Podcasts – Tin House: Recent Episodes
David Naimon, Tin House Books
Lance Olsen returns to Between the Covers to discuss his two new books, his uncategorizable multiverse fiction Absolute Away, and his new collection of philosophical essays and interviews on writing Shrapnel:Contemplations. Lance’s latest novel engages with the life of Edith Metzger, an improbable footnote in two momentous events in history: 1)as the woman in the backseat of Jackson Pollock’s car on the fateful day he crashed it and ended both their lives, and 2)as a German Jewish three-year old at the infamous Nazi book burning. When Hermann Göring mistook her for an Aryan, picking her up, little Edie bit his lip until it bled. Employing the notions of quantum physics as well as the notions of home and exile of Jacques Derrida, Lance imagines many otherwises for Edith Metzger. In this life and others. Together we explore the philosophic underpinnings of Lance’s writing, as evidenced in Shrapnel: Contemplations, and use his novel Absolute Away as the test case.
For the bonus audio archive Lance contributes an extended reading from his forthcoming novel about the outsider artist Henry Darger. It’s provisional title is An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and all the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page.
Here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.
The post Lance Olsen : Absolute Away & Shrapnel appeared first on Tin House.
For nearly twenty years Amitav Ghosh has been writing about opium and the opium trade, first in his fictional Ibis trilogy, and now in nonfiction with Smoke & Ashes. This is a story that brings together many of the preoccupying themes from Ghosh’s career: the legacies of colonialism and extractive colonial economies, the intelligence of plants and the ways plants are actors and agents within history, and the strategies that can be gleaned from the story of opium in today’s battle to address climate change. But given that he has now engaged with the opium trade in both nonfiction and fiction, we also discuss another of his interests: the factors that led to the rise of realism in fiction, that shaped and defined what we.call the literary novel today. It turns out what shaped the realist literary novel are the same forces that have led to our opium and fossil fuel addiction, and we look at both.
If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. There are innumerable potential benefits and rewards of doing so. You can explore them all at the show’s Patreon page.
Lastly, here is today’s BookShop.
The post Amitav Ghosh : Smoke and Ashes appeared first on Tin House.
Today’s guest, poet, playwright, novelist, translator, publisher, editor and critic, Joyelle McSweeney discusses her latest poetry collection Death Styles. She talks about the juxtaposing of “death” and “style” and the seam to the underworld that opens when you do, about style as survival, about writing after and into death, about eyes that spill Art, and ears that make sound, about poetry, performance, prophecy and more. We also do a deep dive into McSweeney’s aesthetics and poetics as exemplified by her landmark book of eco-criticism The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults.
For the bonus audio archive, McSweeney contributes an almost twenty minute incredible performance from her libretto Pistorius Rex, her operatic and Oedipal reimagining of the trial of Oscar Pistorius (the double-amputee Olympic athlete who murdered his girlfriend). This joins bonus audio from many past guests, from Douglas Kearney to C.A. Conrad to Jorie Graham. To find out about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other possible benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.
The post Joyelle McSweeney : Death Styles appeared first on Tin House.
One might ask, just what is Danielle Dutton’s latest book, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other? A collection of stories, a philosophical essay, a sequence of nested dreams and memories, an act of loving citation, a one-act play of silent animals, a meditation on the human in the more-than-human world, on the end of the world, on writing, on reading, on visual art, on black holes, on subterranean forests and the landscapes inside us? Somehow, as we leap from one section to the next, from Prairie to Dresses to Art to Other, this book is about all of these things and much more. And yet, mysteriously, magically, improbably it all holds together as one. Everything echoing off of and deepening everything else. We talk about finding form, about creating work that best reflects the unique and weird way one sees the world, about the generative power of making the world strange again, about opening spaces in fiction, and writing into them.
Many of the people mentioned today, from Bhanu Kapil to Sabrina Orah Mark to Caren Beilin have contributed readings to the bonus audio archive when they themselves were guests on the show. The bonus audio archive is only one possible benefit of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out how to subscribe to it and all the other resources and rewards available at the show’s Patreon page.
Lastly, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.
The post Danielle Dutton : Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other appeared first on Tin House.
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 a different sound and voice for the novel, one that is multiple and collective. both ancestral and visionary, one that invites us to walk back into relationship with other beings and the land itself, and shows us where we are headed when we don’t. Her latest novel Praiseworthy is set in a world like ours, of extreme weather events, of unchecked white supremacy, of the inexorable pull toward assimilation, erasure and the demanding present-tense of the internet. But the book is also one of aboriginal invention, adaptation, and vision, a novel of both biting humor and wisdom, as people, in the face of it all, search for Aboriginal sovereignty.
For the bonus audio archive Alexis reads a favorite poem of hers by Bei Dao which joins an immense archive of supplemental material—readings, craft talks, long-form conversations with translators—from everyone from Layli Long Soldier to Dionne Brand, Naomi Klein to Richard Powers. You can find out more about the bonus audio archive and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is the Bookshop corresponding to today’s episode.
The post Alexis Wright : Praiseworthy appeared first on Tin House.
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, his debut poetry collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. What is remarkable about these three books, is how, in a way, they are three different strategies aimed at the same goal—how to avoid the flatness and fixity of representation of identity, how to create enough elbow room, to push back against the assumptions, presumptions and expectations that come with one’s identity, and assert one’s sovereignty as a writer. Nam has suggested that 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem could be viewed as one long poem, one poem that consists of many stand-alone poems, but where each individual poem, through your encounter with it, affects, changes, and deforms all the others, and the longer poem as a whole. We look at his three books in a similar spirit, looking at each through the vantage point of the others, to see what we discover about questions of identity, representation and art-making as we do.
If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. To find out about all the possible benefits and rewards of doing so, from the bonus audio archive to the Tin House Early Reader subscription, head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, today’s BookShop.
The post Nam Le : 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem appeared first on Tin House.
