Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry
Episodes
Mitchell S. Jackson : Survival Math
18 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“A vibrant memoir of race, violence, family, and manhood . . . Jackson recognizes there is too much for one conventional form, and his various story...
Marlon James : Black Leopard, Red Wolf
01 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which beco...
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Sketchtasy
12 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“Sycamore paints an unsparing and unsentimental portrait of survival in a homophobic era, and her writing is beyond beautiful. Sketchtasy is a power...
Alicia Jo Rabins : Fruit Geode
01 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“How does a body do what it does: make love, mistakes, create life, exist after life; how does a body evolve, celebrate, regret, reconsider its big ...
Genevieve Hudson : Pretend We Live Here
13 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“A terrific collection of stories. There are echoes here of Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, and Denis Johnson, but Genevieve Hudson is her own wr...
Jeffrey Yang : Hey Marfa
02 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“Yang rebuilds for the reader a town that is notable for its many stark contrasts: restored & ruined buildings, wealth & poverty, international art ...
Chaya Bhuvaneswar : White Dancing Elephants
17 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Bhuvaneswar is unflinching about the lives of those for whom identity is a constant battle & the act of being is an unavoidable challenge, but she ...
Layli Long Soldier : Whereas
02 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues acr...
Diane Williams: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams
14 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Williams’s short precise, & emphatic sentences build a strange society whose denizens are not quite familiar to us & not quite comfortable with t...
R.O. Kwon : The Incendiaries
01 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Every explosive requires a fuse. That’s R. O. Kwon’s novel, a straight, slow-burning fuse. To read her novel is to follow an inexorable flame c...
Tommy Pico : Junk
14 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Reading Tommy Pico’s Junk I kept thinking of Heather McHugh’s pronouncement that the main discipline of poetry is “to keep finding life stran...
Dubravka Ugrešić : Fox & American Fictionary
01 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Dubravka Ugrešić is considered one of Europe’s most distinctive novelists and essayists. She is the 2016 winner of Neustadt International Prize ...
Anna Moschovakis : Eleanor or The Rejection of the Progress of Love
24 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Anna Moschovakis takes the reader straight to the terrifying edge: that moment where one ages out of youthfulness & begins to flutter in the debris...
Dao Strom : You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else
22 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Dao Strom’s collection of poetic fragments, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen as Mình sẽ luôn là...
Catherine Lacey : Certain American States
07 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Lacey captures with eerie precision the strangeness of being a person in the world, living alongside other human beings with unknowable thoughts an...
Forrest Gander : Be With
19 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Forrest Gander’s life partner, the poet C.D. Wright, died suddenly a little more than two years ago, and this book is one result or record of the...
Chelsea Hodson : Tonight I’m Someone Else
06 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Hodson’s essays have such a sexy drama to them—and ultimately it’s the romance of just getting through life; the passion that comes from bein...
Molly Crabapple : Brothers of the Gun – A Memoir of the Syrian War
12 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“From the anarchy, torment, and despair of the Syrian war, Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple have drawn a book of startling emotional power and inte...
Sheila Heti : Motherhood
01 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“This book is going to change how we think about life and women forever; like ancient Greek philosopher level of describing reality in a way that cr...
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi : Call Me Zebra
15 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Not many authors are compared to Borges, Cervantes, and Kathy Acker all in one breath, but that is exactly what we’re dealing with here: Azareen ...
Jen Bervin : Silk Poems
01 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Jen Bervin’s work—all of it—engages the eye, the hand, the ear, and the mind. Her artistry is vast and inclusive, by finesse and intelligence...
Cheston Knapp : Up Up Down Down
10 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Cheston Knapp’s Up Up, Down Down has the uncanny, welcome ability to make so-called mainstream or dominant culture—white, masculinist, Christi...
John Keene : Counternarratives, Playland, and Grind
01 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“In Counternarratives, John Keene undertakes a kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitut...
Vi Khi Nao : Umbilical Hospital & A Brief Alphabet of Torture
11 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“These pieces are elaborate piecework—perforated, whip stitched, and distressed field-dressed dissections of language. Tortured? Maybe. But luscio...
Micheline Aharonian Marcom : The Brick House
01 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Brick House is a place where people dream of love and loneliness, of the world’s beauty, and of ongoing environm...
Terese Marie Mailhot : Heart Berries
13 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot is an astounding memoir in essays. Here is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman...
Carmen Maria Machado : Her Body and Other Parties
01 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Cross-pollinating fairy tales, horror movies, TV shows, & a terrific sense of humor, Machado’s work reminds me at different times of such wildly ...
Eunsong Kim : Gospel of Regicide
14 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“In Gospel of Regicide, Eunsong Kim develops a thrilling method for unwriting lyric even as she reimagines it, creating a socially engaged poetry o...
Leni Zumas : Red Clocks
05 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Leni Zumas here proves she can do almost anything. Her tale feels part Melvillian, part Lydia Davis, part Octavia Butler—but really Zumas’s vis...
David Biespiel : The Education of a Young Poet
01 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing & feel the power &, some...
