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

Poet Monica Youn discusses writing from a poetics of difference, exploring anti-Asian violence in the US, Greek mythology, and racial triangulation. The conversation delves into the complexities of identity, home, and community interconnectedness in her latest poetry collection 'From From'.

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 poetry collection, Pink Waves, is a perfect example of this, poetry written within a durational performance, one that involves “microtranslations” of the syntax of the works of others. As Fred Moten says about Pink Waves: “In a deliberate lyricism of regathering, tethering, and receding precedence, in a perpetual canon that keeps spilling and sifting and replenishing what feels like dancing, in a series of breaks weaving wave and snap into writing that listens, Sawako Nakayasu takes the measure of the enjoyment we derive from sensing and making sense of this wasteland of bandwidth and access. Pink Waves is a delicate instrument. Its spare beauty picks up everything.” Much of Sawako Nakayasu’s genre-transgressive work calls into question our notions of originality and selfhood, as she herself explores questions of race and gender and sexual orientation within her poems. By bringing together these various elements, Sawako Nakayasu creates generative questions: How can queer theory speak to translation practices? How can we engage with questions of power between nations and languages and cultures by the choices we make in translation? What does performance tell us about ourselves, and the notion of a self to begin with? And how do these performative and translational activities manifest in poetry, in poems? If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Each patron receives a resource-rich email with each episode and can participate in the collective brainstorm of who to invite in the future, and choose from a wealth of other rewards and gifts from rare collectibles to writing consultations.  There is also the possibility of subscribing to the bonus audio archive which includes contributions from such luminary poets as Rosmarie Waldrop, Forrest Gander, Dionne Brand, Natalie Diaz, Nikky Finney, Arthur Sze, Layli Long Soldier, and many more. Check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. And don’t miss today’s Bookshop!   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 outside of language but with language, poems that look at how artists look when making art. But more principally Bluest Nude is engaged with looking at how the Black female figure has been (mis)represented in art and asking how a Black female poet can write a poetry that claims a sovereign point of view, that reclaims a Black female subjectivity much as Lorraine O’Grady and Simone Leigh, two of the artists she engages with in her collection, have done in their own work in performance and visual art. These questions of how we see and how we are seen, both by others and by ourselves, call into question notions of selfhood, and the mysteries of how we construct a self, something that only happens in engagement with others, how they see us, how we see them seeing us. For the bonus audio archive Ama Codjoe presents us with three different strategies to write ekphrastic poetry, poetry that engages with visual art. And much like Dionne Brand did when she contributed readings of forthcoming work from 2023 books by Canisia Lubrin and Christina Sharpe, Ama first reads and discusses a poem by Evie Shockley from her forthcoming collection suddenly we, then she reads one of her own poems, and finally she ends with a long poem by Terrance Hayes from his forthcoming collection So to Speak. 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 to check it all out. Here is the Bookshop for today’s episode. 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 can both honor, connect, and reflect something true, or reduce, dismiss, and cause harm speak to deep questions about both language and identity. These are topics Bellot explores in her own writing, both about others—from Edward Gorey to Neil Gaiman, James Baldwin to J.K. Rowling—as well as about her own identity as a multiracial transgender writer from the Commonwealth of Dominica. We take Le Guin’s interest in class, gender, and race down to the level of the sentence and look at the many different ways she has explored names and naming across novels and stories as a means within language to both address the world and listen to it, to both hear the world and speak a new world into being. Today’s episode of Crafting with Ursula might be most in conversation with the first episode of the series with Becky Chambers, on creating aliens and alien cultures. For one, we return again to explore the world of The Left Hand of Darkness, but we also return to vital questions, as writers, and simply as people, around the importance of how we describe “the other,” “the stranger,” the person or being who we feel is not like ourselves, and what that description, what the names and words we choose, say about us. If you enjoy today’s conversation, and Crafting with Ursula more generally, consider joining the community of listener-supporters. You can check out all the many potential benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.  Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode.     The post Crafting with Ursula : Gabrielle Bellot on The Power of Names & Naming appeared first on Tin House.