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 and Giramondo respectively, de Marcken’s new book is a deeply philosophical and metaphysical, heartbreakingly funny book about life and death, love and loss. Join our undead protagonist, in search of herself, as she loses one body part after another, yet fills herself with one thing after another. How much can we lose and still be ourselves? How much of our sense of self is built from what we’ve lost? How much of who we are is really ‘other’? Perhaps the crow inside her chest, dead but communicative, speaking human words but not a human language, can tell us.
For the bonus audio archive, Anne contributes a reading from her book The Accident: An Account, which joins supplemental readings from everyone from Dionne Brand to Jorie Graham, Natalie Diaz to Christina Sharpe. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is today’s BookShop.
The post Anne de Marcken : It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over appeared first on Tin House.
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. And each of these codes, each of these edicts, is also engaged with, manipulated and remade by the abstract artist Torkwase Dyson. Together they unmake history, unmake the edicts, one in language and one with a brush. Canisia tells stories that are as short as a line, or told in footnotes, or that take place one thousand years in the future. Stories that remake other stories, and stories that aren’t stories at all. And ultimately, through storytelling, Canisia asks us how we place ourselves in relation to the stories we’ve inherited, the histories which themselves are fictions, and in the ways she herself does and doesn’t engage with the codes, she enacts a different way of living, sounding a future for Black life.
For the bonus audio archive Canisia reads from Dionne Brand’s upcoming book Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, from Christina Sharpe’s remarkable “What Could a Vessel Be?” and more that I will leave as surprise. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally here is today’s BookShop.
The post Canisia Lubrin : Code Noir appeared first on Tin House.
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 years before his suicide, her brother quietly removed the family photos from their frames on the walls, carefully cut himself out of each photo, and returned them to their frames without him. The redacted photos remained on the walls like this for years before and after his death. In different ways, Diana’s books write into and around the empty space that her brother left in these images, and in her family. We talk about her process of radical eulogy, the ways her work outside of language informs her poetry, how she uses photography—redacted by her own sibling—as a form and constraint in her work, about ghosts and hauntings, rivers and bees, about the Vietnamese declarative and the English subjunctive, about alternate lives not-lived and future ones that might be.
One of the topics we cover today is how Diana constructed and crafted Root Fractures as a book, distilling a manuscript of over 200 pages of words and images to a book half that size. For the bonus audio archive Diana discusses this further and reads from some of the body-shaped poems that didn’t make it into the final manuscript, and yet were part of it coming into being. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is today’s Bookshop with not only Diana’s books but many of the books mentioned today. Everyone from Eliot Weinberger and Jenny Erpenbeck to Bhanu Kapil and Victoria Chang.
The post Diana Khoi Nguyen : Root Fractures appeared first on Tin House.
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 emperor invites the conquistador, with his small band of Spanish soldiers, into the palaces of Tenochtitlan as guests. We talk about writing into the gaps of history, fiction’s influence on the “official” record, histories that are actually fictions, and how writing into erased or distorted histories can be a way to speak to the present moment. We talk of hornless deer, ritual cannibalism, psychedelic tomatoes, and a surprising influence of the indigenous cultures of the Americas on all of our lives today.
If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the potential gifts and rewards of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode with all the books, fiction and nonfiction, literary and scholarly, that we reference today.
The post Álvaro Enrigue : You Dreamed of Empires appeared first on Tin House.
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 Polish anthropologist? The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is dedicated to les pensées sauvages, to the wild thinkers, and today’s conversation is an exploration of Énard’s latest wild book, and of wild thinking itself.
If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. There are many potential benefits and rewards of doing so. You can find out about them all at the show’s Patreon page.
In the spirit of Énard’s latest book and our conversation about it, today’s Bookshop is just as wide-ranging—with classics of anthropology, Buddhism, modern Arabic and French literature, and of course, Énard’s own books as well.
The post Mathias Énard : The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild appeared first on Tin House.
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. This three-part episode includes a remarkable reading from Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, an interview of Johnson by writer Chris Offutt that is an unforgettable exploration of a writer’s process and philosophy, and finally, after Denis takes a cigarette break, Johnson, Offutt and Charles D’Ambrosio perform the first act of Johnson’s play Psychos Never Dream.
Books by all three of today’s writers can be found in this episode’s Bookshop. And you can find out more about all the potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page.
The post Tin House Live : Denis Johnson : 2003 appeared first on Tin House.
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 society tries to keep the light and the dark separate, to hide our unasked questions and forbidden desires in the shadows. Nash’s writing insists on bringing them uncomfortably together and we explore what it means to transgress in one’s writing, to risk oneself on the page, to write dangerously and with a burnt tongue. Whether engaging with motherhood under capitalism, industrial animal slaughter, or cross-species kink, Deliver Me leads us into the darkness, crosses the borders of the acceptable, and then looks back at the well-lit world to see it anew.
For the bonus audio archive Elle reads the opening of Elizabeth V. Aldrich’s Ruthless Little Things. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio, and about the countless other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is today’s Bookshop.
The post Elle Nash : Deliver Me appeared first on Tin House.
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 way, behind the curtain of the creative process of composition. And you wouldn’t be wrong. […]
The post Tin House Live : Matthew Zapruder on Story of a Poem appeared first on Tin House.
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 book his selected prose, A Beat Beyond, his meditations on poetry and its relation to […]
The post Major Jackson : Razzle Dazzle appeared first on Tin House.
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 where Novak writes this book we discuss today). The structure of this retreat is inspired […]
The post JoAnna Novak : Contradiction Days appeared first on Tin House.
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 will oneself into presence as an artist and as a human. And it is a […]
The post Jorie Graham : To 2040 appeared first on Tin House.
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, in this craft talk Adjei-Brenyah looks at the tropes of surrealist and speculative fiction within […]
The post Tin House Live : Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Surrealism appeared first on Tin House.
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 for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. . […]
The post Roger Reeves : Dark Days appeared first on Tin House.
