Naomi is joined by writer Mark Haber for a conversation about the habit of mind cultivated through reading. We discuss the kind of writer who opens a door for other writers, tracing a thread through Haber’s early encounter with Kurt Vonengut to a later encounter and friendship with the Argentinian writer Rodrigo Fresán. We talk about voice-driven novels over plot-driven novels, books in conversation with each other, and books that don’t shy away from their influences, along with the American obsession with the myth of originality, of what’s never been done before. Our conversation is framed by Haber’s reading of Rodrigo Fresán’s book The Invented Part, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden.

Reading List

The Invented Part, Rodrigo Fresán

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

Lesser Ruins, Mark Haber

Reinhardt’s Garden, Mark Haber

Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, Mark Haber

Pre-order Haber’s new novel ADA, out July 14, 2026 with Coffee House Press here.

Other Selected writing by Mark Haber

How to Read Kafka

César Aira Makes the Impossible Possible

The Writer You’ve Never Heard of that Made My Book Possible, on the life and writing of Mila Menendez Krause

Mark Haber was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Florida. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden (2019), was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (2022), and third, Lesser Ruins (2024) were both named as a best book of the year by the New York Public Library. His fourth novel, Ada, will be published this July. Mark's fiction has appeared in Guernica, Southwest Review, and LitHub, among others. Mark lives in Minneapolis.

Find a copy of Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, New York University Press, or your local independent bookstore. Subscribe to Process Notes for further reflections on reading, subjectivity, and psychoanalysis.

Naomi is joined by writer and psychoanalyst Akshi Singh. They speak about the kind of associations that prompt more writing in the margins versus the moments of significance that are less immediately available in words; teaching oneself to write dialogue in a novel; how a listener can fade into listening; the problems we're embroiled in while reading; how the carrying-on of one version of a life can involve the repression of one's own thoughts and wishes; and psychoanalysis, friendships, and diaries as spaces where speech and writing can create new experiences of thinking.

Reading List

Voices in the Evening, Natalia Ginzburg

A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner

How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998, Helen Garner

Selection of related essays by Akshi Singh

When Raising Your Voice is Not Enough to be Heard

Issey Miyake

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Akshi Singh is a writer and psychoanalyst. Born in India, she lives in Glasgow. Akshi is the author of In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner (Jonathan Cape, 2025). She works across genres, writing memoir, criticism, fiction, and poetry. Her writing on psychoanalysis, art, and politics has appeared in Granta, Parapraxis, The London Review of Books, Art Review and elsewhere. She has a PhD in literature from the University of London. She was previously a Wellcome Trust funded postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and Lecturer in Global Migrations at the University of Glasgow. She is Associate Editor at Parapraxis magazine and Deputy Editor at Critical Quarterly.

Find a copy of Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, New York University Press, or your local independent bookstore. Subscribe to Process Notes for further reflections on reading, subjectivity, and psychoanalysis.

For the first episode of Season 2, Naomi is joined by writer and art critic Emily LaBarge. We revisit marginalia from her copies of Amy Hempel's The Dog of the Marriage, Joan Didion's The White Album, Sylvia Plath's The Unabridged Journals, and Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? exploring a lineage of library-keeping; book titles lost in translation across continents; forms of intertextual desire; marginalia as a record of life outside the book; the complexity of memory; and the internal rhythms of our prose style, as they develop consciously and unconsciously through our practice of reading and thinking.

Reading List

The Dog of the Marriage, Amy Hempel

The White Album, Joan Didion

The Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

Who Do You Think You Are?, Alice Munro

Selection of related essays by Emily LaBarge

"Best Book of 1978: Who Do You Think You Are?"

"Chantal Akerman's Elusive Interiors: what the filmmaker's portrayal of women reveals--and withholds"

"What Wasn't There"

Purchase LaBarge's debut DOG DAYS

Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer living in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Artforum, mousse, Bookforum, Frieze, The Observer, and The Paris Review, among others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. She is the author of Dog Days (Peninsula Press, 2025; Transit and Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2026).

Find a copy of Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, New York University Press, or your local independent bookstore. Subscribe to Process Notes for further reflections on reading, subjectivity, and psychoanalysis.

For our final episode of our first season, Naomi is joined by fellow Annie Ernaux enthusiast Jeannie Vanasco for an in-depth discussion on immersion in the reading process, the un-self-consciousness of writing memoir, the question of whether there is a divide between the craft and the personal, and how we make choices about what to leave out when and why. For the Annie Ernaux fans out there, Naomi and Jeannie look closely at Jeannie's marginalia in her copies of Shame and The Other Girl and their influence on Jeannie's work, particularly The Glass Eye. Shout-out to Seven Stories Press, Ernaux's American publisher -- we're repping your Annie Ernaux hats and shirts and hope you'll make more of them ;)

Author Bio: Jeannie Vanasco is the author of A Silent Treatment, which was named a best book of 2025 by NPR and a best nonfiction book of 2025 by Electric Literature. Her other memoirs include Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University. Her fourth book is under contract with Tin House, publisher of her other memoirs.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, Interabang Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Naomi is joined by bookseller and podcaster Lori Feathers to discuss her reading of The Hunger of Women by Marosia Castaldi, translated by Jamie Richards (And Other Stories, 2023). They explore the impact of this rhythmic, hypnotic prose, the embedded references to books from other cultures, and the lineage of ‘abundant’ books that drives so much of Lori’s reading.

