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4 episodes with henry prize stories
2 episodes with henry prize stories
2 episodes with henry prize stories
2 episodes with henry prize stories
2 episodes with henry prize stories
2 episodes with henry prize stories
2 episodes with henry prize stories
2 episodes with henry prize stories
2 episodes with henry prize stories
This week, we discuss McSweeney's new quarterly issue: McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers, featuring writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. We are joined by contributors and guest editors of the issue, Thi Bui and Vu Tran, as well as McSweeney's Quarterly Editor Rita Bullwinkel. You can learn more about their work in the episode description below.During the episode, Thi, Vu, and Rita mention upcoming events in celebration of this issue. You can learn more about these special events at the links below. We hope to see you at one of these!Asian Art Museum | San Francisco | May 1 | 3:45 pm Natasha Reichle, Associate Curator of Southeast Asian Art, leads a special curator's choice discussion with McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers co-guest editor Vu Tran and contributing author Doan Bui.Tenderloin Museum | San Francisco | May 1 | 6:00 pm A block party in the heart of Little Saigon. Readings by Vu Tran and Doan Bui, plus a DJ set by Topazu.University of Chicago | Chicago | May 15 | 5:00 pm Co-editors Vu Tran and Thi Bui will be joined by fellow contributor Isabelle Pelaud for a reading and celebration of the issue's publication.This conversation originally took place April 7, 2025 and was recorded via Zoom. We hope you enjoy entering the Mind of a Writer.AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOMEMore about The Make Believers:In McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers (guest edited by Thi Bui and Vu Tran), ten writers of the Vietnamese diaspora write from the eclectic hodgepodge that is their shared imagination of what it means to be "Vietnamese." Packaged in a beautiful foil-stamped cigar box (with art by Bui on each and every surface), and including two booklets, one menu, and a glossary of broken Vietnamese, the work in this issue spans from highbrow to lowbrow, proper to naughty, logical to absurd, and painful to funny. Published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, its contributors work across perspectives and multiple languages. In this completely singular, nothing-else-of-its-kind anthology, these artists write (and illustrate!) from a place of collective loss and joy.Featuring work by: Doan Bui, Thi Bui, H'Rina DeTroy, Anna Moï, Hoài Huong Nguyen, Vaan Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Bao Phi, Paul Tran, and Vu Tran. Order your copy of McSweeney's 78: The Make Believers here.About our guests:THI BUI is a writer and artist from Viet Nam, California, and New York, now planting roots in New Orleans. Best known for her graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, she has also been a longtime educator in public high schools, a professor of comics, an organizer and artist-activist, an ambivalent sculptor and puppeteer, and a fledgling screenwriter. She received a Caldecott Honor as the illustrator of her first children's book, A Different Pond, by Bao Phi.VU TRAN is the author of Dragonfish and a forthcoming novel, Your Origins. His other writing has appeared in publications like The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007: The Best Stories of the Year, The Best American Mystery Stories, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam, and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, and he is an associate professor of practice in the arts at the University of Chicago, where he directs undergraduate studies in creative writing.RITA BULLWINKEL is the author of Headshot and Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award. She is a 2022 recipient of a Whiting Award, the editor of McSweeney's Quarterly, a contributing editor at NOON, the creator of Oral Florist, and a Picador Guest Professor of Literature at Leipzig University in Germany, where she teaches courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building.
Not Yet is the story of Gabrielle, a woman traveling to the absurdly picturesque coastline of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula with her son, their first family trip since her separation from his father. It is a place that holds many memories, and when she suddenly finds herself bleeding uncontrollably all over Tulum, the past catches up with her.It's a startling, powerful story about womanhood, family, youth and mid-life, that is undeniably topical.Joanna Hershon is the author of five novels. Her writing and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, among others, and her work was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize Stories. Joanna has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Edward Albee Foundation. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Joanna grew up in New York and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, and their twin sons and daughter.This show was produced by Tabitha Potts. DonateWe are a volunteer-led organisation and appreciate any donations towards our running costs.Buy us a coffeeBecome a patreonContact usVisit our our website Storyradio.orgSound effectsbeach-wave-cliff-tulum-ruins.wav by Geoff-Bremner-Audio -- https://freesound.org/s/667331/ -- License: Creative Commons 0Airy wind chimes quintet at Hunter's Tor, Teign Gorge by Philip_Goddard -- https://freesound.org/s/700528/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0Podcast Cover ImageSource Tulum Archaeological Site - Quintana Roo - Mexico - 01Author Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Patricia Engel is the author of five books including the newest collection of short stories, The Faraway World; Infinite Country, a New York Times Bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick; The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, and a New York Times Notable Book. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, Patricia teaches creative writing at the University of Miami. Patricia Engel joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss how ideas become short stories or novels, how Veins of the Ocean started as a short story and became a novel, how the ending a short story differs from the ending of a novel, why she likes first person, knowing what to leave out in a short story, and more. For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We've stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You'll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album's worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners. (Recorded on April 25, 2024) Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)