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. Others live in refugee camps or Ramallah or in the diaspora in Europe. But why […]
The post Isabella Hammad : Enter Ghost appeared first on Tin House.
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 from Shy, Max and I explore his impulse to examine and evoke boyhood across these three […]
The post Tin House Live : Max Porter on Shy appeared first on Tin House.
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 relation to capitalism and colonialism and how a messier, more unruly poetics can trouble borders […]
The post Megan Fernandes : I Do Everything I’m Told appeared first on Tin House.
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 that, and their novel Your Love Is Not Good is not just full of sex […]
The post Johanna Hedva : Your Love Is Not Good appeared first on Tin House.
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 deforested countries in Europe, was largely covered in forest, its culture deeply entwined with the […]
The post Tin House Live : Katie Holten on The Language of Trees appeared first on Tin House.
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. I’ve wanted to share this second conversation ever since. Not only because I prepared two distinctly different interviews, but also because this was Powers’ first visit to Oregon for The Overstory, a book not merely set in the Pacific Northwest but one that deeply engages with the longstanding history of forest defense in the region on behalf of the last remaining stands of old growth forest. Because Powers hadn’t been to Portland for his hardback or paperback tours and had since won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this very book, and because of the deep connection the Portland community has to the stories within this novel, the atmosphere was electric at this sold-out event, overflowing with anticipation, excitement, and joy. I’m so happy to be able to now share this with you and want to thank Richard Powers, W. W. Norton, and Powell’s Books, the host of the event, for making that possible. And whether or not you’ve heard the podcast conversation that aired with Powers in 2019, it is a great complement to today’s episode. Two conversations on the same day, one with just Richard and me, the other celebrating the book in community, quite different in tone and content and yet interwoven and speaking to each other.
For the bonus audio archive, Richard contributes a reading of an incredibly moving W. S. Merwin poem about trees, which joins Jorie Graham reading poems by others about rain, Kaveh Akbar reading about worms, Forrest Gander reading poems about lichen, and much more. The bonus audio is only one possible benefit of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about them all at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is today’s very tree-centric Bookshop.
The post Tin House Live: Richard Powers on The Overstory appeared first on Tin House.
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 see a story as song, to sing from or toward love, to experience a book’s phases not as sections but as movements? How does writing from or toward love change the music of our sentences or lines, the shapes of our stories, the way we represent others—whether other people or other nonhuman beings? Thon suggests a relationship between attention and attentiveness and this question of love. By quoting Simone Weil, who says, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” Thon speaks to what she calls the “ethics of perception,” that we can avert our eyes or risk compassion, in our lives and on the page. A conversation that is as much about living as writing, and one that speaks as deeply to questions of poetry, music, silence, spirit, and yes, love, as it does to story.
In today’s conversation Melanie also speaks generously about her approach to the teaching of writing. In that spirit she offers to all Between the Covers supporters two of her teaching documents, “Memory & Adventure” and “The Gospel of Grief, Grace, and Gratitude.” In addition, for the bonus audio archive she gives a craft talk of hers called “The Ethics of Perception.” This joins craft talks from Marlon James (“The Nine and a Half Rules of Seduction”) and Jeannie Vanasco (“How to Write Memorable Lines”) as well as readings by everyone from Teju Cole to Lance Olsen, Carmen Maria Machado to Jenny Offill. You can find out about all of this and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community at the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation.
The post Melanie Rae Thon : As If Fire Could Hide Us appeared first on Tin House.
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, to name a few) or whether her thought and vision provide a foundation and subtext for one (conversations as wide-ranging as those with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Monica Youn, Claire Schwartz, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Charif Shanahan), Sharpe’s scholarship has been a crucial part of some of the most dynamic conversations on the show. Her work has always been more than academic work however. It has always been a hybrid, scholarly and literary, visual and textual, personal and structural. But her latest book, Ordinary Notes, is the most personal to date, and among the many things it could be considered (John Keene suggests it combines memoir, memorial, literary criticism, and political and cultural critique) is as a love letter to Sharpe’s mother and how she cultivated and nourished, in the face of all the brutalities of our world, an atmosphere of Black life, Black art, and Black thought within their home. Of how she pursued, in Christina’s words, “beauty as a method.” This is a rare book that will work on you if you work your way through it. Ordinary Notes is both generous and challenging, envisioning an elsewhere and otherwise of shared risk and care.
For the bonus audio archive Christina contributes readings from Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet, and Canisia Lubrin’s forthcoming Code Noir. These join bonus material from everyone from Nikky Finney to Layli Long Soldier. And the bonus material is only one of many potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out more at the show’s Patreon page.
Today’s Bookshop is the largest and deepest yet, with Christina’s books, of course, but also with many of the Black writers and thinkers and artists that she has been shaped by or writes alongside.
The post Christina Sharpe : Ordinary Notes appeared first on Tin House.
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 his writings on translation and the status of African languages, globally and in Africa today, a topic that is quite personal for him, and central to his writing life. During his year in a maximum security prison in the Kenya of the 1970s, he decided to stop writing his novels in English and wrote his fifth novel, Devil on the Cross, on squares of toilet paper in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. Ngũgĩ suspects that he wasn’t jailed simply because he wrote and put on a play that was critical of the Kenyan government (his recent novels in English had been just as critical of the government) but because it had been written and performed in Gikuyu. Thus, every novel he has written since, he has written in Gikuyu, and then later translated into English himself. You would be right to think that writing in one’s mother tongue should be the most natural and obvious thing to do. And yet the obstacles to doing so continue to be immense and speak to larger questions around the status of the African continent today and postcolonial Africa’s relationship to its colonial past. Today we look at the histories and legacies within languages as well as the power dynamics between them, and how collapsing the hierarchies between languages is crucial to doing the same geopolitically, that the beginnings of true sovereignty begin with our languages.
