Between The Covers : Conversations With Writers In Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

Set during the 17th century witch trials in Denmark, and relayed to us through the voice of a magically animated wax child of one of the accused, Olga Ravn’s new book, which creates something uncannily other from primary sources, has been heralded as a “devilishly subversive feminist anthem” and speaks as much to the present […] The post Olga Ravn : The Wax Child appeared first on Tin House.

Sharing a new podcast from Campside Media called Origin Stories, about the creative process and the craft of writing and reporting. Each episode drills down on a single work. What inspired it? How was it created, and why? What kind of challenges and hurdles cropped up along the way? And above all, what can the […] The post Presenting Hysterical’s Dan Taberski on Origin Stories appeared first on Tin House.

Ten years in the making, poet Rickey Laurentiis joins us to talk about her much-anticipated remarkable new collection Death of the First Idea. “In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives,” says the back copy on this book, whose […] The post Rickey Laurentiis : Death of the First Idea appeared first on Tin House.

What does it mean to write toward or under the aura of another poet one admires, to write in homage, as a celebration of another? What happens to language when it hovers between two writers, between how they each separately inhabit it? What does it say about the self, or is discovered about it—within the […] The post Laynie Browne : Apprentice to a Breathing Hand appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest is writer and critic Martha Anne Toll. Through a discussion of her latest novel Duet for One we explore the perennial mystery of writing and art-making, namely how to render something that lives beyond representation, and how words can become a vehicle to evoke what words themselves cannot adequately describe. In this case, […] The post Martha Anne Toll : Duet for One appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation with Rob Macaisa Colgate is about two books, his poetry collection Hardly Creatures and his verse drama My Love is Water. You could say these two books are approaching the same questions, but from opposite, if complementary vantage points. Questions of care and disability, of accessibility and community, of Filipino-American identity and the afterlives […] The post Rob Macaisa Colgate : Hardly Creatures & My Love is Water appeared first on Tin House.

Don’t miss today’s conversation with Robert Macfarlane. A polyvocal deep dive into the mysteries of words and rivers, of speech acts as spells, whorls as worlds, of grammars of animacy, of what it means to river, and to be rivered. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf’s wave in the mind to Ursula K. […] The post Robert Macfarlane : Is a River Alive? appeared first on Tin House.

With the arrival of Ancestors, the third and final book in adrienne maree brown’s Grievers Trilogy, we take the iconic frames she has created in her nonfiction work—emergent strategy, pleasure activism, fractal responsibility, loving corrections and more—and look at how they are dramatized within this fictional near-future Detroit. Much as the three books do themselves, […] The post adrienne maree brown : Ancestors appeared first on Tin House.

The Book of Records is many things: a book of historical fiction and speculative fiction, a meditation on time and on space-time,  on storytelling and truth, on memory and the imagination, a book that impossibly conjures the lives and eras of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu and the political theorist […] The post Madeleine Thien : The Book of Records appeared first on Tin House.

What would it mean for our writing, thinking, and living if we looked to land as pedagogy, or if we thought of theory as something embodied and kinetic? In Theory of Water Leanne Betasamosake Simpson takes us not only outside the academy, and away from our screens, but outside and into the world at large […] The post Leanne Betasamosake Simpson : Theory of Water appeared first on Tin House.

From the craft of writing sex in poetry to the virtues of failing publicly, today’s conversation with poet Keetje Kuipers is not to be missed. We explore everything from storytelling within poems to the dialectic between control and wildness; everything from queerness and wilderness to fantasy as a portal to truth on the page. Keetje’s […] The post Keetje Kuipers : Lonely Women Make Good Lovers appeared first on Tin House.

What does it mean to risk rupture for rapture, on the page, and in one’s life? Or for water to be one’s method, mode or muse? Are inherited forms (of womanhood, of sexuality, of national identity) a gift or are their borders meant to be crossed and breached? Together we look at forms and norms […] The post Patrycja Humienik : We Contain Landscapes appeared first on Tin House.

Four novellas, in four different genres—science fiction, horror, teen romance, and a western—Stag Dance not only interrogates genre, but gender through genre. Written over a ten year period, Torrey Peters’ new book spans a decade when her own views and insights about gender were themselves changing. Placing these four novellas in conversation with each other […] The post Torrey Peters : Stag Dance appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest, one of Australia’s most celebrated and daring writers, Michelle de Kretser, discusses her latest uncategorizable book Theory & Practice (one she describes as 80% fiction, 15% essay and 5% memoir). Theory & Practice is a book that is wildly erudite and erotic at the same time, both an engrossing, immersive read and one that […] The post Michelle de Kretser : Theory & Practice appeared first on Tin House.

In late October 2023, weeks into Israel’s bombing of northern Gaza, the novelist Omar El Akkad retweeted a video taken by a Gazan man. This video showed a lifeless moonscape with endless empty streets of rubble, every building, one to the next, a hollow blown-out shell of itself. No people, no animals, the only sound […] The post Omar El Akkad : One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This appeared first on Tin House.

Feminist and literary theorist, playwright, philosopher, memoirist and novelist Hélène Cixous returns to the show to discuss her latest genre-defying hybrid work of prose. Written during the first year of the pandemic, Rêvoir explores the effect of pandemic confinement on time, the effect of pandemic time on writing, and what plagues and confinement show us about […] The post Hélène Cixous : Rêvoir appeared first on Tin House.

Poet Aria Aber’s debut novel Good Girl , set in the club scene of Berlin, is a book brimming over with sex and drugs and music, true. But really at its heart it is a book of self-making and unmaking, of self-destruction and self-discovery, where 19 year old Nila navigates the irresolvable dialectics of being a […] The post Aria Aber : Good Girl appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s guest Zahid Rafiq discusses his debut short story collection The World With Its Mouth Open, eleven remarkable stories set in modern-day Kashmir. Prior to writing fiction Rafiq was a journalist and we explore the ways the stories he tells now, and the stories he wrote then, differ and overlap, We look at how fiction can […] The post Zahid Rafiq : The World With Its Mouth Open appeared first on Tin House.

We started 2024 with an archival recording of Denis Johnson from the first ever Tin House Writers Workshop in 2003. That episode was a three-part episode: Denis Johnson reading from the manuscript of his novella Train Dreams, then being interviewed by Chris Offutt, and finally, Denis, Chris and Charles D’Ambrosio performing the first act of […] The post Tin House Live : Denis Johnson : 2004 appeared first on Tin House.

How can a novel set during one brief moment near the end of Herman Melville’s father’s life, a moment lost to history and now fully overshadowed by his son’s enduring literary legacy, become a portal to discuss the world entire? Melvill is a novel about reading and writing, about parenthood and legacy, about madness and memory, about […] The post Rodrigo Fresán : Melvill appeared first on Tin House.