Little Atoms

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Kristen R. Ghodsee was travelling in Europe, and spent the summer of 1990 witnessing first-hand the initial hope and euphoria that followed the sudden and unexpected collapse of state socialism in the former Eastern Bloc. The political and economic chaos that followed inspired Ghodsee to pursue an academic career studying this upheaval, focusing on how ordinary p...

Georgina Harding is the author of three previous novels:  The Solitude of Thomas Cave ,  The Spy Game  and, most recently,  Painter of Silence,  which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 201 2 . Her first book was a word of non-fiction,  In Another Europe , recording a journey she made across Romania in 1988 during the worst times of the Ceausescu regime....

Simon Garfield is the author of seventeen acclaimed books of non-fiction including  Timekeepers ,  A Notable Woman  (as editor) , To the Letter ,  On the Map ,  Just My Type and  Mauve . His study of AIDS in Britain,  The End of Innocence , won the Somerset Maugham prize. His latest book is In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World . Hosted on Acas...

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels  The Queen of the Night  and  Edinburgh . He is a contributing editor at the  New Republic , an editor at large at  Virginia Quarterly Review,  and a critic at large at the  Los Angeles Times . His work has appeared in  The Best American Essays 2016 ,  The New York Times Magazine ,  Slate ,&nbs...

Adam Weymouth's work has been published by a wide variety of outlets including the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New Internationalist. His interest in the relationship between humans and the world around them has led him to write on issues of climate change and environmentalism, and most recently, to the Yukon river and the stories of the communities living on its banks. He lives on a 100-year-ol...

Thea Lim’s novel  An Ocean of Minutes  is out now from Quercus/Hachette in the UK, Viking/Penguin Random House in Canada, and Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster in the US. Her writing has been published by  the Paris Review, the Guardian, Salon, the National Post, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Millions, the Southampton Review, GRIST  and others. She has received mult...

To see in the New Year, here's a repeat of our Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh from August. Ottessa Moshfegh   is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book,  McGlue , a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection  Homesick for Another World . Her stories have been published in ...

For Christmas Day, here's a repeat of our interview from June 2018 with Adam Kay. Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and writer for TV and film, including  Mitchell & Webb  and  Very British Problems . He previously worked as a junior doctor, detailing his funny and sad experiences in his first book  This Is Going To Hurt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more...

David Frye is a professor and historian, whose research has taken him around the world and involved him in numerous archaeological digs since receiving his PhD from Duke University. He has published extensively in international academic journals. He is the author of Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood & Brick . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeff Jackson is the author of  Mira Corpora , a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short fiction has appeared in  Guernica ,  Vice , and  The Collagist , and five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award–winning Collapsable Giraffe theater company in New York City. His latest novel is Destroy All Monsters . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy fo...

This week Padraig Reidy talks to Paul Ewen. Paul Ewen is a New Zealand writer based in south London. His work has appeared in the British Council's  New Writing anthology, the   Guardian, the TES, Tank, and Five Dials. Paul's first novel,  Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author , was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2014. It went on to appear on numerous Books Of The Year lists,...

R. O. Kwon is the author of the novel The Incendiaries . Her writing is published in The Guardian , Vice , BuzzFeed , Time , Noon , Electric Literature , Playboy , and elsewhere. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Omi International, the Steinbeck Center, and the Norman Mailer Write...

Thomas Page McBee was ‘masculinity expert’ for  Vice  and the first trans man ever to box at Madison Square Garden. His essays and reportage have appeared in the  New York Times ,  Playboy ,  Glamour  and  Salon . He is the author of Man Alive , and most recently Amateur: A True Story About What Makes A Man . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more inform...

Robert Olen Butler   is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain , and sixteen other novels including  Hell, A Small Hotel, Perfume River,  and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process,  From Where You Dream.  He has twice won a National Maga...

Richard Skinner is a novelist, poet and critic. His most recent book,  The Mirror , was described as ‘beautifully written . . . immersive . . . captivating’ by the  Guardian . As Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy, he created the flagship ‘Writing a Novel’ six-month course in 2009 and since then has helped hundreds of writers find their voice. He is also the author of Wri...

Rose George is the author of A Life Removed: Hunting for Refuge in the Modern World , and The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste , which was judged one of the best books of 2008 by the Economist, and one of the top ten science books of the same year by the American Library Association, and Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that brings you Ninety...

Sarah Moss is the author of six novels and a memoir of her year living in Iceland, Names for the Sea , shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her novels are Cold Earth , Night Waking (Fiction Uncovered Award), Bodies of Light (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), Signs for Lost Children (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and The Tidal Zone (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize). He...

Jonathan Ames is the author of nine books including  The Extra Man, Wake Up, Sir! , and  You Were Never Really Here , all published by Pushkin Press. He also created the hit HBO comedy  Bored to Death , starring Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman, and  Blunt Talk , starring Patrick Stewart. He has fought in two amateur boxing matches as "The Herring Wonder". He...

Ivy Pochoda is a novelist and writer, previously a world ranked squash player. Her novel  Visitation Street  was chosen as an Amazon Best Book of 2013 and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She has written for a number of outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Huffington Post. S...

Patrick deWitt is the author of  The Sisters Brothers , which won   the Governor General's Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize. He also is the author of  Ablutions , which was a  New York Times  Editor's Choice, and  Undermajordomo Minor .  The Sisters Brothers  is being adapted for film by Jacques Audiard ( Rust and...

Michael Redhill is the author of nine novels including  Consolation , longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and  Martin Sloane , a finalist for the Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious book award which he won with Bellevue Square . He's written a novel for young adults, four collections of poetry and two plays, including the internationally celebrated  Goodness . He also writ...

Dr Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. He has written and presented many award-winning series and programmes for the BBC, including the flagship weekly Radio 4 programme INSIDE SCIENCE and THE CU...

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. She writes regularly for numerous outlets including  The Guardian and  The Pool , and a weekly TinyLetter, which  Vogue  said ‘pops up in your inbox like lucid dreaming.’ She also writes all of the marketing emails for Spotify, so you’ve probably deleted her work. Jean is the author of the memoir  This Really Isn’t A...

Sophie Mackintosh won the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the 2016 Virago/Stylist Short Story competition, and has been published in Granta magazine and TANK magazine among others. her debut novel The Water Cure was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nell Stevens has a First in English and Creative Writing from Warwick, after which she went on to study Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard, to receive a Marcia Trimble Fellowship and the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award for her MFA in Fiction at Boston University, and to complete a Ph. D. in Victorian literature at King’s College London. Previously the author of the mem...