In this episode of the Watchung Booksellers Podcast, authors Joyce Maynard and Alice Elliott Dark rejoice in the launch of Maynard's latest novel How the Light Gets In, recorded in-store at Watchung Booksellers.Joyce Maynard has been publishing bestselling, literary books that shine a light on forbidden subjects for more than fifty years. She is the author of twelve previous novels and five books of nonfiction, as well as the syndicated column Domestic Affairs. Her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, has been translated into sixteen languages. Her novels To Die For and Labor Day were both adapted for film. Deemed “a master storyteller at the top of her game” by Wally Lamb, she divides her time between homes in California, New Hampshire, and Guatemala.Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, as well as two collections of short stories, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry: Prize Stories, among others. Her award-winning story “In the Gloaming” was made into two films and was chosen for inclusion in Best American Stories of the Century. Dark is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is a professor at Rutgers-Newark in the English department and the MFA program.Resources:New York Times Book Review PodcastAnthem by Leonard Cohen Kintsugi John PrineSinead O'ConnorBooks:A full list of the books and authors mentioned in this episode is available here. Register for Upcoming Events.The Watchung Booksellers Podcast is produced by Kathryn Counsell and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, NJ. The show is edited by Kathryn Counsell and Bree Testa. Special thanks to Timmy Kellenyi and Derek Mattheiss. Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica. Art & design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Shurtleff. Thanks to all the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids' Room! If you liked our episode please like, follow, and share! Stay in touch!Email: wbpodcast@watchungbooksellers.comSocial: @watchungbooksellersSign up for our newsletter to get the latest on our shows, events, and book recommendations!
Hi Everyone, We're a little late with this episode and it's all my fault! As I mentioned in my May 1st blog post (sign up here for updates), for the first time in four years, I conducted an amazing interview with Sheila Kohler and forgot to hit record on Zoom. Sheila--the most gracious person on Earth--forgave me for wasting 45 minutes of her time and agreed to re-record the episode. Thank you to Sheila for sitting down with me twice! After I recovered from the shame, I realized this might be a great boon for readers. I loved Cracks—the short story, the novel, and the movie! You will find links to all three below. It was fascinating to talk about Sheila's adaptation from short story to novel and to hear about the making of the movie and the decision to set the movie in England rather than South Africa. I hope you have had time to read the short story and the novel. What did you think of the movie? Let me know if you have any follow-up questions or comments. I would love to hear. Here are the links: Content Warning: Sexual Assault Cracks, the short story, by Sheila Kohler Cracks, The Novel by Sheila Kohler, available at Bookshop and Amazon. Cracks, The Movie In other news... I am taking a sabbatical from the podcast this summer to rest, regroup, and figure out what direction to take this show in in the future. I love doing it, but every now and then, I think it's a good idea to reevaluate and hone in on what has been valuable and what parts need to go. My first guest in the fall is Tim Tomlinson. Although I will be talking to him about one of his short stories, he has a new book coming out this month. It looks terrific! Check out kellyfordon.com for a picture of the cover and publication information from Nirala. Cheers! Kelly Sheila Kohler Bio: Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the younger of two girls. Upon matriculation at 17 from Saint Andrews, with a distinction in history (1958), she left the country for Europe. She lived for 15 years in Paris, where she married, did her undergraduate degree in literature at the Sorbonne, and a graduate degree in psychology at the Institut Catholique. After raising her three girls, she moved to the USA in 1981, and did an MFA in writing at Columbia. In the summer of 1987, her first published story, “The Mountain,” came out in “The Quarterly” and received an O.Henry prize and was published in the O.Henry Prize Stories of 1988. It also became the first chapter in her first novel, “The Perfect Place,” which was published by Knopf the next year. Knopf also published the first volume of her short stories, “Miracles in America,” in 1990. Kohler has won two O.Henry prizes for “The Mountain” 1988 and “The Transitional Object” 2008. She has been short-listed in the O.Henry Prize Stories for three years running: in 1999 for the story, “Africans”; in 2000 for “Casualty,” which had appeared in the Ontario Review; and 2001 for “Death in Rome,” a story which had appeared in The Antioch Review. “Casualty” was also included in the list of distinguished stories in The Best American Short Stories of 2001. In 1994 she published a second novel, “The House on R Street,” also with Knopf, about which Patrick McGrath said, in “The New York Times Book Review: ” “Sheila Kohler has achieved in this short novel a remarkable atmosphere, a fine delicate fusion of period, society and climate.” In 1998 she published a short story, “Africans,” in Story Magazine, which was chosen for the Best American Short Stories of 1999, was read and recorded at Symphony Space and at The American Repertory Theatre in Boston and was translated into Japanese. It was also included in her second collection of stories,” One Girl,” published by Helicon Nine, which won the Willa Cather Prize in 1998 judged by William Gass. In 1999 she published her third novel, “Cracks,” with Zoland, which received a starred review from Kirkus, was nominated for an Impac award in 2001, and was chosen one of the best books of the year by Newsday and by Library Journal.” Cracks” also came out with Bloomsbury in England, was translated into French and Dutch, and will come out in Hebrew. It has been optioned six times by Killer films and Working Track 2. