Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers

In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold. Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.

The friendship between Mary and Nix has endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women reunite for a summer vacation in Greece. It’s a trip instigated by Nix, who has just learned that Mary has been diagnosed with a disease that will inevitably cut her life short. Nix, a free spirit by nature, is determined that Mary have the vacation of a lifetime, but by the time their visit to Greece is over, the ties between them have unraveled, and when they said goodbye, it’s for the last time. Gina Frangello is the author of three books of fiction: A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), which was a book club selection for NYLON magazine, The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown; Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010), which was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006).

“The most striking dystopian novels sound an alarm, focus our attention and even change the language. The Handmaid’s Tale crystallized our fears about reproductive control; Fahrenheit 451 still flames discussions of censorship; and 1984 is the lens through which we watch the Obama administration watching us. Chang-rae Lee’s unsettling new novel, On Such a Full Sea, arrives from that same frightening realm of total oversight and pinched individuality. . . . A brilliant, deeply unnerving portrait.”—The Washington Post Selected by the The New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Chang-rae Lee is also the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A Gesture Life,  Aloft, and The Surrendered, and teaches fiction at Princeton University.

“Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Unputdownable in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody’s desperate need for a tribe. Readers who’ve fallen for Shteyngart’s antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it’s laden and leavened with a deep, consequential psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date.”—Mary Karr, bestselling author of Lit and The Liars’ Club

Told by six women in one family, Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s The Sad Passions captures the alertness, beauty, and terror of childhood lived in proximity to madness. Set against the backdrop of a colonial past, spanning three generations, and shuttling from Mexico City to Oaxaca to the North Fork of Long Island to Veracruz, The Sad Passions is the lyrical story of a middle-class Mexican family torn apart by the undiagnosed mental illness of Claudia, a lost child of the 1960s and the mother of four little girls. “The Sad Passions explodes the tired assumption that women’s interiority is intrinsically domestic, fanning out women’s inner lives like the vibrant sections of a peacock’s tail. It upends our expectations of a novel about women’s family life. The cumulative effect of Gonzalez Peña’s novel is that of a hall of mirrors: an intimate, personal hall of mirrors, a psychic hall of mirrors. This, she tells us, is where women live, how women live, in the company of past selves, future selves, in the anguished haunting of possible selves. This is where women’s lives happen, in the space in between memory and present, in the split-second recognition of one’s reflection, before turning from the glass and going out into the world.”–L.A. Review of Books

There may be no author more integral to the Portland literary scene than Kevin Sampsell.   Kevin is not only the small press curator and events coordinator at Powell’s books, he’s also the editor of the Portland Noir fiction anthology,  curated this year’s Wordstock literary festival,  was in charge of LitHopPDX, Portland’s inaugural literary bar crawl, and is the publisher of the micro-press Future Tense Books.   His own books include the collections Beautiful Blemish and Creamy Bullets, and his memoir A Common Pornography.  His work has appeared in Tin House, Salon, McSweeney’s,  Best Sex Writing 2012 and Best American Essays 2013, and he is here today on Between The Covers to talk about his novel, This is Between Us.

 We seem to be in the midst of an upsurge in dystopian art and end times anxieties.  If we as a culture don’t have a sense of impending doom, we do at least have trouble imagining the future being bright and promising.   Today’s guest Lucy Corin is here on Between The Covers to talk about her new book from McSweeney’s,   A Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, a book playful both in form and content, that looks at this cultural moment from every perspective imaginable. Lucy Corin is the author of the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History of Girls and the short story collection The Entire Predicament from Tin House Books.   She is the program director of the creative writing program at UC Davis and the winner of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize who described her writing as follows:  “Lucy Corin sounds like no one; prickly, shrewd, faintly paranoid or furtive, witty and also savage, she has something of Paley’s gift for soliloquy combined with Dickinson’s passionate need to hold the world at bay, that sense of a voice emanating from a Skinner box. Her achievement is already dazzling, he promise immense.”

