fiction/non/fiction

Poet and memoirist Reginald Dwayne Betts and novelist Zachary Lazar join V.V Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell for the first of two special episodes on the effects of mass incarceration on American communities and democracy. Betts, a poet, memoirist and lawyer who was incarcerated as a young man, talks about writing in different genres, as well as the experience of having friends and colleagues write about his character to support his application to the bar and our collective impulse to be punitive. Lazar discusses his recent novel, Vengeance, which is set at Angola, the maximum-security Louisiana state penitentiary where inmates work on a farm that used to be a plantation.  Readings: • Bastards of the Reagan Era, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, and A Question of Freedom, by Reginald Dwayne Betts • [“Prison,”](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/prison) by Reginald Dwayne Betts • [“For the City That Nearly Broke Me,”](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/city-nearly-broke-me) by Reginald Dwayne Betts • [“Feeling Fucked Up: The Architecture of Anger”](https://aprweb.org/poems/feeling-fucked-up-the-architecture-of-anger) by Reginald Dwayne Betts • Vengeance, by Zachary Lazar • Crush, by Richard Sitken • The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander • [“For Freckle-Faced Gerald,”](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51369/for-freckle-faced-gerald) by Etheridge Knight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, socialism has been on the rise—or was it ever really gone? In episode 17, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell talk to Dana Goldstein of The New York Times about what it’s like to cover teacher walkouts and strikes today, and how today’s actions compare to those she wrote about in her bestselling book, The Teacher Wars, which covers the history of teaching in America. Later in the show, Thomas Frank of Listen, Liberal fame gives us a sneak preview of the final essay in his forthcoming collection. He discusses the state of socialism, the failures of the Democratic Party, and which fiction writers have most successfully taken socialism on as their material.   Readings: • The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein • Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank • Rendezvous With Oblivion by Thomas Frank (forthcoming) • Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, by Studs Terkel • “[25-Year-Old Textbooks and Holes in the Ceiling: Inside America’s Public Schools,](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/reader-center/us-public-schools-conditions.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Freader-center&action=click&contentCollection=reader-center®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront)” by Josephine Sedgwick • The U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos • Native Son by Richard Wright • Such Sweet Thunder by Vincent O. Carter • Bottom Dogs by Edward Dahlberg • Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward • The Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Was this episode our destiny? In episode 16, Jess Row and Meghan O’Rourke talk fate and fortune with V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell. Jess Row speaks first about race and fate, his novel Your Face in Mine, and his upcoming essay collection, White Flights. Then Meghan O’Rourke talks about how she saw her poem “My Life as a Subject” back when she wrote it, and how she understands it now, as well as her writing about the #MeToo movement and about illness. What are we responsible for, and what can we change? Readings: Your Face in Mine by Jess Row • "[Native Sons](https://www.guernicamag.com/jess-row-native-sons/)," by Jess Row, from Guernica • “Elbow Room,” by James Alan McPherson • "[Election Night,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHG0ezLiVGc)" from Saturday Night Live • "[The Gifts of Black Folk in the Age of Terrorism,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrxavMcGTW8)" by Cornel West • “[My Life as a Subject](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=192&issue=3&page=23),” and “[Idiopathic Illness](https://lithub.com/idiopathic-illness-a-new-poem-by-meghan-orourke),” by Meghan O’Rourke, from Sun in Days • “[When the Fog Lifts](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/magazine/the-reckoning-women-and-power-in-the-workplace.html),” by Meghan O’Rourke, from The New York Times Magazine • [The Story Behind The Song: Killing Moon by Echo & The Bunnymen](https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-story-behind-the-song-the-killing-moon-by-echo-the-bunnymen-1) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In episode 15, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell ask who’s funny in the age of Trump, and how they’re managing to pull it off. They talk to Sloane Crosley, author of the new essay collection, Look Alive Out There, about the humor of the everyday and the freedom and subversiveness of not writing about the president. The also speak to Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post’s ComPost column, whose column features humorous takes on political news ranging from James Comey’s book release to Chris Christie’s screaming eyes. Readings: • Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley • A Field Guide to Awkward Silences and the ComPost blog, by Alexandra Petri, including [“Further excerpts from James Comey’s book, if the existing ones are anything to go on](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2018/04/13/further-excerpts-from-james-comeys-book-if-the-existing-ones-are-anything-to-go-on/?utm_term=.0d4b0ee949c3)" • Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell • My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber • Sylvia Plath, [“Tulips”](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49013/tulips-56d22ab68fdd0) • The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations • [“The Clouds](http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/clouds.html)," by Aristophanes • [“The Personal Essay Boom is Over,”](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over) by Jia Tolentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In episode 14, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell examine the omnipresent American comfort narrative of mystery and crime fiction. Why do we love crime stories so much? How do they shape the way that we think about a whole host of real-world issues from the Mueller investigation to Black Lives Matter and the shootings of young black men by police? They are joined for this discussion by Mat Johnson, author of the novels Loving Day, Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the graphic novels Incognegro and Dark Rain. Readings: •    Incognegro by Mat Johnson, and its new miniprequels •    Superman II, Superman III (film) •    The Untouchables (film) •    The Road To Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder •    The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler •    Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky •    CrimeReads.