Rae Armantrout : Partly – New & Selected Poems
01 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“For nearly 40 years Armantrout has made a poetics of not finding the right words–of finding, in fact, the ‘wrong’ ones . . . Armantrout resto...
Eileen Myles : Afterglow
19 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“What is a dog if not god? In Afterglow, Eileen Myles steps up to the challenge for writers to function as prophets. Ghostwritten in part by decease...
Celeste Ng : Little Fires Everywhere
05 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“I read Little Fires Everywhere in a single, breathless sitting. With brilliance and beauty, Celeste Ng dissects a microcosm of American society jus...
Peter Rock : Spells
21 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Spells is a fascinating hybrid text, not simply illustrated by a collection of photographs but created in response to them, a collaboration between...
Safiya Sinclair : Cannibal
10 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Sinclair crafts her stunning debut collection around the beauty & brutality of the word cannibal, whose origins derive from Columbus’s belief tha...
Matthew Zapruder : Why Poetry
21 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Why Poetry, award-winning poet, translator, and editor, Matthew Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing...
Yanara Friedland : Uncountry
07 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“As a descendent of Chantal Akerman and Unica Zürn—among others—Yanara Friedland reimagines the origin myth. Friedland’s permeable pages allo...
Mary Ruefle : My Private Property
22 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Mary Ruefle’s careful, measured sentences sound as if they were written by a thousand-year-old person who is still genuinely curious about the wo...
Yuri Herrera : Kingdom Cons
11 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts & egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake th...
Gregory Pardlo : Digest
26 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“[Gregory Pardlo] explores what is American, what is African American, what is the Other, what is city, what is suburban, what is personal & what is...
Dani Shapiro : Hourglass
07 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting,...
Jeff Vandermeer : Borne
23 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Here is the story about biotech that VanderMeer wants to tell, a vision of the nonhuman not as one fixed thing, one fixed destiny, but as either pe...
Thalia Field : Experimental Animals
02 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Thalia Field has now composed what very well might be her life’s work—a tragic, comical, & utterly fascinating tale of a marriage that vividly ...
Sallie Tisdale : Violation
19 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“That Sallie Tisdale’s a treasure comes as no secret to lovers of the essay, and yet this happy gathering that spans the decades is revelatory, a ...
Morgan Parker : There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
29 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Morgan Parker uses political & pop-cultural references as a framework to explore 21st century black American womanhood & its complexities: performance...
Melissa Febos : Abandon Me
15 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Abandon Me is, in many ways, a story about how a woman’s body & the body of literature hold memory. In other ways, Abandon Me is a story about st...
Ursula K. Le Guin : Words Are My Matter
14 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken...
Susan DeFreitas : Hot Season
18 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
An outlaw activist on the run. A pipeline set to destroy a river. And 3 young women who must decide who to love, who to trust, & what to sacrifice for...
Solmaz Sharif : Look
04 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, & sequences, Sharif assembles fragmented narratives in the aftermath of war. Those repercussions echo...
Sofia Samatar : The Winged Histories
13 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“If you love stories but distrust them, if you love language & can also see how it is used as a tool or a weapon in the maintenance of status quo, t...
Tyehimba Jess : Olio
16 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“This 21st century hymnal of black evolutionary poetry, this almanac, this theatrical melange of miraculous meta-memory. Tyehimba Jess is inventive,...
Eliot Weinberger : The Ghosts of Birds
02 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A new collection from “one of the world’s great essayists” (The New York Times), The Ghosts of Birds offers 35 new essays by Eliot Weinberger. ...
Pauls Toutonghi : Dog Gone
27 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“You can’t write about dogs without writing about people. They chose long ago to be our good company in the adventure of being alive, and ever sin...
Monica Drake : The Folly of Loving Life
28 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Following her acclaimed novels Clown Girl and The Stud Book, Monica Drake presents her long-awaited first collection of stories. “What can I say abo...
Alexis Smith : Marrow Island
14 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“A faltering journalist returns to an island abandoned after an earthquake released a toxic spill. That’s the beautifully wrought setting of this ...
Jesse Ball : How to Set a Fire and Why
17 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Jesse Ball’s blistering novel tells the story of a teenage girl who has lost everything—and will burn anything. Lucia’s father is dead, her moth...
Rikki Ducornet : Brightfellow
20 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A feral boy comes of age on a campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails, & homemade jams. Stub is the cause of that missing sweater, th...
Lina Meruane : Seeing Red
30 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This powerful autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving h...
Rob Spillman : All Tomorrow’s Parties
15 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“Truly exceptional memoirs have to do something more than recount a good origin story: they have to test the author’s youthful understanding of th...
Brian Blanchfield : Proxies
18 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“Into what some are calling a new golden age of creative nonfiction lands Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, which singlehandedly raises the bar for wha...
Idra Novey : Ways to Disappear
04 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“Idra Novey, an acclaimed poet & translator of Spanish & Portuguese literature, has written a debut novel that’s a fast-paced, beguilingly playful...
