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

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]