If you enjoy today’s episode consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Every supporter gets the resource-rich email with each episode with things referenced during the conversation in question as well as places to explore once you’ve finished listening, and there are many other potential benefits to choose from. These include the bonus audio archive with readings from everyone from Dionne Brand to Layli Long Soldier; the Tin House early readership program, receiving twelve books over the course of a year months before they are available to the general public; rare collectibles from past guests; and more. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is today’s Bookshop, full of the books we mention today.
The post Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o : The Language of Languages appeared first on Tin House.
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 whose positions / I appear not to occupy.” How does one connect to others, be seen and heard by others, make art about oneself in language, when language itself does not capture one’s identity, when the available categories do not describe your life, when one’s identity is defined by its instability or uncategorizability? Today’s conversation looks at complex intersections between Arabness and Blackness, between North Africa and North America, between a mother’s self-conception and a son’s very different one, and the ways different legacies of race—historically, geopolitically—can ripple through the most intimate of spaces, within a family, between lovers, before one’s therapist, among one’s peers. Shanahan’s very particular journey around finding a language, a poetics, that can more fully evoke his embodied life experience tells us all something about the construction of self more generally, about the relationship of language to self-making, and about what possibilities the ways we are categorized, or categorize ourselves, either open up or foreclose.
For the bonus audio archive Shanahan contributes a reading of a long excerpt from what will be his next book, a polyvocal, epistolary project called Dear Whiteness. In addition, Mizna, the journal of Arab American art, literature, and culture, has also contributed copies of issues related to today’s conversation, or which might be of particular interest to listeners of the show, for new supporters of the show. These are only two of many possible benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter. You can find out more at the show’s Patreon page.
Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode, with Charif’s books but also books by everyone from Safia Elhillo to Chouki El Hamel.
The post Charif Shanahan : Trace Evidence appeared first on Tin House.
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 escaping a simple, reductive meaning, forever changing shape and being retold, forever out of fashion and always enduring, ancient and contemporary at the same time, Sabrina’s essays refuse to be only essays, somehow becoming fairy tales themselves. Our conversation about this essay collection is about fiction, fantasy, memoir, and poetry, about childhood, motherhood, and step-motherhood, and how they all magically coexist in the alchemy of Sabrina’s prose. Ultimately these tales, these surreal dreams, are not ways to look away from the world, but ways to be in it, to cope, confront, and engage with the unimaginably difficult, whether the raising of two Black Jewish boys in the United States today, unspeakable ancestral rupture, a global pandemic and climate apocalypse, or the anxieties and uncertainties of the everyday. Happily takes our hands to walk into the forest together.
For the bonus audio archive Sabrina contributes a reading of the Bruno Schulz story “Birds.” This joins a vast archive of material from Jai Chakrabarti reading poems by Bruno Schulz’s biographer, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, to Jen Bervin reading the letters of Paul Celan, to Rosmarie Waldrop reading Edmond Jabès or Alice Oswald reading from the Book of Job. This is one of many possible benefits to joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about them all at the show’s Patreon page.
Finally here is the Bookshop corresponding to today’s conversation.
The post Sabrina Orah Mark : Happily appeared first on Tin House.
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 of anti-Asian violence in the United States but is always conscious of the ways this violence is situated structurally, of the racial triangulation of Asian Americans, of how, in Dorothy Wang’s words, “there’s no way to talk about Asian immigrants or the Asian American experience as separate from the Black American experience or the Indigenous experience or the Latinx experience because of the relation to whiteness.” From From engages with everything from Greek mythology (and the construction of the Greek self in relation to the Asian other) to the 1992 L.A. uprising and the murder of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du. And ultimately with what it means to call a place “home” that never seems to see you as part of its history, that is always asking “but where are you from from?”
For the bonus audio archive Monica contributes the reading of two electrifying long poems. The first, “A Guide to Usage: Mine,” was commissioned by the Boston Review for the anthology Poems for Political Disaster (a book conceived in response to the election of Donald Trump). The second is a draft of a poem, one that hasn’t yet fully come together (and which she has never shared before), but was originally meant to be part of the series of magpie parable poems in the new collection. Partially inspired by the landmark 1948 Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer, which abolishes racially-restrictive housing covenants, this never-before-seen poem is called “Parable of the Magpie’s Nest.” To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive (which includes readings from everyone from Victoria Chang to Nikky Finney, from Ada Limón to Dionne Brand), and about the many other potential rewards and benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is today’s Bookshop.
photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
The post Monica Youn : From From appeared first on Tin House.
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 other. Chakrabarti’s new story collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, engages with complex questions of class, gender, race, religion, and nationality, particularly in relation to families and family making, and the tensions between our individual dreams and the countervailing realities of the people we share lives with and among. We discuss questions of story shape, characterization, point of view, and the role of the reader in order to look deeply at how to tell such stories in ways that feel nuanced, lived, and embodied.
For the bonus audio archive Jai reads two poems by the Polish poet and translator (and biographer of Bruno Schulz) Jerzy Ficowski. The epigraph to Jai’s novel comes from one of them, and the second poem is dedicated to the memory of Janusz Korczak (who we discuss quite a bit in the main discussion). To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards from joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over the the show’s Patreon page.
Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation.
The post Jai Chakrabarti : A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness appeared first on Tin House.
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 genre. We look at the ways her work extends Argentina’s long and storied tradition of fantastical literature, but, even more, we look at the remarkable ways her writing departs from it, the ways Anglophone horror writers have inspired her to write an Argentinian horror that is similarly place-based, that comes up from the land and the events that happened on it (and still haunt it today), that engages with the stories, customs, rituals, fears, and politics of the place where the story is set. We also talk about her assertion that Latin America, while it has a long and deep history of fantastical literature, as well as a few examples of horror, doesn’t, in her mind, have what amounts to a horror tradition, and she theorizes about why England and the U.S., by contrast, have such a deep engagement with horror as a genre.
