Little Atoms

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Kristen R. Ghodsee was travelling in Europe, and spent the summer of 1990 witnessing first-hand the initial hope and euphoria that followed the sudden and unexpected collapse of state socialism in the former Eastern Bloc. The political and economic chaos that followed inspired Ghodsee to pursue an academic career studying this upheaval, focusing on how ordinary people’s lives – and women’s particularly – changed when state socialism gave way to capitalism. For the last two decades, she has visited the region regularly and lived for over three years in Bulgaria and the Eastern parts of reunified Germany. Now a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she has won many awards for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has written six books on gender, socialism, and postsocialism, examining the everyday experiences of upheaval and displacement that continue to haunt the region to this day. Ghodsee also writes on women's issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education and is the co-author of Professor Mommy: Finding Work/Family Balance in Academia. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Eurozine, Aeon, Dissent, Foreign Affairs and The New York Times. Her latest book is Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Georgina Harding is the author of three previous novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game and, most recently, Painter of Silence, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. Her first book was a word of non-fiction, In Another Europe, recording a journey she made across Romania in 1988 during the worst times of the Ceausescu regime. It was followed by Tranquebar: A Season in South India, which documented the lives of the people in a small fishing village on the Coromandel coast. Her latest novel is Land of the Living. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simon Garfield is the author of seventeen acclaimed books of non-fiction including Timekeepers, A Notable Woman (as editor), To the Letter, On the Map, Just My Type and Mauve. His study of AIDS in Britain, The End of Innocence, won the Somerset Maugham prize. His latest book is In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. His latest book is the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Weymouth's work has been published by a wide variety of outlets including the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New Internationalist. His interest in the relationship between humans and the world around them has led him to write on issues of climate change and environmentalism, and most recently, to the Yukon river and the stories of the communities living on its banks. He lives on a 100-year-old Dutch barge on the River Lea in London. His first book, Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thea Lim’s novel An Ocean of Minutes is out now from Quercus/Hachette in the UK, Viking/Penguin Random House in Canada, and Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster in the US. Her writing has been published by the Paris Review, the Guardian, Salon, the National Post, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Millions, the Southampton Review, GRIST and others. She has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work, including artists’ grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Her novella The Same Woman was released by Invisible Publishing in 2007. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and she previously served as nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast. She grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto, where she is a professor of creative writing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To see in the New Year, here's a repeat of our Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh from August. Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For Christmas Day, here's a repeat of our interview from June 2018 with Adam Kay. Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and writer for TV and film, including Mitchell & Webb and Very British Problems. He previously worked as a junior doctor, detailing his funny and sad experiences in his first book This Is Going To Hurt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Frye is a professor and historian, whose research has taken him around the world and involved him in numerous archaeological digs since receiving his PhD from Duke University. He has published extensively in international academic journals. He is the author of Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood & Brick. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeff Jackson is the author of Mira Corpora, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Vice, and The Collagist, and five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award–winning Collapsable Giraffe theater company in New York City. His latest novel is Destroy All Monsters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.