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

“A Fortune for Your Disaster proves that, if you pay attention, Black people have defined and still define themselves for themselves amid roses and dandelions, cardinals and violets, the blues of music and police uniforms, prayer and swagger. . . . The disaster is not us or ours but what we endure, forced and as […] The post Hanif Abdurraqib : A Fortune For Your Disaster appeared first on Tin House.

The New Yorker poetry editor and host of The New Yorker poetry podcast, Kevin Young, delivered this talk, “How to Write a Hoax Poem,” at the 2014 Tin House Writers Workshop. He discusses some of the more notable modern poetry hoaxes, glimpsing into the secret history of the poem as something conceived to tempt or […] The post Tin House Live : Craft Talk : How to Write a Hoax Poem with Kevin Young appeared first on Tin House.

“Whether speaking about motherhood, grief, or poetry, Zucker’s unrelenting eye and wittily critical voice peel back these experiences to reveal insights that are both deeply human and uncompromisingly analytic. . . . Above all, this book is open—open about difficult subjects, open in the way its language operates, open in its willingness to create a […] The post Rachel Zucker : SoundMachine appeared first on Tin House.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ talk “Power & Audience: On Not Writing for White People” was given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon. In this talk she references a 2019 Publishing Industry Survey and a series of pie charts showing the racial, gender, sexual orientation, and ability breakdown of various subsets of the […] The post Tin House Live : Craft Talk : Power & Audience, On Not Writing for White People with Ingrid Rojas Contreras appeared first on Tin House.

Dorothy Allison treated the participants of the 2011 Summer Workshop to a spirited discussion of how characters should speak on the page. Not only “he said, she said, none of them said a thing,” but a whole range of language issues—what is said and not said, dialect and rhythm, pacing, patterns in speech, and most […] The post Tin House Live : Craft Talk : On Dialogue with Dorothy Allison appeared first on Tin House.

“Reinhardt’s Garden is one of those perfect books that looks small and exotic and melancholic from the outside but, once in, is immense and exultant in the best possible way. Think Amulet by Roberto Bolaño, think Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, think Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, think Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, think Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto, think The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. Think.” —Rodrigo […] The post Mark Haber : Reinhardt’s Garden appeared first on Tin House.

“Novelists don’t need to dream the end of the world anymore—they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today’s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it’s as if they are all cut from one diamond.” –Jonathan Dee The post Jenny Offill : Weather appeared first on Tin House.

“Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what it is to be alive.” —Carole Maso The post Lance Olsen : My Red Heaven appeared first on Tin House.

Alexander Chee delivered this craft lecture, from “First Draft to Plot,” at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop. Chee is the author most recently of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. The post Tin House Live : Craft Talk : “From First Draft to Plot” with Alexander Chee appeared first on Tin House.

“Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. […] The post Garth Greenwell : Cleanness appeared first on Tin House.

“In the Dream House . . . confronts the issues of credibility, self-doubt, and disbelief that all too frequently arise when survivors of domestic abuse speak out. But the work also stands as an intervention explicitly aimed at the silences, erasures, and lacunae of the culture at large . . . Machado’s In the Dream […] The post Carmen Maria Machado : In the Dream House appeared first on Tin House.

Jericho Brown gave these two talks, on suicide, and on joy, at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon.  His latest poetry collection The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press) was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. The post Tin House Live : Craft Talk : Jericho Brown on Suicide & Joy appeared first on Tin House.

“In The Magical Language of Others, E. J. Koh writes of the boundary between anonymity and naming, between absence and abandonment, between cruelty and safety for four generations of mothers and daughters, each speaking with an occupied heart and crossing narrative borders between Korea, Japan, and America. As a reader, you give yourself over to her […] The post E. J. Koh : The Magical Language of Others appeared first on Tin House.

“In this retelling of the Mahabharata from the point of view of its hitherto minor female characters, Karthika Naïr uncovers a seminal feminist text. Until the Lions makes dazzling use of concrete verse and surreptitious rhyme to tell a story you think you know. By poem’s end you understand, with gratitude, that you know nothing […] The post Karthika Naïr : Until the Lions : Echoes from the Mahabharata appeared first on Tin House.

“CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed […] The post CAConrad : Resurrect Extinct Vibration appeared first on Tin House.

“Older’s spellbinding novel is a fever dream full of magic and loss, wickedness and grace, faith and love, spirit and power.”–Marlon James;  “A lyrical, beautiful, devastating, literally haunting journey of assimilation, resistance, and family. Older just gets better and better.”—N.K. Jemisin The post Daniel José Older : The Book of Lost Saints appeared first on Tin House.

Rebecca Solnit says Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings gives us something essential: “a vision of who and where we are that’s both scathing and generous.” Kiese Laymon says “I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier to be alive after reading any book. In this weird way that probably says way too much about the […] The post Lacy M. Johnson : The Reckonings appeared first on Tin House.

In eleven captivating tales, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love to an eerie […] The post Christine Schutt : Pure Hollywood appeared first on Tin House.

“Sycamore paints an unsparing and unsentimental portrait of survival in a homophobic era, and her writing is beyond beautiful. Sketchtasy is a powerful firecracker of a novel; it’s not just one of the best books of the year, it’s an instant classic of queer literature.”—Michael Schaub, NPR Books The post Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Sketchtasy appeared first on Tin House.

“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 and small moments: these are the passionate concerns of Alicia Rabins’ Fruit Geode, a book that I could not stop reading once I started, a book that drew me […] The post Alicia Jo Rabins : Fruit Geode appeared first on Tin House.