We talk not only about horror in relation to place and literary tradition, but also horror in relation to gender, and the gothic in relation to gender. About the role of women as characters in the horror genre and about the new wave of Latin American women writers attracted to horror as a lens through which to create their work. We also talk about the politics and aesthetics of portraying violence, and how her work does and does not map itself in relation to the brutal dictatorship she grew up under and which is the setting of her new novel, her first in English, Our Share of Night.
Many writers get mentioned and discussed in this conversation, from Jorge Luis Borges to Stephen King to Ursula K. Le Guin, but I want to mention one writer who we discuss several times, the Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor. Melchor’s past appearance on the show to discuss her book Hurricane Season is the perfect pairing with today’s episode with Mariana.
For the bonus audio archive, we’ve added a long-form conversation with Mariana Enriquez’s translator Megan McDowell. There is also a long-form conversation with Megan from when Alejandro Zambra was on the show as well. They make a great pairing as Megan was translating both of their books simultaneously during the first years of the pandemic and she makes some revelatory comparisons between their books, and between Chilean and Argentinian literature in relation to the fantastic and the real. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about the many other potential rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally here is today’s Bookshop.
The post Mariana Enriquez : Our Share of Night appeared first on Tin House.
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 haunts the reader long after closing the book. They also have a fascinating relationship to story, and by extension to time, and to the image and the mysterious relationship between words on the page and images in our minds. In her own words Bates describes Judas Goat as follows: “Within the book I see a woman wrestling her various hauntings: the specter of sexual violence, anxieties around attachment and marital commitment, motherlessness, queerness, Biblical figures, education, her reliance on (and distrust of) the visual. What haunts the speaker of Judas Goat most is what she’s been taught, how she’s been trained.”
For three lucky new supporters of Between the Covers, Gabrielle Bates is offering two 30-minute poetry consultations and an annotated advance copy of Judas Goat, containing anecdotes about the poems, background about them, and the poet’s own inside scoop about how they came to be written. These are only a few of many possible rewards and gifts for joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. The bonus audio archive (with contributions from everyone from Jorie Graham, Dionne Brand, Nikky Finney, Layli Long Soldier, Alice Oswald, and more), the Tin House early readership subscription, collectibles from everyone from Ama Codjoe to Ursula K. Le Guin and much more. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page.
And here is today’s episode’s Bookshop.
The post Gabrielle Bates : Judas Goat appeared first on Tin House.
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 the stories of his grandmother, on the fantastical tales of Márquez and Borges, on the notion that stories themselves can not only comfort and console, but sometimes save a life. His latest novel, Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel (who is part of today’s conversation), is about the comforts and dangers of the past, of nostalgia, and what happens to a country, to a world, when the future feels canceled and we look backward for somewhere to live. As Bulgarian translator Izidora Angel said in her review of the book: “Beneath the book’s speculative façade, it’s also clear the author is meditating on his own legacy as a man of words within it. Real, bloody conflict exists but something else is eating away at us too—a critical depletion of empathy, a critical mass of meaninglessness, as Gospodinov has called it, and it is the job of writers to counter these metaphysical but no less real dangers. Words are time shelters too—living, breathing portals to memory, experience, and history, archives and blueprints all at once.”
For subscribers to the bonus audio archive, there is a supplementary interview with Georgi’s translator, Angela Rodel, about the questions and conundrums of translation that arose with Time Shelter, about how Gospodinov’s work is distinct within Bulgarian literature, and about her own artistic pursuits beyond translation, from starring in Bulgarian films and television to performing in a Bulgarian folk-rock band and more. This joins other long-form conversations with translators of other previous guests including Megan McDowell translating Alejandro Zambra, Ellen Elias-Bursać translating Dubravka Ugrešić, and more. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally here is today’s Bookshop.
The post Georgi Gospodinov : Time Shelter appeared first on Tin House.
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 Life Is Everywhere, a book that contains other books, is hard to categorize. Some have called the structure like that of Matryoshka dolls but its inspiration comes directly from an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” an essay that reaches toward a different future for the novel. In Ives’ book we spend just as much time reading the things inside our protagonist’s bag as we do with the protagonist herself. At any moment what we are reading might seem like a #MeToo novel, a book of fictional history, a book of real history, a fantastical adventure of magical statuary, an autofiction, or a “systems novel,” one that looks at how individuals act and are acted upon within structures and institutions, whether a marriage or a university. As Percival Everett says “If Lucy Ives is as smart as her novel Life Is Everywhere, then I am in complete awe. . . . How many books in one and yet one book. This is great writing.” And Jesse Ball aptly adds about this erudite and sly invention, Ives “slays enemy and friend alike.”
For the bonus audio Lucy Ives contributes a reading of a five-part writing exercise called “Exercises for Writing from Memory.” This joins contributions from writers as varied as Ted Chiang, N.K. Jemisin, Dionne Brand, Arthur Sze, Max Porter, and more. To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other many potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page.
Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation.
The post Lucy Ives : Life Is Everywhere appeared first on Tin House.
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 interest in the strange, uncanny relationship between truth and fiction, truth and myth, the imagination and the real, the fantastic and reality, and the ways we seem hardwired, from childhood onward, to be adept at finding the enduring truths within stories that others have “made up.” Today’s conversation, as the final one in the Crafting with Ursula series, serves a double purpose. Yes, we do a deep dive into word magic, into the power and purpose of creating and telling stories, into the spells they weave and why. But we also celebrate Le Guin, the intelligence and music of her words, her spells, by having Neil Gaiman, one of the most mellifluous and recognizable narrative voices today, read excerpts of Le Guin’s work for us, from A Wizard of Earthsea to The Lathe of Heaven to Always Coming Home.
Whether you’ve been following the Crafting with Ursula series from the beginning, or whether Neil Gaiman is what brought you here for the first time, don’t miss the many other science fiction and fantasy conversations within the main Between the Covers show. You can go to the show’s homepage and sort the archive for “SFF” and not only find the three conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin herself, but also conversations with many others including Ted Chiang, Jeff VanderMeer, N.K. Jemisin, China Miéville, Nnedi Okorafor, William Gibson, Sofia Samatar, Neal Stephenson, Marlon James, Jo Walton, Kelly Link, Daniel José Older, David Mitchell and more.
