Jordan sits down with Renee Gladman to talk about prose architecture, Henry James, walking in cities, and mushrooms.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nicholson Baker sits down with Jordan to discuss writing about the unsung pleasures and details of the world-- things like the way your mother cuts up a banana, or the advertisements in your favorite magazine. Things that "live in this between area of noticing, they're part of the background of life."

Mentioned in the episode:

• Nicholson's book about WWII, Human Smoke
• "Sock (Object Lessons)" by Kim Adrian
• "The Lab Leak Hypothesis," New York Magazine

Nicholson Baker has written seventeen books, including The Mezzanine, Vox, Human Smoke, The Anthologist, and Baseless—also an art book, The World on Sunday, in collaboration with his wife Margaret Brentano. Several of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and he has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Herman Hesse Prize.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Aziza sits down with Jordan to talk about the eating disorder that almost took her life in 2019, and the search into her family's history in Palestine that she undertook in a bid for her own survival.

Mentioned in the episode:

• the Nakba
• transgenerational trauma
• José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
• ghurba

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of The Hollow Half, a genre-bending work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other publications. Previously a Fulbright fellow in Jordan, she is the recipient of numerous Pulitzer Center grants for Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Writer’s Workshop, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lisa Ko sits down with Jordan to talk about the daily journaling practice that she started at age five, and the period of creative crisis between her first and second novels when she began methodically destroying every journal she'd ever kept.

Mentioned in the episode:

• Tehching Hsieh
• soft gaze
• Moleskin daily journals

Lisa Ko is the author of the new novel Memory Piece and the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and The Believer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan sits down to talk with Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches, about writing the non-human world, leaving the world of legacy media, and how they've learned from the deep sea --and from their colleagues-- about the power of collectivity.

Mentioned in the episode:

• how to write a book on top of a full-time job
• uncharismatic microfauna
• Sabrina's essay on salps and queer collectivity, from How Far the Light Reaches
• Who Is Steven Hotdog?

Sabrina Imbler is a staff writer at Defector, a worker-owned site, where they cover creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a Los Angeles Times book prize in science and technology. Their chapbook Dyke (geology), was published by Black Lawrence Press, and was selected for the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Program.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Jordan sits down to talk with Maya Binyam, author of the novel Hangman,about a near-drowning that changed her life.

Maya Binyam is the author of Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Dublin Literary Award. She is the recipient of the 2025 Bard Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, theNew Yorker,Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is an advisory editor of theParis Review.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we're sharing a live conversation between Jordan and Carvell Wallace, recorded last year at P&T Knitwear in New York. They talk about his new memoir, Another Word for Love, a moment of real peril from his childhood, and the long process that followed for him of learning to embrace vulnerability, connection, and his own writing voice.

Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster who has contributed to The New Yorker, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, MTV News, and Al Jazeera. His debut memoir, Another Word For Love (MCD, 2024), explores his life, identity, and love through stories of family, friendship, and culture and is a 2024 Kirkus Finalist in Nonfiction. He was a 2019 Peabody Award nominee, a 2022 National Magazine Award Finalist, a 2023 winner of the Mosaic Prize in Journalism, and a 2025 UCross Fellow. He lives in Oakland.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Jordan sits down to talk with Lidia Yuknavitch about menopause, where stories lodge in our bodies, having a creative process that takes the shape of an ocean wave, and more.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of four novels: Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the OBA Reader's Choice Award. She has also published a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books in 2017. Verge, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2020. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Her newest memoir, Reading the Waves, was published by Riverhead books in 2025. She is a very good swimmer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we bring you a live interview with Garth Greenwell, conducted in October 2024 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Garth talks about growing up in Kentucky assuming that he would die young, the teacher who gave him a path toward being an artist, and the doggedness with which he has pursued his aesthetic practices (in both music and literature) ever since.

Mentioned:

Garth's new novel, Small Rain (FSG 2024)

Frank Bidart

Benjamin Britten

Così Fan Tutte

The HIV/AIDS crisis

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Cleanness was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications.  A new novel, Small Rain, is now out from FSG. He is the recipient of many honors for his work, including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Grinnell College, the University of Mississippi, Princeton, and NYU. He writes regularly about literature, film, art and music for his Substack, To a Green Thought. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're revisiting our 2021 interview with the poet Jericho Brown, who this week was named a MacArthur Fellow-- one of the highest honors in the arts and humanities. He and Jordan talk about the great mystery of why we desire the things we desire; about oration and the poets he read and memorized as part of his own becoming; mitigating our impulses toward violence with tenderness, and more.

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.