Ursula K. Le Guin : Late in the Day
20 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Late in the Day, Ursula K. Le Guin’s new collection of poems (2010–2014) seeks meaning in an ever-connected world, giving voice to objects that ma...
Brian Evenson : A Collapse of Horses
30 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby; Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive; and in a mine on another p...
Laila Lalami : The Moor’s Account
16 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In this stunning work of historical fiction, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the 1st black explorer of America, a Moroccan slave whose ...
Lacy M. Johnson : The Other Side
17 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“[Lacy M. Johnson’s] powerfully moving and brilliantly structured memoir, The Other Side, asks, ‘How is it possible to reclaim the body after de...
Keith Lee Morris : Travelers Rest
20 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“It won’t take long—a page, maybe two—before you feel wondrously disquieted by Keith Lee Morris’s Travelers Rest. The novel traps its charac...
Mary Gaitskill : The Mare
16 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
From the author of the National Book Award-nominated Veronica: Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare—the story of a Dominican girl, the white woman who introd...
Valeria Luiselli : The Story of My Teeth
19 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, The Story of My Teeth is a witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs...
Amelia Gray : Gutshot
28 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
NPR calls Gutshot “a book brimming with blood, sexual deviance, mucus and madness.” The New York Times says “reading Gutshot is a little like be...
Ursula K. Le Guin : Steering The Craft
01 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Ursula K. Le Guin believes we cannot restructure society without restructuring the English language, and thus her book on the craft of writing inevita...
Liz Prato : Baby’s On Fire
23 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
“Liz Prato’s stories are filled with the lost, the lonely, and the damned, and she makes all of them sing with a haunting grandeur. Baby’s on Fi...
David Biespiel : A Long High Whistle
19 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Library Journal calls David Biespiel’s A Long High Whistle one of the best books about reading poetry you will ever find. Biespiel is a poet, editor...
Rebecca Makkai : Music For Wartime
05 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Rebecca Makkai, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, discusses her much-anticipated story coll...
Maggie Nelson : The Argonauts
29 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family. Maggie Nelson binds her personal experience, the sto...
Lidia Yuknavitch : The Small Backs of Children
15 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fier...
Mary Ruefle : An Incarnation of the Now
03 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Beloved and critically-acclaimed poet, essayist, and erasure artist, Mary Ruefle talks about her life as an artist, her approach to poetry, the questi...
Neal Stephenson : Seveneves
20 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
A catastrophic event renders the Earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devis...
Viet Thanh Nguyen : The Sympathizer
29 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
It is April 1975 and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted ca...
Sarah Manguso : Ongoingness
02 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for 25 years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything tha...
Kelly Link : Get in Trouble
04 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Kelly Link has been hailed by Michael Chabon as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” and by Neil Gaiman as “a national treasure.”...
Sarah Gerard : Binary Star
25 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn’t replenished; she is held together by her own ...
Miranda July : The First Bad Man
28 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she ...
Leslie Jamison : The Empathy Exams
18 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and re...
Claudia Rankine : Citizen
13 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Claudia Rankine, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, speaks about her much-awaited follow-up to her groundbreaking work Don’t Let Me Be Lon...
William Gibson : The Peripheral
05 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, for the neural ...
David Mitchell : The Bone Clocks
01 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“No one, clearly, has ever told Mitchell that the novel is dead. He writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in la...
Ben Parzybok : Sherwood Nation
10 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In drought-stricken Portland, Oregon, a Robin Hood-esque water thief is caught on camera redistributing an illegal truckload of water to those in need...
Karen Russell : Sleep Donation
13 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
A crisis has swept America. Hundreds of thousands have lost the ability to sleep. Enter the Slumber Corps, an organization that urges healthy dreamers...
Dinaw Mengestu : All Our Names
30 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into t...
Jo Walton : My Real Children
25 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
It’s 2015 and Patricia Cowan is very old. “Confused today,” read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know—w...
Roxane Gay : An Untamed State
11 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce. It is the story o...
Leni Zumas & Luca Dipierro : A Wooden Leg
28 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There is a long, if lesser known, history of fictions (and fictive illustrations) that invite reader participation, where the reader co-creates the st...
Lorrie Moore : Bark
23 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Harper’s Magazine may have said it best when describing today’s guest, Lorrie Moore: “Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work o...
Kyle Minor : Praying Drunk
09 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes ...
Helen Oyeyemi : Boy, Snow, Bird
27 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’...
Gina Frangello: A Life In Men
12 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The friendship between Mary and Nix has endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women reunite f...
Chang-rae Lee : On Such A Full Sea
20 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“The most striking dystopian novels sound an alarm, focus our attention and even change the language. The Handmaid’s Tale crystallized our fears a...
Gary Shteyngart : Little Failure
23 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Unputdownable in the day an...
Veronica Gonzalez Peña : The Sad Passions
19 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Told by six women in one family, Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s The Sad Passions captures the alertness, beauty, and terror of childhood lived in proxi...
Kevin Sampsell : This Is Between Us
21 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
There may be no author more integral to the Portland literary scene than Kevin Sampsell. Kevin is not only the small press curator and events coordina...