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

“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.

“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

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

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.

We seem to be in the midst of an upsurge in dystopian art and end times anxieties. If we as a culture don’t have a sense of impending doom, we do at least have trouble imagining the future being bright and promising. Today’s guest Lucy Corin is here on Between The Covers to talk about her new book from McSweeney’s, A Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses. A book playful both in form and content, Corin’s new book looks at this cultural moment from every perspective imaginable. Lucy Corin is the author of the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History of Girls and the short story collection The Entire Predicament from Tin House Books. She is the program director of the creative writing program at UC Davis and the winner of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize who described her writing as follows: “Lucy Corin sounds like no one; prickly, shrewd, faintly paranoid or furtive, witty and also savage, she has something of Paley’s gift for soliloquy combined with Dickinson’s passionate need to hold the world at bay, that sense of a voice emanating from a Skinner box. Her achievement is already dazzling, her promise immense.”

Jonathan Lethem is a man of many lives. For one, because of his repeated return to New York as both setting and muse in novels such as Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City, he may be New York’s closest thing to having a bard. But Lethem is known as well for his genre fiction, his hard-boiled detective and science fiction books, his revival of the Marvel comic Omega the Unknown, and for editing the Library of America’s four-volume edition of Philip K. Dick’s novels. Yet another side of Jonathan Lethem is that of essayist on music and culture, with books about John Carpenter, the New York Mets, and the Talking Heads, with his remarkable Rolling Stone interview of Bob Dylan, and a profile of James Brown that the New York Times says “stands as the best writing ever about the greatest musician of the post-World War II era.” Given all of these accomplishments, it is no small thing that many call Lethem’s latest novel, Dissident Gardens, his best. Spanning three generations and eighty years, from the Jewish communists of Queens in the 1930s, to the folk revivalists of Greenwich Village in the 60s, to the modern-day Occupy movement, Dissident Gardens is both an intimate and epic portrayal of the American Left, of American Jews in the twentieth century, and of one family’s quest for transformation and self-reinvention one generation to the next.

“When most of us think of today’s great American novel, we think of Franzen’s Freedom or Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—sprawling stories that comment on contemporary society as we live it. Tumbledown, Robert Boswell’s latest, is just such a book—and one you’ll stay up until 3 AM reading. Over the course of a few weeks, James Candler, a 30-something therapist, is about to lose everything including his job at the treatment center, his fiancée, and his underwater house in the suburbs. Whether he actually loses it all becomes less important as the lives of his teenage patients intertwine with his . . . This look at life inside a for-profit mental health facility will make you laugh out loud, then sucker-punch you straight to sorrow . . . Boswell is a writer who can see the humanity, and yes, even beauty, in just about anything, including a lone man sitting at a late-night diner, holding ‘a frosted doughnut to his nose as if it were a flower.'”—Leigh Newman, “Oprah Book of the Week” review

For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart for one reason: Edie’s enormous girth. She’s obsessed with food–thinking about it, eating it—and if she doesn’t stop, she won’t have much longer to live. With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.

Matt Bell’s novel is so unlike anything else you’ll read this year that people are struggling to describe just what it is. The Washington Post says it’s like a magical realist story chanted by druids on mushrooms, The Stranger says it feels like a Tolkein epic set inside Plato’s cave and told by Carl Jung, others mention Calvino, Borges, Kafka, and the Bible. Earlier this year Flavorwire called Matt Bell one of the 10 best millennial writers you haven’t read (yet) and NPR called Bell’s book, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, one of the smartest meditations on love, family, and marriage in recent years.

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, NoViolet Bulawayo earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was the recipient of the Truman Capote fellowship. In 2011 she won the biggest literary prize in Africa, the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Hitting Budapest,” first published in the Boston Review. Bulawayo talks with Between The Covers host, David Naimon, about her debut novel, We Need New Names, a powerful story of emigration and immigration during Zimbabwe’s Lost Decade.