Reading List:

Miss Mackintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young

Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

Lori Feathers is a writer and podcaster in Dallas, Texas, and a co-owner/founder of Interabang Books where she is the store’s book buyer. She is creator of “The Big Book Project” on Substack, and co-hosts the critically acclaimed books podcast, “Across the Pond.” Lori is founding Chair of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, US and Canada, a prize honoring the work of small publishers, and co-founder of the Inside Literary Prize for incarcerated persons. For six years she served on the elected board of the National Book Critics Circle. Her writing can be found at Literary Hub, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Southwest Review.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, Interabang Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Naomi is joined by Lauren Elkin for a conversation on the permission-giving qualities of Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, how reading Perec made her into a writer, and what it's like to re-see the world in the way he encourages us to do. Weaving through Elkin's own experiments in seeing with her book No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus and the ways we live in and through our homes with her novel Scaffolding, we land in her current home in London where her accumulated stacks of books are grouped by subject, and we get a taste of how a new stack is building toward a particular new project.

Reading List

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Georges Perec

The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen

The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Jane Gallop

Lauren Elkin is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including Scaffolding, Art Monsters, and Flâneuse. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. An award-winning translator, she lives between Paris and London.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Miranda Mellis joins Naomi for a discussion that indexes Michael Eigen’s book The Psychoanalytic Mystic. They discuss the resonance between annotation and free association; the experience of narrating oneself in analysis, losing the thread, doubling back, and having one’s speech be received by the other; the index as a branching form, a poem of the subjective reader; writing as social practice through collective annotation; and how sometimes a text pours salt in the wound while sometimes it serves as a balm.

Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia (Nightboat Books); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short-story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the co-author of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody (forthcoming, Solid Objects 2026). With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding co-editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she is a professor at The Evergreen State College. Read her intermittencies at: You Are in Love with the Impossible.

She is on tour in support of Crocosmia through November, with upcoming readings this week: 

• 10/29: UCSD New Writing Series in San Diego with Anna Joy Springer | 5PM
• 10/30: Book Soup in Los Angeles with Sarah LaBrie | 7PM
• 11/1: Gattopardo | with Stanya Kahn | 4PM

For more tour dates, click here.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Naomi is out on tour, so she will be back in two weeks with a new, full episode in conversation with Miranda Mellis, author of Crocosmia from Nightboat Books. And, as it happens, Miranda is on tour, too. Click here for a full list of her upcoming stops.

Naomi's next stops are Clio's Books in Oakland, CA on Friday, October 17th with the poet and psychoanalyst Alice Jones and Third Place Books - Ravenna in Seattle, WA on Friday, October 24th with the poet and multimedia essayist/artist Cori A. Winrock.

Looking forward to seeing you out on the tour!

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Lofty Pigeon, Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Check Naomi's website for her upcoming tour dates. And subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Briana Parker, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Lofty Pigeon Books, joins Naomi for a discussion that begins in her thoroughly annotated copy of Ulysses from a high school English class (shouts out to Richard Roundy, Briana’s English teacher and now regular at Lofty Pigeon!) and meanders through the many worlds Briana has occupied and built in New York City — from growing up in Sheepshead Bay, to the Union Square Barnes & Noble, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the cozy kids’ corner at her own Lofty Pigeon Books.

Briana Parker is a third-generation Brooklynite. She spent ten years as an editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before opening Lofty Pigeon Books in Kensington, Brooklyn with her partner Davi in 2023. 

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Lofty Pigeon, Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Check Naomi's website for her upcoming tour dates. And subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

To celebrate the release of Naomi's Marginalia: an autobiography, we have a bit of a role reversal in this episode. Michael Wheaton, publisher of Autofocus Books, joins us today and takes over the host chair as he chats with Naomi about Marginalia, the kind of book it turned out to be, “project” books, the idea of a book as container, and how the process of creating it altered her practice of marginalia today. This is a delightful, insightful episode on the unexpected paths a book takes to find its final form...

Michael Wheaton is the publisher of Autofocus Books. He is the author of the essay Home Movies (BUNNY, 2024). His writing has appeared previously in Essay Daily, DIAGRAM, Burrow Press Review, HAD, Rejection Letters, and other online journals.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Check Naomi's website for her upcoming tour dates. And subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.