays.” And we explore what it means to write fugitively, to write into and from and toward fugitivity. If, as Fred Moten says, fugitivity is “a desire...

  
• 07.08.2023

  Isabella Hammad : Enter Ghost

  Isabella Hammad’s latest book Enter Ghost is about a Palestinian theater group attempting to put on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The actors come from many different Palestinian experiences, one to the next. Some have Israeli citizenship....

  
• 07.01.2023

  Tin House Live : Max Porter on Shy

  Even though each of Max Porter’s books is a stand-alone book, some have called Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny, and his latest, Shy, a “trilogy of boyhood,” a framing Max himself embraces. After a truly electrifying short reading...

  
• 06.20.2023

  Megan Fernandes : I Do Everything I’m Told

  Spareness, economy, and distillation are often put forth as obvious virtues in poetry. But what if there were a politics undergirding this aesthetic preference? In today’s conversation with poet Megan Fernandes we look at questions of poetics and aesthetics in...

  
• 06.10.2023

  Johanna Hedva : Your Love Is Not Good

  What if you gave your fictional main character all of your own biographical details and family history but had them, at every point, choose “wrong”? At every point do the thing you yourself would be against? Johanna Hedva does just...

  
• 06.01.2023

  Tin House Live : Katie Holten on The Language of Trees

  In Early Medieval Ireland there was a language called Ogham that was sometimes referred to as the “Celtic Tree Alphabet'” because its letters each corresponded to and depicted a different tree. At one point Ireland, now one of the most...

  
• 05.19.2023

  Tin House Live: Richard Powers on The Overstory

  Back in 2019, when Richard Powers was a guest on Between the Covers for The Overstory, we also appeared together that very same night, in conversation again. This time, an onstage ticketed event at Revolution Hall before a live audience....

  
• 05.10.2023

  Melanie Rae Thon : As If Fire Could Hide Us

  Melanie Rae Thon’s latest book, As If Fire Could Hide Us, is described not as a novel with three chapters, nor as a collection of three stories, but as “a love song in three movements.” What does it mean to...

  
• 05.01.2023

  Christina Sharpe : Ordinary Notes

  There may be no writer, no thinker, who has shaped my conversations on the show more than Christina Sharpe. Whether her work is explicitly part of a conversation (in episodes with Ross Gay, Solmaz Sharif, Natalie Diaz, and Dionne Brand,...

  
• 04.11.2023

  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o : The Language of Languages

  Today’s guest, novelist, storyteller, essayist, playwright, scholar, translator, and perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, is an iconic figure in postcolonial thought. His latest book, The Language of Languages, is the first book dedicated to...

  
• 04.01.2023

  Charif Shanahan : Trace Evidence

  Early in poet Charif Shanahan’s latest collection, Trace Evidence, we encounter the lines: “I want to ​tell you what for me it has been like. // To speak at all / I must occupy a position // In a system...

  
• 03.14.2023

  Sabrina Orah Mark : Happily

  Today’s guest is poet, storyteller, and now essayist Sabrina Orah Mark. Her latest book, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales, is an intriguing blend of two radically different forms, memoir and fairy tale. Much as fairy tales are feral, forever...

  
• 03.03.2023

  Monica Youn : From From

  In today’s conversation with poet Monica Youn we explore what it means to write from a poetics of difference rather than of authenticity, a poetics of deracination rather than identity. Youn’s latest poetry collection From From engages with the history...

  
• 02.20.2023

  Jai Chakrabarti : A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness

  Today’s conversation with novelist and story writer Jai Chakrabarti is unusually wide-ranging, touching on everything from classical Indian aesthetics to Jewish ritual, from poetry to cognitive science, from Tagore’s plays to Buber’s philosophy, from sublimating the self to writing the...

  
• 02.01.2023

  Mariana Enriquez : Our Share of Night

  Today’s guest, Argentinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist Mariana Enriquez has been called the queen of Latin American gothic horror. She is in the vanguard of a generation of Latin American women writers breaking new ground in the horror...