If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener supporter. Each supporter receives a resource-rich email with each episode, can join our collective brainstorm, our collective dreaming of who to invite as future guests, and there are a wide variety of other possible benefits from the bonus audio archive to rare Le Guin collectibles. Check it all out at the show’s Patreon page.
Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation.
photo credits: William Anthony (Le Guin), Beowulf Sheehan (Gaiman)
The post Crafting with Ursula: Neil Gaiman on Word Magic & The Power of Telling Stories appeared first on Tin House.
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 each within the next in a way that illuminates something about all three. Her latest […]
The post Sawako Nakayasu : Pink Waves appeared first on Tin House.
“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 seeing, and its poems often engage with visual art—poems that look at art forms made […]
The post Ama Codjoe : Bluest Nude appeared first on Tin House.
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 have contained both power and an elusive mysterious quality for Le Guin. The ways names […]
The post Crafting with Ursula : Gabrielle Bellot on The Power of Names & Naming appeared first on Tin House.
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 about her birthplace and childhood in Algeria, that she would never write about her mother, […]
The post Hélène Cixous : Well-Kept Ruins appeared first on Tin House.
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, of the sociopolitical forces that shaped what we consider a novel today, a form whose […]
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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 first truly substantive presentations of her work in both English and Spanish. She’s translated other […]
The post Crafting with Ursula : Maria Dahvana Headley on Feminist Translation & Classical Retellings appeared first on Tin House.
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 cultural critic of uncompromising courage, an artist in language and ideas, and an intellectual conscience […]
The post Dionne Brand : Nomenclature — New and Collected Poems appeared first on Tin House.
“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 and meaningfulness in our lives. When Castillo says “read,” and suggests that how we read […]
The post Elaine Castillo : How to Read Now appeared first on Tin House.
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 latest novel Thrust follows a character who herself is a “carrier.” Because this essay has influenced […]
The post Crafting with Ursula : Lidia Yuknavitch on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction appeared first on Tin House.
Claire Schwartz’ poetry collection Civil Service looks at the ways ordinary, everyday actions uphold and sustain state violence, the ways civility can and does serve extraordinary atrocities. The world of this collection, populated by civil positions—The Accountant, The Archivist, The Curator, The Intern—also has within it a fugitive voice, a disruptive voice, the voice of Amira. […]
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Morgan Talty’s collection of linked short stories is set on the Penobscot Reservation on Indian Island in Maine. But Morgan is quick to point out that these stories are not Penobscot stories in so far as they do not ‘represent’ the Penobscot people, that even people who are praising the book are often falling into […]
The post Morgan Talty : Night of the Living Rez appeared first on Tin House.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s biographer, Julie Phillips, joins “Crafting with Ursula” to talk about the writing mother, how Le Guin’s embrace of both writing and motherhood influenced her engagement with feminism, as well as with story form, and ultimately how it prompted her to develop a philosophical framework from which to re-vision her own work […]
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Daniel Mendelsohn’s latest book you could say is about digression and about ring composition, a form of storytelling with digression at its heart. And yet this book, about digression, is not only his shortest and most concise, a mere 112 pages, but also somehow contains all the concerns of his previous books and much more, […]
The post Daniel Mendelsohn : Three Rings — A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate appeared first on Tin House.
The Immortal King Rao is somehow three narratives in one, a historical novel set within a Dalit community in 1950s India, a near-future tech dystopia on the islands of the Puget Sound near Seattle, and an immigration story from the former to the latter. As a technology reporter herself, Vauhini Vara is interested in artificial […]
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“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by them,” says Ursula K. Le Guin. “From within.” This is just one of many quotes that arise from Le Guin’s high regard for the child reader and for the unique intelligence of children. Her philosophy around the importance of the imagination and of imaginative […]
The post Crafting with Ursula : William Alexander on Writing for Children appeared first on Tin House.
Hernan Diaz’s debut novel In the Distance went on to become not only one of the great debuts of the year, but a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. His follow-up Trust is also a book that engages with and interrogates the stories that the United States tells about itself and […]
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The first time Rae Armantrout came on the show, in 2017, we looked at her poetry through the lens of her interest in quantum physics. Now, five years later, with the release of this double collection of poems, we look at her career-long desire to cultivate a poetics that encourages life to interrupt and interject […]
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Today’s guest, Kim Stanley Robinson, is perhaps the living writer most associated with utopian literature today. And as a student of the philosopher, political theorist, and literary critic Fredric Jameson, Robinson has thought deeply about the history of utopias, the history of the novel, and the strange hybrid form that became the utopian novel. In […]
The post Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias appeared first on Tin House.
Courtney Maum’s latest book, her memoir The Year of the Horses, is about a writer at a rough point in her writing career, in her marriage, as a mother, as a woman, finding a way back to herself in all of these spheres by learning to listen and communicate, outside of language, to another species. […]
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Today’s guest Ada Limón discusses her latest collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, whose poems ask and explore what it means to be a human animal among animals, and how language can be a means or an obstacle to this desire. We talk about the relationship of joy to death, poetry to praise, and the […]
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Today’s conversation with adrienne maree brown begins with the notion that all organizing is science fiction, and thus that social justice and science fiction are intricately linked imaginative acts, acts that have real effects in the world at large. brown looks at works by Le Guin that she considers foundational texts for activists and organizers, […]
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Cristina Rivera Garza returns to the show to discuss her New and Selected Stories, which gathers together fiction across thirty years of her writing life. Some are stories translated into English for the first time. Others are stories in English that haven’t yet appeared in Spanish. Still others are new versions, rewritten, retranslated or both. We […]
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Today’s guest, Caren Beilin, talks about her latest novel Revenge of the Scapegoat. All four of her books—two nonfiction, two fiction—each stand alone but they each also share recognizable people/characters that travel across books and across genre. How do the fictional versions of the real people in her life—her partner, her parents, her siblings, her […]
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Today’s guest on Crafting with Ursula, the award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction Karen Joy Fowler, was a longstanding friend of Ursula K. Le Guin. And they both shared a deep interest not only in science, but also in raising questions about the biases deeply embedded in the way we conduct it […]
The post Crafting with Ursula : Karen Joy Fowler on Experimental Women, Animals, Science & Story appeared first on Tin House.
