When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? Acclaimed author of Out of Sheer Rage and “one of our greatest living critics” (New York) Geoff Dyer considers these questions in his newest book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, an extended meditation on late style and last works. Joining us virtually in conversation with Sam Lipsyte, Dyer gave us the span of his study and delved into the heart of its questions—what would John Coltrane’s music have become if he hadn’t passed so suddenly? Beethoven’s, if he had retained his hearing? Is it better to peak and eke out into oblivion, or better to go out on a high note? (Recorded May 18, 2022.) 

Greenlight welcomed celebrated Korean author and Man Asian Literary Prize winner Kyung-sook Shin (Please Look After Mom) and acclaimed translator Anton Hur, who called in live from Seoul, Korea to grace our virtual stage. Celebrating their joint achievement, Violets—written by Shin, translated by Hur, and published by Feminist Press—Hur both interviewed and translated for Ms. Shin, who led a contemplative, lyrical discussion regarding her process and aspirations for the book, traveling to farms in the middle of the night to get the smell of soil and flowers just right, and how “sadness becomes beauty the more you look at it, and beauty likewise becomes sadness the more you look at it.” (Recorded May 10, 2022.) 

When the unnamed narrator of Alyssa Songsiridej’s debut novel Little Rabbit first meets a choreographer at an artists' residency in Maine, it's not a match. But when they run into each other a few months later, their encounter sets off a summer of expanding her own body's boundaries—her body learns to obediently follow his, and his desires quickly become inextricable from her pleasure. This must be happiness, right? Songsiridej sticks a singular landing with this exhilarating and deeply unflinching look at desire, creativity, ambition, sex, and power. Songsiridej joined us for the launch in conversation with acclaimed author Julia Phillips (Disappearing Earth), where they discussed questions of craft, the writing of sexuality, and the recentering of female lust and creative ambition. (Recorded May 5, 2022.) 

Greenlight welcomed author Alejandro Varela to celebrate his debut novel, The Town of Babylon--named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed, Lambda Literary, and more. Varela probes the intertwining of community and self and renders an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity in this moving, politically engaged tale. Andrés, a gay, Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown to help his ailing father and ends up attending his 20 year high school reunion, which brings him back into contact with the many characters from his youth: his first love who is now married with children, his former best friend who is being institutionalized for mental illness, a man he thinks killed someone in high school in a homophobic rage who is now a minister, and more. In conversation with Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind), Varela discussed “public health fiction”, the distance between experience and fiction, the liberatory politics of queerness, and the basic desire to figure out “how one can stand to live in this world and enjoy it.” (Recorded May 4, 2022.)

As we continue to grapple with uncertainty in our world, how can writers and creators build community and make an imprint? Whose voices get heard and how can we use craft to shape a new blueprint for the future? MacArthur Fellow and author of The City We Became N. K. Jemisin joined us virtually for a night of discussion and community in support of The Octavia Project, which fosters spaces of imagination and exploration for NYC teens, using speculative fiction to envision new futures. In a lively conversation with next generation of writers from The Octavia Project, Jemisin discussed what it means to be a storyteller, the challenge of working on one’s craft as a marginalized person, and the importance and power of building community. (Recorded April 5, 2022.) 

Acclaimed, Whiting Award-winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity—climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss—in his second collection of poems, Best Barbarian. Roaming across the literary and social landscape, visiting with Beowulf’s Grendel and the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, reckoning with immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man, Reeves’s formally elegant and daring poems ask urgently “Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another’s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled?” Reeves joined us virtually in conversation with fellow poet and old friend A. Van Jordan (Rise) for a positively bibliographic conversation covering craft, grief, jazz, theory, and time as a structure—a visionary meeting of minds. (Recorded March 29, 2022.) 

The Greenlight Bookstore Podcast kicks off its third season—though we remain far from the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re out of quarantine! One of our first successes in this new age of author events was the standing-room-only launch for Elaine Hsieh Chou’s acclaimed debut, Disorientation—an uproarious and bighearted story of a Taiwanese American woman’s coming-of-consciousness that ignites chaos on a college campus. Chou was joined by author and critic Larissa Pham (Pop Song) for a sharp, searching, and sincere discussion of the politics of Asian-American solidarity and the perils of contemporary dating. Despite some technical difficulties, this golden conversation was a triumphant return to our beloved and well-missed in-store events programming—we're so glad to be back! (Recorded March 24, 2022.) 

We bid farewell to our “Quarantine Season” of podcasts as we navigate our way back to in-person author events at Greenlight Bookstore! For our virtual season’s swan song, we reprise award-winning poet Yanyi’s virtual launch event for DREAM OF THE DIVIDED FIELD, a collection on heartbreak and transitions, written with a piercing lyric ferocity. How can we carry our homes with us? Informed by Yanyi’s experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, these poems explore the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. Acclaimed poet Sandra Lim (THE CURIOUS THING) joined Yanyi in a generous conversation that telescoped through questions of astrology, craft, the importance of journaling, and the chorus of influences that sing through one poet’s voice. (Recorded March 17, 2022.)

In a virtual event co-presented with our friends at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA, award-winning author NoViolet Bulawayo joined us to launch GLORY, her “manifoldly clever, brilliant... satire with sharper teeth” (The NYT Book Review). Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup in November 2017 of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president of nearly four decades, GLORY shows a country's imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices that unveil the ruthlessness required to uphold the illusion of absolute power and the imagination and bulletproof optimism to overthrow it completely. Bulawayo was joined by fellow acclaimed Zimbabwean author Novuyo Tshuma (House of Stone) for a reading and heartening discussion of the power of allegory, the importance of “reading dangerously”, and their vital belief that “a better Zimbabwe is possible”. (Recorded March 9, 2022.)

Celebrated New Yorker staff writer and author Rebecca Mead joined us virtually from across the pond to discuss her topical new memoir, Home/Land--a moving reflection on the complicated nature of home and homeland, and the heartache and adventure of leaving an adopted country in order to return to your native land. In conversation with fellow New Yorker staff writer and author of Trick Mirror Jia Tolentino, Mead lead us through a reading focused on the architectural idea of “historical movement”--the sinking and cracking of buildings as a city ages—and a conversation that wound through the privilege and pitfalls of moving one's home and the relationship between geography and the character of places. (Recorded March 3, 2022)