  
• 01.20.2023

  Gabrielle Bates : Judas Goat

  Today’s conversation is with poet, visual artist, editor, and podcast host Gabrielle Bates. The poems in Bates’ debut poetry collection Judas Goat feel both personal and mythic, violent and tender, human and much more than human, with an effect that...

  
• 01.01.2023

  Georgi Gospodinov : Time Shelter

  Today’s guest, Bulgarian novelist, storyteller, poet, essayist, and more, Georgi Gospodinov, is the perfect writer to bring in the new year. Gospodinov is a writer obsessed with beginnings and endings, with time, history, imagination, and memory. A writer raised on...

  
• 12.22.2022

  Lucy Ives : Life Is Everywhere

  Novelist, short story writer, poet, and critic Lucy Ives’ new novel Life Is Everywhere has been heralded by some of our most formally inventive and playful writers today, from Jesse Ball to Alejandro Zambra to Percival Everett. No wonder as...

  
• 12.10.2022

  Crafting with Ursula: Neil Gaiman on Word Magic & The Power of Telling Stories

  Who better to talk about the unique power of telling stories than one of our great contemporary storytellers, Neil Gaiman? One deep way Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin are kindred spirits is how they both share an abiding...

  
• 12.01.2022

  Sawako Nakayasu : Pink Waves

  Of Sawako Nakayasu’s many literary endeavors—poetry, translation, performance art—it is hard to know where one begins and another ends. They each seem to not only be talking to each other but Sawako’s work also blurs the boundaries between them, nesting...

  
• 11.20.2022

  Ama Codjoe : Bluest Nude

  “On Seeing and Being Seen” is the title of an Ama Codjoe poem but it could just as easily be a description of her debut collection Bluest Nude as a whole. Bluest Nude is a book that engages with ways of...

  
• 11.10.2022

  Crafting with Ursula : Gabrielle Bellot on The Power of Names & Naming

  Writer and editor Gabrielle Bellot joins Crafting with Ursula to discuss the power of names and naming across Le Guin’s work. From the very beginning, with Ged in Earthsea, a boy-wizard who is named in three very different ways, names...

  
• 11.01.2022

  Hélène Cixous : Well-Kept Ruins

  Today’s guest is poet, novelist, playwright, feminist theorist, literary critic, and philosopher Hélène Cixous. Perhaps best known for her iconic 1976 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous thought for much of her writing life that she would never write...

  
• 10.19.2022

  Billy-Ray Belcourt : A Minor Chorus

  Poet Billy-Ray Belcourt has already transformed the memoir form, remaking it—strange, fresh, and new, in A History of My Brief Body. He does something similarly unexpected with his first novel, A Minor Chorus. Deeply aware of the history of the novel,...

  
• 10.10.2022

  Crafting with Ursula : Maria Dahvana Headley on Feminist Translation & Classical Retellings

  One of Le Guin’s lesser known but lifelong practices was that of a translator. Her translations of the first Latin American Nobel Prize Laureate in literature (and the only Latin American woman to receive the award), Gabriela Mistral, were the...

  
• 10.01.2022

  Dionne Brand : Nomenclature — New and Collected Poems

  Today’s guest Dionne Brand, to borrow the words of John Keene, “is without question one of the major living poets in the English language.” Kamau Brathwaite called Brand “our first major exile female poet.” Adrienne Rich described her as “a...

  
• 09.18.2022

  Elaine Castillo : How to Read Now

  “White supremacy makes for terrible readers” says today’s guest Elaine Castillo, arguing that we are all overeducated in a set of fundamentally terrible reading techniques, ones that impoverish us as readers and thinkers, ones that diminish the availability of meaning...

  
• 09.08.2022

  Crafting with Ursula : Lidia Yuknavitch on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

  Today’s conversation is about one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most iconic and influential essays: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay that deserves an entire episode to itself. And who better to discuss it than Lidia Yuknavitch, whose...