Sheila Heti returns to Between the Covers to discuss her latest unclassifiable novel Pure Colour. When something happens in your life that upends everything you thought you knew, that changes what you notice and value, something that is hard, if not impossible, to put into language, that mystifies you even now, how do you find […]
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Today’s guest is Chilean novelist, essayist, literary critic, and poet Alejandro Zambra, talking about his latest novel Chilean Poet, a novel brimming over with, yes, Chilean poets and poems, but also with love and laughter, artistic dreams and failures, and the desire to find language for things deeply felt that have no name. This conversation, […]
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Today’s “Crafting with Ursula,” a conversation with nature writer Isaac Yuen, explores Le Guin’s writing of the nonhuman other in her fiction. Why might we consider decentering the human within our stories and how do we do so? How does one evoke a truly alien intelligence (i.e. that of a plant or an insect) but […]
The post Crafting with Ursula : Isaac Yuen on Writing Nature & Nature Writing appeared first on Tin House.
It’s been five years since Solmaz Sharif’s first appearance on Between the Covers, for her National Book Award–finalist debut collection Look. Since then, many listeners have pointed to this conversation as one of the most memorable episodes to date. Solmaz returns today to discuss her much-anticipated follow-up, Customs. We talk about belonging, exile and language, about what […]
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Writer and performance artist Gabrielle Civil talks about her latest book the déjà vu: black dreams & black time, as well as her chapbook ( ghost gestures ), chosen by Bhanu Kapil for the Gold Line Press Nonfiction prize. What does Civil mean by “Black time” and how does she enact this in the déjà […]
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Today’s guest on the second episode of Crafting with Ursula, Molly Gloss, the acclaimed writer of both award-winning science fiction and fantasy as well as feminist Westerns, has a particular insight into the work and writing life of Le Guin. Gloss’ writing career began as a student of Le Guin’s in a workshop in the […]
The post Crafting with Ursula : Molly Gloss on Writing the Clear, Clean Line appeared first on Tin House.
Writer, critic, performer, & visual artist James Hannaham talks about his latest and most uncategorizable book Pilot Impostor. This book slips between the borders of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, image and text, facts and fake news, selfhood and persona, pretending and privilege. And Pilot Impostor comes into being piece by piece through an engagement with the work, poem by poem, of Fernando Pessoa, a writer who created and wrote from over seventy (!!!) different heteronyms (personas that interacted with each other and had full biographies, from a bisexual naval engineer in Scotland to an uneducated Portuguese shepherd trying to unlearn even more). And yet this book of Hannaham’s is also somehow about Trump, air disasters, the nature of selfhood, and the ongoing legacy of colonialism and slavery. How is this all possible? Well, listen in to find out!
Here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation, with all of the books mentioned today, where you can support writers, independent bookstores, and the podcast all in one act. If you enjoy today’s episode, consider becoming a listener-supporter of Between the Covers. Many past guests, from Nikky Finney to Ursula K. Le Guin, have donated collectibles for future supporters. There is also the possibility of becoming a Tin House early reader, receiving twelve books over the course of a year, months before they are available to the general public. And every supporter joins a community that is helping shape the future of the show, as well as receiving a resource-rich email with each conversation. Check it all out at the Between the Covers Patreon page.
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Rabih Alameddine talks about his new novel The Wrong End of the Telescope, which is set on the island of Lesbos amidst the medical personnel and tourist-volunteers involved with helping the arriving Syrian refugees. Interestingly, the writer, one suspiciously similar to Rabih himself, is a secondary character in this novel, a character who asks Mina, a Lebanese-American doctor, to tell this story, to be the narrator, because the writer is too undone by the situation to do so. We talk about narrative distance, about how to find what Rabih calls “the Goldilocks distance” not too enmeshed, not to detached, to be able to effectively tell a story that needs to be told. We talk about the power and limits of literature, of empathy, of volunteerism, about why each of Rabih’s books is a rebellion against the one before, about how to write without relying on the reader’s preexisting emotions and why one might want to do so.
The Bookshop for this episode contains most of the books mentioned today (from Vivian Gornick to Elisa Gabbert to Italo Calvino, and of course most of Rabih’s books that we talk about today too). It is a nice way to support the show, the writer, and independent bookstores, all in one gesture.
For the bonus audio archive Rabih contributes a brief discussion and reading of a favorite poem of his by Fernando Pessoa. To find out about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the other potential benefits of becoming a supporter of the show head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.
The post Rabih Alameddine : The Wrong End of the Telescope appeared first on Tin House.
Today’s guest, Becky Chambers, discusses her own work, and her own considerations when imagining alien cultures and the beings that inhabit them. She does this in light of Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness and Le Guin’s short story, “Coming of Age in Karhide,” written by Le Guin 25 years later, but within the same world as the the novel. What does putting these two narratives side by side tell us about storytelling, about audience, about otherness, about the author herself? And what does it mean to imagine worlds not through the science of physics but through the science of culture and the science of bodies? What can be gained by decentering (or even disposing of) plot, conflict, or heroes? And what are the biological and technological considerations one might think about when imagining a future or the beings that might inhabit it?
If this first episode of Crafting with Ursula is your first encounter with the Between the Covers podcast, you can sort the show’s archive by genre, foregrounding, if you desire, all the past science fiction and fantasy conversations with everyone from Ted Chiang and N.K. Jemisin to Neal Stephenson, Daniel José Older, and Kelly Link. All the books mentioned in today’s conversation with Becky Chambers can be found at the show’s BookShop (a nice way to support the author, the show, and independent booksellers all at the same time).
