Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

Abdellah Taïa, a Moroccan novelist and filmmaker, discusses A Country for Dying and the fractured lives behind it. He explores immigrant exploitation in Paris, queer and Muslim identity, childhood trauma, djinns and possession, and women’s sorcery as resistance. He also reflects on Isabelle Adjani, colonial memory, morally complex characters, and reshaping French into a language of revenge.

National Book Award winners Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-Canadian-American novelist and journalist, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, a Palestinian-American poet and translator, explore writing amid genocide. They discuss audience, witnessing, complicity, literary erasure, silence as resistance, breaking craft conventions, and the risks of making art against the political current.

Lidia Yuknavitch, acclaimed writer and educator behind The Chronology of Water, joins David Naimon for a lively celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin. They explore Le Guin’s craft, the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, fantasy’s political power, poetry, ecology, and her willingness to publicly revise her thinking on gender, feminism, and her own work. A thoughtful conversation about artistic courage, literary community, and staying open to change.

Layli Long Soldier, an Oglala Lakota poet and visual artist, returns to discuss We and Wé, exploring belonging, kinship, and the invitations hidden in language. She considers poems as living relatives, collaborative art as prayer, and silence as a form of communication. The conversation also confronts blood quantum, residential-school grief, treaty language, stolen land, and poetry’s power to challenge colonial authority.

Today’s unforgettable archival conversation with Elvia Wilk was recorded in-person in 2019 on the occasion of the release of her debut novel Oval. Wilk takes questions of self and other, nature and culture, human and non-human into the dystopic near-future and into the realm of both philosophy and narrative. We discuss her writings outside of the novel about weird fiction, the literary movement called The New Weird, and how she herself often writes about weird (but real) endeavors that blur the natural and the artificial or that flip our preconceptions on our head. From exploitation and exclusion in the art world to global climate apocalypse, Wilk’s weird fiction makes us see the world frightfully anew. As McKenzie Wark says, “J. G. Ballard meets William Gibson meets Jeff VanderMeer. Oval is an up-to-the-minute story about the twilight zones of corporate design, aesthetics, pharmacy, and bioengineering, where there’s nothing consultants won’t break in the quest for ‘innovation.’ What could possibly go wrong? Find out in Elvia Wilk’s crisp and stylish debut book.” For the bonus audio, Elvia contributed a reading of the first half of a speech she delivered at an ecology symposium, her talk called “Death by Landscape.” This joins an ever-growing archive of contributions from past guests—of readings, translator conversations, craft talks, music, soundscapes and more. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus material and about the 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, for your book shopping needs don’t miss Milkweed Editions Bookshop bookstore.

Today’s archival episode with Marlon James was recorded in 2019 at the studios of KBOO community radio. Marlon’s latest book The Disappearers has garnered the most talked about book review of this year, from the New York Times book critic Dwight Garner (who isn’t known to gush). Not only did he say it should be talked about alongside Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Garner also called it one of the signal reading experiences of his adult life, a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century so far. The book we discussed seven years ago now, was James’ move into fantasy and myth, a novel that won the 2020 Locus Award for Best Horror, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. The science fiction and fantasy author and critic Amal El-Mohtar, perplexed by all the comparisons of it to George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien suggested at the time that it was more as if Toni Morrison had written Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Painful and strange, full of bodies shifting from personhood into meat, and somehow, always, still, upsettingly beautiful. This isn’t Tolkien’s grief-stricken melancholy, or Martin’s calculating, character-forward plot mechanics; it’s horror and tragedy by way of fantasy, nothing discrete, everything penetrating everything else. Reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf was like being slowly eaten by a bear, one inviting me to feel every pressure of tooth and claw tearing into me, asking me to contemplate the intimacy of violation and occasionally cracking a joke.” For the bonus audio archive Marlon reads his essay “Why I’m Done Talking About Diversity (or, Why We Should Try an All-White Diversity Panel).” We also added his 2015 Tin House Summer Writing Workshop craft lecture “The 9 and 1/2 Rules of Seduction” to the archive. These join many contributions from past guests including Ted Chiang, China Miéville, N.K. Jemisin, Joe Sacco, Naomi Klein, Carl Phillips, Dionne Brand and many others. To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio, as well as about all the 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, for your book shopping needs, don’t miss Milkweed Editions bookstore on BookShop.

China Miéville, the British author behind The City & The City and Perdido Street Station, discusses The Rouse, his 21-year literary undertaking. They explore domestic realism giving way to supernatural rupture, fractured language, consciousness, Marxism beyond materialism, spiritualism on the left, political collapse, and the strange mysteries that resist explanation.

Today’s conversation between Thalia Field and David Naimon, moderated by Anne de Marcken, was recorded in February as part of the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Visual Arts low residency MFA program. Thalia and David discuss and explore their pieces within the anthology Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation, where each writer was given a scientific study to engage with and create art in relation to. As a result, side-blotched lizards, boreal toads and the green cutthroat trout all help make up the cross-species chorus of today’s conversation, one that isn’t just about making art in relation to science, but also about interrogating, through art-making, the assumptions baked into the scientific frame, and using art to reveal the unexamined stories hidden within that frame. Looking at other non-normative modes of scientific inquiry, ones where the line isn’t so bright between art and science, nor the subjective and the so-called objective, Thalia, David and Anne explore the various possibilities and pitfalls for art-makers and writers when engaging with the more-than-human world. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BTC BookShop specific to today’s episode. And don’t miss Milkweed Editions own BookShop bookstore as well.

Hajjar Baban is a Kurdish-American poet and co-founder of the Kurdish Poets Collective. She discusses her acclaimed debut, Low Flying Planes, and the lineages shaping her work, from Shirko Bekas to Paul Celan. The conversation explores silence, mistranslation, linguistic inheritance, Kurdish identity, opacity, refusal, rocks as memory, and poetry’s power to hold absence.

Today’s conversation with poet Morgan Parker was recorded in-person in 2019 and was Morgan’s second appearance on the show. Both conversations with Morgan are unforgettable, so don’t miss her first appearance in 2017 after you enjoy today’s episode about Magical Negro. Later that same year Magical Negro won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Danez Smith, another past guest of this show, said this about it: “2019 justly belongs to Morgan Parker. Her poems shred me with their intelligence, dark humor and black-hearted vision. Parker is one of this generation’s best minds, able to hold herself and her world, which includes all of us, up to impossible lights, revealing every last bit of our hopes, failings, possibilities and raptures.” For the bonus audio archive Morgan contributed a reading from her YA novel Who Put this Song on? which joins contributions from Kaveh Akbar, Tommy Pico, Dionne Brand, Nikky Finney, Natalie Diaz and more. To find out about how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and all the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. And don’t miss Milkweed Editions bookstore BookShop for even more books to explore.