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

One of Le Guin’s lesser known but lifelong practices was that of a translator. Her translations of the first Latin American Nobel Prize Laureate in literature (and the only Latin American woman to receive the award), Gabriela Mistral, were the first truly substantive presentations of her work in both English and Spanish. She’s translated other […]

Today’s guest Dionne Brand, to borrow the words of John Keene, “is without question one of the major living poets in the English language.” Kamau Brathwaite called Brand “our first major exile female poet.” Adrienne Rich described her as “a cultural critic of uncompromising courage, an artist in language and ideas, and an intellectual conscience […]

“White supremacy makes for terrible readers” says today’s guest Elaine Castillo, arguing that we are all overeducated in a set of fundamentally terrible reading techniques, ones that impoverish us as readers and thinkers, ones that diminish the availability of meaning and meaningfulness in our lives. When Castillo says “read,” and suggests that how we read […]

Today’s conversation is about one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most iconic and influential essays: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay that deserves an entire episode to itself. And who better to discuss it than Lidia Yuknavitch, whose latest novel Thrust follows a character who herself is a “carrier.” Because this essay has influenced […]

Claire Schwartz’ poetry collection Civil Service looks at the ways ordinary, everyday actions uphold and sustain state violence, the ways civility can and does serve extraordinary atrocities. The world of this collection, populated by civil positions—The Accountant, The Archivist, The Curator, The Intern—also has within it a fugitive voice, a disruptive voice, the voice of Amira. […]

Morgan Talty’s collection of linked short stories is set on the Penobscot Reservation on Indian Island in Maine. But Morgan is quick to point out that these stories are not Penobscot stories in so far as they do not ‘represent’ the Penobscot people, that even people who are praising the book are often falling into […]

Ursula K. Le Guin’s biographer, Julie Phillips, joins “Crafting with Ursula” to talk about the writing mother, how Le Guin’s embrace of both writing and motherhood influenced her engagement with feminism, as well as with story form, and ultimately how it prompted her to develop a philosophical framework from which to re-vision her own work […]

Daniel Mendelsohn’s latest book you could say is about digression and about ring composition, a form of storytelling with digression at its heart. And yet this book, about digression, is not only his shortest and most concise, a mere 112 pages, but also somehow contains all the concerns of his previous books and much more, […]

The Immortal King Rao is somehow three narratives in one, a historical novel set within a Dalit community in 1950s India, a near-future tech dystopia on the islands of the Puget Sound near Seattle, and an immigration story from the former to the latter. As a technology reporter herself, Vauhini Vara is interested in artificial […]

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by them,” says Ursula K. Le Guin. “From within.” This is just one of many quotes that arise from Le Guin’s high regard for the child reader and for the unique intelligence of children. Her philosophy around the importance of the imagination and of imaginative […]

Hernan Diaz’s debut novel In the Distance went on to become not only one of the great debuts of the year, but a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. His follow-up Trust is also a book that engages with and interrogates the stories that the United States tells about itself and […]

The first time Rae Armantrout came on the show, in 2017, we looked at her poetry through the lens of her interest in quantum physics. Now, five years later, with the release of this double collection of poems, we look at her career-long desire to cultivate a poetics that encourages life to interrupt and interject […]

Today’s guest, Kim Stanley Robinson, is perhaps the living writer most associated with utopian literature today. And as a student of the philosopher, political theorist, and literary critic Fredric Jameson, Robinson has thought deeply about the history of utopias, the history of the novel, and the strange hybrid form that became the utopian novel. In […]

Courtney Maum’s latest book, her memoir The Year of the Horses, is about a writer at a rough point in her writing career, in her marriage, as a mother, as a woman, finding a way back to herself in all of these spheres by learning to listen and communicate, outside of language, to another species. […]

Today’s guest Ada Limón discusses her latest collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, whose poems ask and explore what it means to be a human animal among animals, and how language can be a means or an obstacle to this desire. We talk about the relationship of joy to death, poetry to praise, and the […]