David Naimon

speaker

4,074 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 24 Aug

David Naimon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry · Valeria Luiselli : Beginning Middle End · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

I love that. podcast-host

Well, one of the things I love about your books is podcast-host

how the writer's process and materials enter the narrative the itself. podcast-host

For instance in Lost Children Archive, the seven boxes in the back of the car that uh the family is road tripping in, different boxes assigned to different family members for either the research materials they want to bring along or as receptacles for things they discover along the way. podcast-host

so that the mother can, during an insomnia in a random motel, wander out to the car at night, secretly looking through her soon to be ex husband's boxes, discover what books he brought with him, bring one back to her bed, and that narrative from that book then enters the narrative of your book. podcast-host

And similarly, as mother and daughter inhabit the main character's lover's apartment without him present, they engage with his Loeb Classical Library, which is a series of bilingual books, either in ancient Greek or ancient Latin, with the green books in Greek and the red in Latin, and with the English translations on the facing pages. podcast-host

Unlike the lover, who mainly apparently wants to just display them, the daughter wants to read them, and they end up stealing some of them to take on their quest when they flee this apartment. podcast-host

Because of this, the thoughts of ancient philosophers become a certain substrata of this book. podcast-host

And you, like me, studied philosophy as an undergraduate in university, and I imagine this might have been an opportunity for you to revisit some of these texts decades later. podcast-host

But either way, you've also said in interviews that you now teach a class that centers the pre-Socratic philosophers. podcast-host

So I'd like to. podcast-host

to hear anything that comes to mind about your interest in them, why they figure so prominently in the book, and maybe a favorite philosophical idea or or philosopher from antiquity that you'd wanna um podcast-host

share w with listeners today. podcast-host

I love that both Pliny and Empedocles die by volcano. podcast-host

And also how you say it's the tourist view of Odysseus that he's the greatest hero. podcast-host

You've mentioned this already today, and not uh the greatest hero of civilization and not a trafficker of female sex slaves. podcast-host

And that you also throw your lot in with Polyphemus, the Cyclops. podcast-host

And I do the same when I talked with Omar El Akkad about the ancient origins of the West's othering of people outside of its borders. podcast-host

And this inversion makes me think of how you continually point out the hypocrisy of Europe today, the Italy for Italians people, when so many Europeans were themselves refugees. podcast-host

The grandmother in this book ends up in Mexico from Sicily to escape famine. podcast-host

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