Jonathan Lethem is a man of many lives. For one, because of his repeated return to New York as both setting and muse in novels such as Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City, he may be New York’s closest thing to having a bard.  But Lethem is known as well for his genre fiction, his hard-boiled detective and science fiction books, his revival of the Marvel comic Omega the Unknown, and for editing the Library of America’s four-volume edition of Philip K. Dick’s novels.  Yet another side of Jonathan Lethem is that of essayist on music and culture with books about John Carpenter, the New York Mets and the Talking Heads, with his remarkable Rolling Stone interview of Bob Dylan, and a profile of James Brown that the New York Times says “stands as the best writing ever about the greatest musician of the post-World War II era.”  Given all of these accomplishments, it is no small thing that many call Lethem’s latest novel, Dissident Gardens, his best. Spanning three generations and eighty years, from the Jewish communists of Queens in the 1930s, to the folk revivalists of Greenwich Village in the 60s to the modern day Occupy movement, Dissident Gardens is both an intimate and epic portrayal of the American Left, of American Jews in the twentieth century, and of one family’s quest for transformation and self-reinvention one generation to the next.

“When most of us think of today’s great American novel, we think of Franzen’s Freedom or Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—sprawling stories that comment on contemporary society as we live it. Tumbledown, Robert Boswell’s latest, is just such a book—and one you’ll stay up until 3 a.m. reading. Over the course of a few weeks, James Candler, a 30-something therapist is about to lose everything including his job at the treatment center, his fiancée and his underwater house in the suburbs. Whether he actually loses it all becomes less important as the lives of his teenage patients intertwine with his…This look at life inside a for-profit mental health facility will make you laugh out loud, then sucker-punch you straight to sorrow…Boswell is a writer who can see the humanity, and yes, even beauty in just about anything, including a lone man sitting at a late-night diner, holding “a frosted doughnut to his nose as if it were a flower.” — Leigh Newman, ‘Oprah Book of the Week’ review

For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie’s enormous girth. She’s obsessed with food–thinking about it, eating it–and if she doesn’t stop, she won’t have much longer to live. With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.  David Naimon hosts.

Matt Bell’s novel is so unlike anything else you’ll read this year that people are struggling to describe just what it is. The Washington Post says it’s like a magical realist story chanted by druids on mushrooms, The Stranger says it feels like a Tolkein epic set inside Plato’s cave and told by Carl Jung, others mention Calvino, Borges, Kafka, and the Bible. Earlier this year Flavorwire called Matt Bell one of the 10 best millennial writers you haven’t read (yet) and NPR called Bell’s book, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, one of the smartest meditations on love, family and marriage in recent years.

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, NoViolet Bulawayo earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was the recipient of the Truman Capote fellowship. In 2011 she won the biggest literary prize in Africa, the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Hitting Budapest,” first published by Junot Diaz in the Boston Review. Bulawayo talks with Between The Covers host, David Naimon, about her debut novel, We Need New Names, a powerful story of emigration and immigration during Zimbabwe’s Lost Decade.

Host David Naimon talks with Lenore Zion about her debut novel, Stupid Children, a book Thomas Michael Duncan of Necessary Fiction calls “a bildungsroman of twisted proportions told with startling clarity through the filter of a smart, psychoanalytic perspective. No character is safe from Zion’s unapologetic examinations. She bestows her protagonist with an open mind, a sharp intellect, and a sweltering imagination—all of the requisite ingredients for a disturbing, fascinating novel.”

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. President Chase Williams has sworn to protect the people of the United States from the menace in their midst, but is becoming the very thing he has promised to destroy. So far the threat has been controlled by laws and violence and drugs. But the night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge, and the battle for humanity will begin. Host David Naimon talks with author Benjamin Percy about his new novel, Red Moon.

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 (alongwith David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson) for her debut novel, Swamplandia!   Now Russell is back with a magical new collection of stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, that showcases her gifts at their inimitable best.