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

Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, for the neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC’s elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there’s a job he’s supposed to do—a job […] The post William Gibson : The Peripheral appeared first on Tin House.

“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 language and all the rabbit holes of experience . . . In his sixth novel, he’s brought together the time-capsule density of his eyes-wide-open adventure in traditional realism with the […] The post David Mitchell : The Bone Clocks appeared first on Tin House.

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. Nicknamed Maid Marian—real name: Renee, a twenty-something barista and eternal part-time college student—she is an instant folk hero. Renee rides her swelling popularity and the public’s disgust at how the city has […] The post Ben Parzybok : Sherwood Nation appeared first on Tin House.

A crisis has swept America. Hundreds of thousands have lost the ability to sleep. Enter the Slumber Corps, an organization that urges healthy dreamers to donate sleep to an insomniac. Under the wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers, the Corps’ reach has grown, with outposts in every major U.S. city. Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was […] The post Karen Russell : Sleep Donation appeared first on Tin House.

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 the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart—one into the deepest peril, […] The post Dinaw Mengestu : All Our Names appeared first on Tin House.

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—what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don’t seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she […] The post Jo Walton : My Real Children appeared first on Tin House.

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 of a willful woman attempting to find her way back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places. […] The post Roxane Gay : An Untamed State appeared first on Tin House.

There is a long, if lesser known, history of fictions (and fictive illustrations) that invite reader participation, where the reader co-creates the story with the authors.  These stories often utilize an element of chance and/or suggest multiple possible ways a text can be read. Leni Zumas and Luca DiPierro, the co-creators of A Wooden Leg: […] The post Leni Zumas & Luca DiPierro : A Wooden Leg appeared first on Tin House.

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 of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore.” Over the course of the […] The post Lorrie Moore : Bark appeared first on Tin House.

The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and […] The post Kyle Minor : Praying Drunk appeared first on Tin House.

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’s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d […] The post Helen Oyeyemi : Boy, Snow, Bird appeared first on Tin House.

The friendship between Mary and Nix has endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women reunite for a summer vacation in Greece. It’s a trip instigated by Nix, who has just learned that Mary has been diagnosed with a disease that will inevitably cut her life short. Nix, […] The post Gina Frangello: A Life In Men appeared first on Tin House.

“The most striking dystopian novels sound an alarm, focus our attention and even change the language. The Handmaid’s Tale crystallized our fears about reproductive control; Fahrenheit 451 still flames discussions of censorship; and 1984 is the lens through which we watch the Obama administration watching us. Chang-rae Lee’s unsettling new novel, On Such a Full […] The post Chang-rae Lee : On Such A Full Sea appeared first on Tin House.

“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 and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody’s desperate need for a tribe. Readers who’ve […] The post Gary Shteyngart : Little Failure appeared first on Tin House.

Told by six women in one family, Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s The Sad Passions captures the alertness, beauty, and terror of childhood lived in proximity to madness. Set against the backdrop of a colonial past, spanning three generations, and shuttling from Mexico City to Oaxaca to the North Fork of Long Island to Veracruz, The Sad Passions is the lyrical […] The post Veronica Gonzalez Peña : The Sad Passions appeared first on Tin House.

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 coordinator at Powell’s books, but he’s also the editor of the Portland Noir fiction anthology, curated this year’s Wordstock literary festival, was in charge of LitHopPDX, Portland’s inaugural literary bar […] The post Kevin Sampsell : This Is Between Us appeared first on Tin House.

We seem to be in the midst of an upsurge in dystopian art and end times anxieties. If we as a culture don’t have a sense of impending doom, we do at least have trouble imagining the future being bright and promising. Today’s guest Lucy Corin is here on Between The Covers to talk about […] The post Lucy Corin : One Hundred Apocalypses appeared first on Tin House.

Jonathan Lethem is a man of many lives. For one, because of his repeated return to New York as both setting and muse in novels such as Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City, he may be New York’s closest thing to having a bard. But Lethem is known as well for his genre […] The post Jonathan Lethem : Dissident Gardens appeared first on Tin House.

“When most of us think of today’s great American novel, we think of Franzen’s Freedom or Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—sprawling stories that comment on contemporary society as we live it. Tumbledown, Robert Boswell’s latest, is just such a book—and one you’ll stay up until 3 AM reading. Over the course of a […] The post Robert Boswell : Tumbledown appeared first on Tin House.

For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart for one reason: Edie’s enormous girth. She’s obsessed with food–thinking about it, eating it—and if she doesn’t stop, she won’t have much longer to live. With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, […] The post Jami Attenberg : The Middlesteins appeared first on Tin House.