To learn more about the potential benefits and rewards of becoming a listener-supporter of the show, from rare Le Guin collectibles to becoming an early reader for Tin House, head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.
The post Crafting with Ursula : Becky Chambers on Creating Aliens & Alien Cultures appeared first on Tin House.
Poet Victoria Chang talks about her latest and most uncategorizable book Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. A book composed largely of essay-like letters, Dear Memory also contains collages by Victoria, created from the artifacts (mementos, documents, photographs) found in her family’s storage locker, and short poems which she places among the images. What does this formal shapeshifting tell us about this project? How are form and identity related? What does changing form (in this case from poetry to prose) reveal about the self? What role does imagination play in memory? What is post-memory and how does one write into memories that one didn’t have oneself but which nevertheless cast a shadow under which one’s life has been shaped? What does it mean to put language at risk and how does one go about doing it? Is it possible that constructing a self comes not from striving toward wholeness, but from entering the gaps, the silences, the severance, and departures from which one comes?
Today’s conversation invokes the thoughts and work of many other writers (from Brandon Shimoda to Don Mee Choi to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to Rick Barot). You can check out all the books mentioned (by both Victoria and others) at today’s episode’s BookShop.
For the bonus audio archive Victoria adds a reading from her forthcoming collected The Trees Witness Everything as well as a short discussion of writing using constraints, talking about the multiple constraints that produced the tiny poems in this very different upcoming collection. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio as well as about the other potential benefits of becoming a Between the Covers supporter at the show’s Patreon page.
The post Victoria Chang : Dear Memory appeared first on Tin House.
Today’s guest, Mexican poet, painter, and translator Valerie Mejer Caso talks about her latest book, the bilingual publication of poetry, collage, and photography Edinburgh Notebook, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero for Action Books. What does it mean to write something both autobiographical and surreal, both dream-like and real? How can questions of selfhood and identity (the identity of nation, of language, of family) become uncanny? What does it mean to write with “shattered language” and how can one find words, images, and forms to capture grief, loss, and death? This only scratches the surface of this conversation with Valerie, one that ranges widely, from Freud’s dreams to Tarkovsky’s notion of time to Raúl Zurita’s thoughts on the relationship of poetry to mortality itself.
Today’s addition to the bonus audio archive is a long-form, in-depth conversation with the translator of Edinburgh Notebook, Michelle Gil-Montero. We talk about translating Valerie Mejer Caso’s work, about studying under poet-translators Forrest Gander and C.D. Wright, about her press Eulalia Books that seeks to translate poetry and hybrid works that are ex-centric and ecstatic and which trouble notions of nation, and about finding the right balance between her own writing, her translating, her teaching, and her editing. Near the end she reads some of her most recent poetry as well. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of becoming a supporter of Between the Covers head over to the show’s Patreon page.
The post Valerie Mejer Caso : Edinburgh Notebook appeared first on Tin House.
British poet, educator, and writer Raymond Antrobus has two poetry collections out this year. The US release of his award-winning debut The Perseverance and his follow-up, just out now, All The Names Given. We discuss both books in relation to Antrobus’ own particular deaf poetics. What questions do his poems raise about audience and accessibility, about the written, the heard, the signed, the performed? What questions do they raise about sound itself? We also discuss the intersection of deafness and race, and about holding a space for the tensions and contradictions when exploring, in one’s art, both sides of the Antrobus family tree, white, Black, Jamaican and British. All of this and much more.
As 2021 comes to a close, consider becoming a supporter of Between the Covers going into 2022. To find out all the potential benefits and rewards of doing so head over to the show’s Patreon page.
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Tice Cin’s debut novel Keeping the House is set within the Turkish Cypriot community of North London. But while it is also set within the heroin trade there, this book is not a crime novel, or if it is, it is like no crime novel you’ve read before. Keeping the House is a book, by Cin’s own description, for people who feel “glitched.” The book “glitches” between past and present, between prose and poetry, and between one language and another and back again. Keeping the House not only subverts the tropes of crime fiction, of hero narratives and the gender dynamics within them, but challenges us to be within a new form, to feel our way forward, carried by the rhythms of this newness on its own terms. Our conversation ranges widely, from glitching to cabbages, artificial intelligence to complex PTSD, sensitivity reads to chosen families, to what it means to keep the house, to find a home.
Tice Cin’s contribution to the bonus audio archive is a first for the show. She asked me to give her a writing prompt so that she could write something new especially for Between the Covers supporters. Having spent some time in North Cyprus myself, the place her family comes from, and given the food-centric formal shape of her novel, I came up with a prompt that is both Cyprus and food-specific and she wrote what could best be described as something that lingers between a poem and a song, one that will take your breath away. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and/or about the many other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of BTC head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.
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Today’s guest, poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop, is best known for her prose poetry and for good reason. Waldrop is one of the great prose poetry practitioners and innovators over the course of the last half century. We speak about her latest collection, The Nick of Time, through the lens of the themes, questions, and poetics that animate her work across the decades: her attraction to betweenness, to the gap between two things or between two words; her desire to distress the sentence and to what end; her aversion to metaphor and analogy; and her belief that it is in the silence, the not-said, the unrepresented, the nothingness that lies between two words, where creation and generation truly happens. We also explore her life as a translator, particularly in relation to the work of Egyptian Jewish writer Edmond Jabès, and the friendship they forged through their shared engagement with the mysteries of language (she translated fourteen of his books from French to English), and the questions this relationship raises about identity, both the self and the other.
For the bonus audio archive Waldrop reads from her translation of Jabès’ remarkable “Adam, or The Birth of Anxiety” from The Book of Shares. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits and rewards of becoming a supporter of the show (from rare collectibles to becoming an early reader for Tin House) head over to the Between the Covers Patreon page.
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