Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

They live among us.
 They are your neighbor, your mother, your lover.
 They change.  Every teenage girl thinks she’s different. When government agents kick down Claire Forrester’s front door and murder her parents, Claire realizes just how different she is. Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and hours later stepped off it, the only passenger left alive, a hero. Pres...

Karen Russell is one of today’s most celebrated and vital writers—honored in the  New Yorker ’s list of the twenty best writers under the age of forty, Granta ’s Best of Young American Novelists, and the National Book Foundation’s five best writers under the age of thirty-five. Last year, Karen Russell was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (along with David Foster Wallace and Denis Johns...

In the hip haven of Portland, Oregon, a pack of unsteady but loyal friends asks what it means to bring babies into an already crowded world. A smart, edgy and poignantly funny exploration of the complexities of what parenthood means today, Monica Drake’s second novel, The Stud Book , demonstrates that when it comes to babies, we can learn a lot by considering our place in the animal kingdom....

A hilarious collection of stories from the writer the New York Times called “the novelist of his generation.” Returning to the form in which he began, Sam Lipsyte, author of the New York Times bestseller The Ask , offers up The Fun Parts , a book of bold, hilarious, and deeply felt fiction. Combining both the tragicomic dazzle of his beloved novels and the compressed vitality of his classic debut...

“George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read All Year,” declared the cover of the New York Times Magazine several weeks ago. Since then, the world has rushed to agree that Saunders’ new story collection, Tenth of December , is a remarkable literary achievement. “George Saunders is a complete original, unlike anyone else, thank god—and yet still he manages to be th...

Writer, filmmaker and art critic Chris Kraus talks with host David Naimon about her latest book,  Summer of Hate.  Her other books include the novels  I Love Dick , hailed by Rick Moody as one of the literary highpoints of the past two decades,  Aliens & Anorexia , and  Torpor.   She is also the author of the essay collections  Video Green  and  Where Art Belongs , and is a frequent contributo...

Portland author Alexis Smith talks with host David Naimon about  Glaciers , her debut novel from Tin House books.  Glaciers   follows Isabel through a day in her life, in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the i...

Host David Naimon talks with Jess Walter about his sixth novel,  Beautiful Ruins , a deeply human rollercoaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. Walter is also the author of the national bestseller  The Financial Lives of the Poets , the National Book Award finalist  The Zero , the Edgar Award-winning  Citizen Vince ,  Land of the Blind , and the  New York Times  Notable...

Host David Naimon speaks with Junot Diaz, who the New Yorker calls one of the top 20 writers for the 21st century. He’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , a Creative Writing professor at MIT, the Fiction Editor at the Boston Review , and a founding member of Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop, which focuses on writers of color. In 2010,...

Is  How Should a Person Be?  a novel, a memoir, a self-help manual, or a book of philosophy? It is all of these things and more.  Host David Naimon talks with Sheila Heti about her new book, which  Bookforum  dubs “a raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friends, sex, and love in the new millennium—a compulsive read that’s like spending a day with your new best friend.” Canadian writer Shei...

On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, and the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal di...

A war has either started or is about to; bombs are going off in the city, but people seem strangely disengaged. Della’s activist friends seem more concerned about the next sex party or the finer points of vegan ideology, and customers at the vegan café where she works talk of leaving the country for a life of escape and eco-tourism. But Della feels compelled to stay as the bombs inch closer,...

Adam Levin’s debut novel,  The Instructions , published by McSweeney’s in 2010, arrived with a lot of buzz. An inventive, experimental book of over 1000 pages, its protagonist was Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, a 10-year-old genius from Chicago, who may or may not be the Jewish Messiah. Levin’s short stories have appeared in Tin House , McSweeney’s, and Esquire . He was the winner of the New York Publ...

Host David Naimon talks with Portland author, Jon Raymond, about his new novel  Rain Dragon .  Raymond is the author of the novel The  Half-Life , and the short story collection  Livability,  which won the Oregon Book Award and contained two stories that became the critically acclaimed movies  Old Joy  and  Wendy & Lucy . Jon Raymond was also the screenwriter for the film  Meek’s Cutoff...

Englander burst on the literary scene in 1999 with  For The Relief of Unbearable Urges , a story collection that earned him the PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kauffman Prize. His first novel,  The Ministry of Special Cases , set during Argentina’s Dirty War, came out in 2007. And this year finds Englander particularly busy, with a play,  The Twenty-Seve...

What if the words your children spoke to you actually made you sick? Physically sick. And what if the children themselves relished in this newfound power over their parents? This is the setting of Ben Marcus’ new dystopian novel  The Flame Alphabet . Ben Marcus is Chair of Creative Writing at Columbia University and the author of three previous books of fiction. “Echoes of Ballard’s insanely sane...

Host David Naimon speaks with award-winning writer Colson Whitehead about his new novel Zone One , described as a “wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel.” The world has been devastated by a plague. There are two types of survivors: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels  The Intuitionist ,  John Henry Days ,...

Host David Naimon interviews debut novelist Justin Torres. His book,  We the Animals , has been heralded for its beautiful, concentrated prose. NPR likened it to a diamond, brilliant and brilliantly compressed.  Esquire  called it a “knock to the head that will leave your mouth agape.” Justin Torres is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, with work in the New Yorker , Harper...

Science fiction and fantasy writer China Miéville has won nearly every award in the genre and has caught the attention of mainstream publications from the New York Times to the Guardian with the depth of his imagination and the height of his erudition. David Naimon interviews him about his new, much anticipated book,  Embassytown . “ Embassytown is a fully achieved work of art . . . Works on every...

Host David Naimon interviews Portland writer Scott Sparling about his debut novel,  Wire to Wire , from Tin House Books.  A pick of the week by Publisher’s Weekly , they call  Wire to Wire , “well-crafted and thrilling, tying together an obvious love for both Michigan and railroads with an expert sense of timing and plot. The world he has created is both overwhelming and exhilarating, thanks in no...

Host David Naimon speaks with writer Anthony Doerr about his latest book,  Memory Wal l . Doerr is the author of three other books:  The Shell Collector ,  About Grace , and Four Seasons in Rome . Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in  The Best American Short Stories ,  The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories , and  The Scribner Anthology of Contemp...

Host David Naimon speaks with Nicole Krauss about her newest novel  Great House , which tells a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children? How do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change?   Great House  was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction this year. Nicole Krauss is also the author of the international be...