Late Night Debut, hosted by Amber Keller

This month we feature Shobha Rao’s debut short story collection, An Unrestored Woman, published by Flatiron Books. Kirkus Reviews calls it “stunning and relentless,” saying that the stories focus on “how the actions of those in power affect vulnerable women and children on both sides of the divide.”

Act 1: Host Amber Keller covers entertaining book culture news and cool new debuts

Act 2: Kjerstin Johnson and Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt discuss Shobha Rao’s debut

Act 3: Kjerstin Johnson speaks with Shobha Rao about using multiple points of view, tapping into your rage, writing about a time of conflict, and the value of endurance

 

Purchase An Unrestored Woman on IndieBound

GIVEAWAY: WIN A FREE COPY OF RAO’S DEBUT.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE FOR DETAILS, THEN EMAIL

[email protected] BY

MIDNIGHT ON APRIL 1.

ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:

Shobha Rao moved to the U.S. from India at the age of seven. She is the winner of the 2014 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, awarded by Nimrod International Journal. Her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2015. She lives in San Francisco.

ABOUT OUR CO-HOSTS:

Kjerstin Johnson is a writer and editor living in Portland, Oregon. She was editor in chief of the magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture and currently is web editor at The Masters Review, a platform for emerging writers. She has a master’s in book publishing from Portland State University, where she currently teaches writing and editing.

 

 

Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt is a professor in the department of English and Creative Writing at Linfield College, Oregon. Dutt-Ballerstadt specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, and also coordinates the Gender Studies Program at Linfield. Her book, The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant was published in 2010.

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Kristin Maffei

Featured Guest: Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

Tonight, Kristin speaks with debut author Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib about his upcoming book of poetry, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, which you can purchase at AWP next week. They also discuss essay writing and Hanif’s new job as a columnist for MTV.

ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, a columnist at MTV News, and a Callaloo creative writing fellow. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, is being released in 2016 by Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press.

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Paul Martone

March Book Club Selection! This month we feature Barbara Roether’s debut novel, This Earth You’ll Come Back To, published by McPherson & Company. Conversation topics: social class & identity, generational relationships, mother/daughter relationships, communal living, and more. 

Join the LNL Book Club for $9.99/month

Purchase This Earth You’ll Come Back To at IndieBound

ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:

Barbara Roether is a writer and teacher based in San Francisco. She has lived and worked in Morocco and Indonesia. Before teaching, she worked in book publishing as an editor and freelance writer, and has contributed to many books on travel and religion. As an editor at HarperCollins, she created Signs of the Sacred, a series of visual books on religious ritual. She is the author of a poetry collection,The Middle Atlas, and her essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. She is a mother, a novice surfer, and is married to the journalist Mark MacNamara.

Late Night Debut, hosted by Amber Keller

February Book Club Selection! This month we feature Lina Meruane’s English-language debut, Seeing Red, published by Deep Vellum. “This is a penetrating autobiographical novel,” says Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author.”

Act 1: Host Amber Keller covers entertaining book culture news and cool new debuts

Act 2: Nathalie Handal and Megan McDowell discuss Lina Meruane’s debut

Act 3: Nathalie Handal speaks with Lina Meruane about what’s in a name, writing from real events, and all the things that go into how we see and how we are seen

 

Join the LNL Book Club for $9.99/month

Purchase Seeing Red at IndieBound

GIVEAWAY: WIN A FREE COPY OF MERUANE’S DEBUT.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE FOR DETAILS, THEN EMAIL

[email protected] BY

MIDNIGHT ON MARCH 6.

ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:

Lina Meruane (born in Santiago, Chile, 1970), novelist, essayist, and cultural journalist, is one of the most prominent and influential voices in Chilean contemporary literature. Meruane is a former Guggenheim Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient. She received her PhD in Latin American Literature from NYU, where she is currently a professor.

ABOUT OUR CO-HOSTS:

Nathalie Handal’s recent books include The Republics, which Patricia Smith lauds as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers”; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award.

 

 

Megan McDowell is a Spanish-language literary translator from Kentucky whose work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Mariana Enriquez, Álvaro Bisama, and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Mandorla, and Vice, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Paul Martone

Featured guests: Michael McGregor and John Beer

Michael N. McGregor is an author, journalist, editor, teacher and writing consultant based in Portland, OR.  A professor of English and Creative Writing at Portland State University, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in New York and a BA in Journalism from the University of Oregon.

 

A companion piece to Thomas Merton’s bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax tells the story of Merton’s best friend and early spiritual inspiration. Written by a close friend of Lax, Pure Act gives an intimate view of a friendship and a life that affected Merton in profound ways. It was Lax, a daringly original poet himself, who encouraged Merton to begin writing poetry and Lax who told him he should desire to be a saint rather than just a Catholic. To the end of Merton’s life, Lax was his spiritual touchstone and closest friend.

Purchase Pure Act: the Uncommon Life of Robert Lax at IndieBound 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALSO FEATURING . . .

