Little Atoms

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.

This week Padraig Reidy talks to Paul Ewen. Paul Ewen is a New Zealand writer based in south London. His work has appeared in the British Council's New Writing anthology, the Guardian, the TES, Tank, and Five Dials. Paul's first novel, Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2014. It went on to appear on numerous Books Of The Year lists, won a Society of Authors McKitterick Prize, and was described as "inspired" by the Sunday Times, whose reviewer also called it "a brilliant, deranged new comic creation... the funniest book I've read in years." Paul is now the author of Francis Plug: Writer in Residence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

R. O. Kwon is the author of the novel The Incendiaries. Her writing is published in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Time, Noon, Electric Literature, Playboy, and elsewhere. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Omi International, the Steinbeck Center, and the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony. Born in South Korea, she has lived most of her life in the United States.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas Page McBee was ‘masculinity expert’ for Vice and the first trans man ever to box at Madison Square Garden. His essays and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, Glamour and Salon. He is the author of Man Alive, and most recently Amateur: A True Story About What Makes A Man. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and sixteen other novels including Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University. His latest novel is Paris in the Dark. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Skinner is a novelist, poet and critic. His most recent book, The Mirror, was described as ‘beautifully written . . . immersive . . . captivating’ by the Guardian. As Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy, he created the flagship ‘Writing a Novel’ six-month course in 2009 and since then has helped hundreds of writers find their voice. He is also the author of Writing a Novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rose George is the author of A Life Removed: Hunting for Refuge in the Modern World, and The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste, which was judged one of the best books of 2008 by the Economist, and one of the top ten science books of the same year by the American Library Association, and Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that brings you Ninety Percent of Everything, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week, and won the Mountbatten Literature Award by the British Maritime Foundation. Rose writes frequently for the Guardian, the New Statesman and many others, and her two TED talks, on sanitation and seafaring, have had 3 million views. Her latest book in Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.