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

An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce. It is the story of a willful woman attempting to find her way back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places. An Untamed State establishes Roxane Gay as a writer of prodigious, arresting talent. “Once you start this book, you will not be able to put it down. An Untamed State is a novel of hope intermingled with fear, a book about possibilities mixed with horror and despair. It is written at a pace that will match your racing heart, and while you find yourself shocked, amazed, devastated, you also dare to hope for the best, for all involved.”—Edwidge Danticat The post Roxane Gay : An Untamed State appeared first on Tin House.

There is a long, if lesser known, history of fictions (and fictive illustrations) that invite reader participation, where the reader co-creates the story with the authors. These stories often utilize an element of chance and/or suggest multiple possible ways a text can be read. Leni Zumas and Luca Dipierro, the co-creators of A Wooden Leg: A Novel in 64 Cards, discuss A Wooden Leg in light of these traditions. Leni Zumas is a professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Portland State University and the author of the short story collection Farewell Navigator, as well as the novel The Listeners, a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award. Luca Dipierro is an animator and illustrator whose work appears regularly on record and book covers and in animated films. Dipierro is also the author of the art zine Das Ding and the book of fictions Biscotti Neri. The post Leni Zumas & Luca Dipierro : A Wooden Leg appeared first on Tin House.

Harper’s Magazine may have said it best when describing today’s guest, Lorrie Moore: “Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore.” Over the course of the past thirty years Lorrie Moore, has earned a place among the best and most beloved of American writers. The author of 4 collections of short stories and 3 novels, Moore’s work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, has won the O Henry Prize, and been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize. A longstanding faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lorrie Moore has recently become the Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. In addition to her fiction, she is a frequent essayist on popular culture for the New York Review of Books. She is here today on Between The Covers to talk about her latest story collection “Bark,” a collection the New York Times declares “will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.” The post Lorrie Moore : Bark appeared first on Tin House.

The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout the untamable turbulence of their worlds. In a masterful blend of fiction, autobiography, and surrealism, Kyle Minor shows us that the space between fearlessness and terror is often very small. Long before Praying Drunk reaches its plaintive, pitch-perfect end, Minor establishes himself again and again as one of the most talented younger writers in America. “I finished this book with my heart pounding and grateful, my coffee cold and my smile wide and crying like a baby.”—Daniel Handler The post Kyle Minor : Praying Drunk appeared first on Tin House.

In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold. Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.   The post Helen Oyeyemi : Boy, Snow, Bird appeared first on Tin House.

The friendship between Mary and Nix has endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women reunite for a summer vacation in Greece. It’s a trip instigated by Nix, who has just learned that Mary has been diagnosed with a disease that will inevitably cut her life short. Nix, a free spirit by nature, is determined that Mary have the vacation of a lifetime, but by the time their visit to Greece is over, the ties between them have unraveled, and when they said goodbye, it’s for the last time. Gina Frangello is the author of three books of fiction: A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), which was a book club selection for Nylon Magazine, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown; Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010), which was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006). The post Gina Frangello: A Life In Men appeared first on Tin House.

“The most striking dystopian novels sound an alarm, focus our attention and even change the language. The Handmaid’s Tale crystallized our fears about reproductive control; Fahrenheit 451 still flames discussions of censorship; and 1984 is the lens through which we watch the Obama administration watching us. Chang-rae Lee’s unsettling new novel, On Such a Full Sea, arrives from that same frightening realm of total oversight and pinched individuality . . . A brilliant, deeply unnerving portrait.”—The Washington Post Selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Chang-rae Lee is also the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A Gesture Life,  Aloft, and The Surrendered, and teaches fiction at Princeton University. The post Chang-rae Lee : On Such A Full Sea appeared first on Tin House.

“Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Unputdownable in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody’s desperate need for a tribe. Readers who’ve fallen for Shteyngart’s antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it’s laden and leavened with a deep, consequential psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date.”—Mary Karr The post Gary Shteyngart : Little Failure appeared first on Tin House.

Told by six women in one family, Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s The Sad Passions captures the alertness, beauty, and terror of childhood lived in proximity to madness. Set against the backdrop of a colonial past, spanning three generations, and shuttling from Mexico City to Oaxaca to the North Fork of Long Island to Veracruz, The Sad Passions is the lyrical story of a middle-class Mexican family torn apart by the undiagnosed mental illness of Claudia, a lost child of the 1960s and the mother of four little girls. “The Sad Passions explodes the tired assumption that women’s interiority is intrinsically domestic, fanning out women’s inner lives like the vibrant sections of a peacock’s tail. It upends our expectations of a novel about women’s family life. The cumulative effect of Gonzalez Peña’s novel is that of a hall of mirrors: an intimate, personal hall of mirrors, a psychic hall of mirrors. This, she tells us, is where women live, how women live, in the company of past selves, future selves, in the anguished haunting of possible selves. This is where women’s lives happen, in the space in between memory and present, in the split-second recognition of one’s reflection, before turning from the glass and going out into the world.”—Los Angeles Review of Books The post Veronica Gonzalez Peña : The Sad Passions appeared first on Tin House.

There may be no author more integral to the Portland literary scene than Kevin Sampsell. Kevin is not only the small press curator and events coordinator at Powell’s books, but he’s also the editor of the Portland Noir fiction anthology, curated this year’s Wordstock literary festival, was in charge of LitHopPDX, Portland’s inaugural literary bar crawl, and is the publisher of the micro-press Future Tense Books. His own books include the collections Beautiful Blemish and Creamy Bullets, and his memoir A Common Pornography.  His work has appeared in Tin House, Salon, McSweeney’s, Best Sex Writing 2012 and Best American Essays 2013, and he is here today on Between The Covers to talk about his novel, This is Between Us. The post Kevin Sampsell : This Is Between Us appeared first on Tin House.