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

Today’s conversation, with poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen, is not to be missed. Both of her books, Ghost Of and Root Fractures, engage with and are shaped by her brother’s absence and the family silence surrounding it. Two years before his suicide, her brother quietly removed the family photos from their frames on […] The post Diana Khoi Nguyen : Root Fractures appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation with Álvaro Enrigue about his latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires, translated by Natasha Wimmer, is set during the relatively undocumented first encounter between Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés. The novel dilates the knife’s edge moment when the Aztec emperor invites the conquistador, with his small band of Spanish soldiers, into the palaces of […] The post Álvaro Enrigue : You Dreamed of Empires appeared first on Tin House.

Is Mathias Énard’s latest book formally influenced by the Buddhist Wheel of Time, by Jewish undertaker guilds, by François Rabelais’s scatological and philosophical prose and linguistic wordplay, by Catholic altarpiece polyptych panel paintings, and by the scandalous diaries of a Polish anthropologist?  The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is dedicated to les pensées sauvages, […] The post Mathias Énard : The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild appeared first on Tin House.

We are kicking off the new year with a serious blast from the past. A recording from the very first Tin House writers workshop in the summer of 2003 with novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright and screenwriter, Denis Johnson. This three part episode includes a remarkable reading from Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, an interview of […] The post Tin House Live : Denis Johnson : 2003 appeared first on Tin House.

Perhaps it is fitting that today’s episode, with writer and founding editor of Witchcraft Magazine, Elle Nash, is launched on the shortest day of the year, the longest night of darkness. Nash’s new novel Deliver Me explores the ways society tries to keep the light and the dark separate, to hide our unasked questions and […] The post Elle Nash : Deliver Me appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s part two of the conversation with Naomi Klein about Doppelganger highlights the Jewish elements in the book, and looks at them through the lens of Palestine & Israel. We discuss Zionism, Marxism and the Jewish Labor Bund’s notion of ‘hereness.” We look at the battles over the definition of  antisemitism and the ways accusations […] The post Naomi Klein : Doppelganger : Part Two appeared first on Tin House.

In Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar’s Tone they construct a shared voice, that of the “Committee to Investigate the Atmosphere.” Yes, they do this to investigate tone, in the writings of everyone from Nella Larsen to Clarice Lispector, W.G. Sebald to Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman to Bhanu Kapil. But in chasing the ever-elusive notion of tone, […] The post Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar : Tone appeared first on Tin House.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore returns to Between the Covers to talk about her remarkable new book, Touching the Art. A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism and social history, Touching the Art is above all a complicated love letter to Mattilda’s grandmother, abstract artist Gladys Goldstein. Through an exploration of Mattilda’s love for Gladys’ art, Touching the Art becomes […] The post Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Touching the Art appeared first on Tin House.

Bhanu Kapil’s postcolonial feminist road novel Incubation: A Space for Monsters has long been out of print. The book of hers that most engages with the mythos and reality of America, Incubation follows Laloo, a British woman of Indian descent, who arrives in the US to give birth to a monster. This fictional story parallels […] The post Bhanu Kapil : Incubation : A Space for Monsters appeared first on Tin House.

Colleen Burner’s novella Sister Golden Calf is the story of two sisters on the road set in a world without men. Inspired, in part, by Vanessa Veselka’s essay “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters,” Sister Golden Calf by its very existence interrogates the road novel tradition it now becomes a part […] The post Colleen Burner : Sister Golden Calf appeared first on Tin House.

Essayist and translator Kate Briggs’ first novel The Long Form is a book about, and happening within, the relationship between Helen and her infant daughter Rose. What does making a novel baby-centric, not a novel about babies, but where the baby is a main character, a vital actor that shapes the story that unfolds, that […] The post Kate Briggs : The Long Form appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s conversation with Lydia Davis about her latest story collection, Our Strangers, a collection of 143 stories, is a deep dive into storytelling. These stories, whether incredibly short or quite long, often eschew backstory, exposition, context, or psychological interiority. Sometimes they even comment on other stories within the collection, or revise themselves, becoming something else entirely. […] The post Lydia Davis : Our Strangers appeared first on Tin House.

Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is a departure for her. One some of her closest friends even cautioned her against. On the one hand, it is what we come to expect from Klein, a brilliant framing, through the coining of new language, of our current political moment. And yet Doppelganger is decidedly more personal, more vulnerable, […] The post Naomi Klein : Doppelganger appeared first on Tin House.

You could say that Matthew Zapruder’s Story of a Poem is about the revision of a poem, that it follows the life of one poem, from its first phrase to its final draft, and invites us, in the most mesmerizing way, behind the curtain of the creative process of composition. And you wouldn’t be wrong. […] The post Tin House Live : Matthew Zapruder on Story of a Poem appeared first on Tin House.

Poet and host of the The Slowdown podcast Major Jackson joins us to talk about Razzle Dazzle, his collection of new and selected poems that captures two decades in the life of a poet. Last year Major also released a book his selected prose, A Beat Beyond, his meditations on poetry and its relation to […] The post Major Jackson : Razzle Dazzle appeared first on Tin House.

Five months pregnant, fearful of the future, and creatively blocked, JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the life, writings, and paintings of Agnes Martin. She fashions a three-week intensive writing regimen in northern New Mexico, where Martin lived and painted (and where Novak writes this book we discuss today). The structure of this retreat is inspired […] The post JoAnna Novak : Contradiction Days appeared first on Tin House.

Jorie Graham’s first appearance on the show in 2021, to discuss her collection Runaway, is one of the most relistened to episodes in the show’s history, a conversation that, with each revisitation, seems to reveal something new about how to will oneself into presence as an artist and as a human. And it is a […] The post Jorie Graham : To 2040 appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s craft talk, “Why So Surrealism” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, was recorded at the 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop. Prompted by a journalist who asked him to talk about how surrealistic and speculative conceits operated in and informed Black fiction, in this craft talk Adjei-Brenyah looks at the tropes of surrealist and speculative fiction within […] The post Tin House Live : Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Surrealism appeared first on Tin House.

Poet Roger Reeves calls the essays in his debut book of prose “fugitive essays.” And we explore what it means to write fugitively, to write into and from and toward fugitivity. If, as Fred Moten says, fugitivity is “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. . […] The post Roger Reeves : Dark Days appeared first on Tin House.

Isabella Hammad’s latest book Enter Ghost is about a Palestinian theater group attempting to put on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The actors come from many different Palestinian experiences, one to the next. Some have Israeli citizenship. Others live in refugee camps or Ramallah or in the diaspora in Europe. But why […] The post Isabella Hammad : Enter Ghost appeared first on Tin House.