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this month, mob attacks on Sri Lanka’s minority Muslim community prompted a state of emergency in that country, and a temporary ban on Facebook and other social media applications. In Episode 13, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell speak to Meera Srinivasan, The Hindu’s Sri Lanka correspondent, about her reporting on those incidents and the rise of Sinhala Buddhist hardliners in Sri Lanka, as well as the parallels she sees between that situation and the rise of populism in the U.S., Europe, India, and other parts of Asia. Writer Bill Lychack, a frequent visitor to Myanmar, joins the show to talk about what draws him to the country and how he views Aung San Suu Kyi in light of the nation’s treatment of its beleaguered Rohingya minority. Readings: "Letter from Burma: Captives of the Junta" by Bill Lychack in The American Scholar  Love Marriage, by V.V. Ganeshananthan  “It was not a Sinhala-Muslim clash, it was a mob attack on Muslims: Sri Lanka Minister Rauff Hakeem,” the Wednesday Interview by Meera Srinivasan, The Hindu “Banning Social Media Won’t Stop Hate Speech,” by Rohan Samarajiva in The New York Times Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In mid-February, seventeen students and adults were shot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In the aftermath, surviving students have led a powerful campaign for gun control. In episode 12, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell bring you two authors—and a pile of books—that have covered the territory of school shootings, activism, and coming of age. First, Jim Shepard discusses his 2004 novel Project X, which is told from the POV of an eighth-grader who decides to commit a Columbine-style shooting. Shepard offers his thoughts on empathy, alienation, and how schools tend to treat their outcasts. Then Danielle Evans shares her read on the students activists in the #neveragain movement and the longstanding literary trope of child narrators who outwit adults. Adolescent anger and activism play out in Evans's story "Robert E. Lee is Dead," set in a high school in the south; she also points us to Edward P. Jones’s story “The First Day” for a particularly poignant phrasing of the transition of adolescence. Readings: Project X by Jim Shepard (2004); "Robert E. Lee is Dead" by Danielle Evans, from the collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2011); "The First Day" by Edward P. Jones, from the collection Lost in the City (2004); The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In episode 11, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell offer a very Lit Hub take on Academy Awards season. What’s the process really like when a book becomes a movie? How does Hollywood decide which books will work best for the big screen? For answers, they talk to production and development executive Christina Sibul, who worked on the Academy Award nominated book adaptations The House of Sand and Fog (2003) and Sideways (2004). Then author Jeff VanderMeer joins the show, fresh back from the L.A. premiere of Annihilation, a brand new Paramount Pictures film based on the first novel of Jeff’s bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy. Jeff will give us the inside scoop on his techniques for freaking out readers, how director Alex Garland translated Annihilation’s monsters to the big screen, and how to dress for the red carpet if you’re an author. BONUS: Sugi casts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast movie adaptation! Readings: Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer (2014); The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (1999); Sideways by Rex Pickett (2004) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recently, the Polish Senate passed a law that would criminalize any suggestions of complicity by the Polish state in Nazi war crimes, including the Holocaust. In episode 10, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell talk to the novelist Steve Yarbrough about the nationalist Law and Justice party, which is behind the ban—and how their authoritarian tactics mirror those of the Trump Administration. Yarbrough's new novel, The Unmade World, is set in contemporary Poland and America. Then we talk to the novelist Eileen Pollack about Charlottesville, the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and how her 2012 novel, Breaking and Entering, anticipated the rise of the alt-Right. Readings: The Unmade World, by Steve Yarbrough (2018); The Party That Wants to Make Poland Great Again, by James Traub, New York Times Magazine, Nov. 2 2016; 'Orgy of Murder': The Poles who 'Hunted" Jews and Turned Them Over to the Nazis, by Ofer Aderet, Haaretz, Feb. 11, 2017; Breaking and Entering, by Eileen Pollack (2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For episode 9, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell talk with Ron Charles, editor of The Washington Post Book World and Shanthi Sekaran, author of Lucky Boy, about obscenity, literature, and immigration. In the first half of the show, Charles leads us through the famous 1933 obscenity trial involving James Joyce's Ulysses and the 1964 trial involving Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Then Shanthi Sekaran talks to us about Trump's infamous shithole comments, his immigration policy, and how she believes the language surrounding immigration—"ICE," "illegal alien"—is more profane than any curse word. Plus: Whitney reads the dirtiest passage he can find in Ulysses and embarrasses his mother. Readings: Ulysses by James Joyce; Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller; The Awakening by Kate Chopin; Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran. In the Stacks features Anthony Stromoski of Rough Draft Bar and Books in Kingston, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices