Jorge Luis Borges called her the “Tolstoy of Mexico” and César Aira the “greatest novelist of the 20th century,” so why is it likely that you haven’t read or even heard of Elena Garro before now? And given that Garro was, like her fantastical stories,  not beholden to the truth when accounting her own life, […]

Caren Beilin’s first appearance on the show, in 2022 to discuss her book Revenge of the Scapegoat, was so unforgettable, and spurred so much enthusiasm and electrifying conversation in its wake, that I couldn’t say “no” to being in conversation with her again, this time live at Powell’s Bookstore, to discuss her latest book Sea, Poison […]

Painter Stephen Hayes latest exhibition, “Elegy,” consists of twelve abstract paintings that engage with the genocide in Gaza. One of the twelve paintings was created while listening to the Between the Covers conversation with Omar El Akkad about his book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Because of this, instead of asking, […]

Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C.P. Cavafy began as a collaborative multidisciplinary project between the poet Robin Coste Lewis, the composer Vijay Iyer, the cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and the visual artist Julie Mehretu. This multimedia quartet traveled to Athens together to engage with the Cavafy archives as part of the composition of […]

As an artist, how does one dive into the wreck of an archive, a canon, a shared collective memory, a history—one filled with silenced voices, distorted accounts, erasures and elisions—on behalf of those wronged by it? Poet Dionne Brand says “the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck” and Diana Arterian’s work seems animated […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]