John Beer is the author of the poetry collection The Waste Land and Other Poems (2010), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the chapbook Lucinda (2013). Associative and imaginative, Beer’s work has been praised for its “passionate and watchful” moods, in the words of Norma Farber judge Bin Ramke. Ramke called The Waste Land and Other Poems “full of the most amazing engagements.”

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Kristin Maffei

Featured Guest: Odilia Galván Rodríguez

Purchase Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice

Tonight, Kristin talks with Odilia Galván Rodríguez about her new book, Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, where she and co-editor Francisco X. Alarcon bring together more than eighty poets in an anthology that powerfully articulates the need for change and the primacy of basic human rights. Tonight, Kristin and Odilia discuss social justice in poetry, why it’s vital to have a plurality of voices in literature, and what it was like working with the late Francisco X. Alarcon on this important anthology.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Eco-poet, writer, editor, and activist, Odilia Galván Rodríguez is the author of four volumes of poetry; her latest is Red Earth Calling: Cantos for the 21st Century. She was the English edition editor of Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba. She facilitates creative writing workshops nationally and is a moderator of “Poets Responding to SB 1070” and “Love and Prayers for Fukushima,” both Facebook pages dedicated to bringing attention to social justice issues that affect the lives and well-being of many people.

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Kristin Maffei

Featured Guest: John Matteson

Purchase The Annotated Little Women

Tonight, Kristin talks with John Matteson about his new book, The Annotated Little Women, where he brings his expertise on the Alcott family—as well as some photos of their home and belongings—to the beloved children’s classic. Tonight, Kristin and John discuss Louisa May Alcott, her relationship with her father, Bronson, and why we’re still so drawn to a book that is almost 150 years old.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

John Matteson, Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father and The Lives of Margaret Fuller. He lives in the Bronx, New York.

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Justin Hocking

Featured guest: Natalie Serber

ABOUT OUR GUEST HOST

Justin Hocking’s memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, published by Graywolf Press, won the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Wonderworld was also a Barnes and Nobel Discover Great New Writers selection, a Library Journal “Best Books of 2014” pick, and one of “Ten Brilliant Books That Will Grab You From Page One” in The Huffington Post and Kirkus Reviews.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Purchase Community Chest at IndieBound

The year Natalie Serber turned 50, she published her first book, settled her daughter at college and was diagnosed with breast cancer. Community Chest is her fierce and funny memoir about fear and family, treatment decisions and the changed landscape of her body. Serber grapples with how to step fully back into life after confronting death, and along the way discovery that, after all, we are all bald underneath.

ABOUT OUR FEATURED GUEST

Natalie Serber is the author of the memoir Community Chest, recently published by Two Sylvias Press. Her shory story collection Shout Her Lovely Name, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, a summer reading selection from O, the Oprah Magazine, and an Oregonian Top 10 Book of the Pacific Northwest. Natalie currently serves as a Board Director for a little nonprofit called Late Night Library.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Paul Martone

January Book Club Selection! This month we feature Chaitali Sen’s debut novel, The Pathless Sky, published by Europa Editions. Conversation topics include: cultural life in Austin, Texas, sweeping romantic novels, the absence of romance in contemporary literary fiction, family relationships, and regional, ethnic, and individual perceptions of ancestry and cultural identity.

Join the LNL Book Club for $9.99/month

Purchase The Pathless Sky at IndieBound

ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:

Chaitali Sen is the author of The Pathless Sky, published by Europa Editions in 2015. Born in India and raised in New York and Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and stepson. She is a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program. Her short fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in New England Review, New Ohio Review, Colorado Review, The Aerogram, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other journals.

Late Night Debut, hosted by Amber Keller

This week we feature Rickey Laurentiis’s Cave Canem Poetry Prize-winning debut, Boy with Thorn, published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Judge Terrance Hayes says, “Rickey Laurentiis fills history with his ‘crucial blood,’ his ‘stubbornness,’ his ‘American tongue’; and history, in return, fills him with crucial muses (from Auden to Hayden), stubborn ghosts (such as Emmett Till), and manifold expressions of culture (southern, sexual, spiritual). The result is an extraordinary, and ultimately, irreducible debut. To paraphrase something Einstein once said, the true magic of this book can only be found inside this book.”

Act 1: Host Amber Keller covers entertaining book culture news and cool new debuts

Act 2: Terrance Hayes and Rachel Eliza Griffiths discuss Rickey Laurentiis’s debut

Act 3: Terrance Hayes speaks with Rickey Laurentiis about Wallace Stevens, questioning the old masters, and the hardest line to write

Purchase Boy with Thorn on IndieBound

GIVEAWAY: WIN A FREE COPY OF LAURENTIIS’S DEBUT.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE FOR DETAILS, THEN EMAIL

[email protected] BY

MIDNIGHT ON JANUARY 1.

ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:

Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book, Boy with Thorn, was selected by Terrence Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

ABOUT OUR CO-HOSTS:

Terrance Hayes is the author of five books of poetry, including Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award, and How to Be Drawn, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

 

 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. Her most recent collection is Lighting the Shadow and her visual and literary work has appeared in the The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Transition, and many others. Griffiths teaches creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and Sarah Lawrence College.