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September, 2009, and at the London film festival and came out here in the summer of 2010 and is now on Netflix. It is directed by Jordan Scott, with Eva Green in the role of Miss G. In 2000 Kohler received the Smart Family Foundation Prize for “Underworld,” a story published in the October “Yale Review.” In 2001 she published her fourth novel,” The Children of Pithiviers,” with Zoland, a novel about the concentration camps during the Vicky Period in France in Pithiviers and Beaune la Rolande. In 2003 she was awarded a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Institute to work on a historical novel based on the life on the Marquise de la Tour du Pin, a French aristocrat who escaped the Terror by bringing her family to Albany, New York. Also that year she published her third volume of short stories, “Stories from Another World” with the Ontario Review Press. She won the Antioch Review Prize in 2004 for work in that magazine. Both “ The Perfect Place” and “Miracles in America” came out in England with Jonathan Cape and in paperback with Vintage International. “The Perfect Place” was translated into French, German, Japanese, and Portuguese. Her fifth novel, “Crossways,” came out in October, 2004, also, with the Ontario Review Press edited by Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates. It received a starred Kirkus Review and is out in paperback with the Other Press as well as “The Perfect Place.” Kohler has published essays in The Boston Globe, Salmagundi (summer 2004, 2009), The Bellevue Literary magazine, and O Magazine,”The Heart Speaks” ( May 2004), “What Happy Ever After Really Looks Like” (2008) and reviews in The New Leader and Bomb as well as essays in The American Scholar in 2014 and 2015. Kohler began teaching at The Writer's Voice in 1990, going on from there to teach at SUNY Purchase, Sarah Lawrence, Colgate, CCNY , Bennington and Columbia. She has taught creative writing at Princeton since 2008 and now teaches freshman seminars there . Sheila's sixth novel, “Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness” was published in 2007, and the paperback was published with Berkely in 2008. “The Transitional Object” in Boulevard won an O.Henry prize and is included in the 2008 volume. Her tenth book, “Becoming Jane Eyre” came out with Viking Penguin in December, 2009, and was a New York Times editor's pick. Casey Cep wrote in the Boston Globe about this novel: “With an appreciation for their craft and sympathy for their difficult profession, Kohler's “Becoming Jane Eyre'' is a tender telling of the Brontë family's saga and the stories they told.” Her eleventh book “Love Child” was published by Penguin in America and by La Table Ronde in France. In June of 2012, her twelfth book “The Bay of Foxes,” was published by Penguin. “Dreaming for Freud” was published by Penguin in 2014. It will be translated into Turkish In 2013 the story, “Magic Man” was published in Best American Short Stories. Sheila Kohler published her memoir “Once we were sisters” in 2017 with Penguin in America and with Canongate in England and Alba in Spain. Sheila's latest novel is “Open Secrets” published by Penguin in July 2020. Kohler currently lives in New York and Amagansett. ***
Following its late February premiere, FX's Shōgun became the No. 1 general entertainment series premiere globally for Disney and FX's biggest premiere on Hulu in the U.S. With rave reviews from critics, Shōgun has become TV's most buzzed about new series.Streaming weekly on Hulu, Shōgun is set in Japan in the year 1600 at the dawn of a civil war. Lord Yoshii Toranaga is fighting for his life as his enemies on the Council of Regents unite against him. When a mysterious European ship is found marooned in a nearby fishing village, its English pilot, John Blackthorne, comes bearing secrets that could help Toranaga tip the scales of power. Toranaga's and Blackthorne's fates become tied to their translator, Toda Mariko, a mysterious Christian noblewoman. While serving her lord amidst this fraught political landscape, Mariko must reconcile her newfound companionship with Blackthorne, her commitment to the faith that saved her and her duty to her late father.Shōgun is created for television by Rachel Kondo (Co-Creator/ Executive Producer/Writer) & Justin Marks (Co-Creator/Showrunner/Executive Producer/Writer). Marks wrote Disney's hit film The Jungle Book and co-wrote the Academy Award®-nominated Top Gun: Maverick. Kondo has written for various publications and her story “Girl of Few Seasons” was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories and selected as a juror favorite by Elizabeth Strout.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.
Following its late February premiere, FX's Shōgun became the No. 1 general entertainment series premiere globally for Disney and FX's biggest premiere on Hulu in the U.S. With rave reviews from critics, Shōgun has become TV's most buzzed about new series.Streaming weekly on Hulu, Shōgun is set in Japan in the year 1600 at the dawn of a civil war. Lord Yoshii Toranaga is fighting for his life as his enemies on the Council of Regents unite against him. When a mysterious European ship is found marooned in a nearby fishing village, its English pilot, John Blackthorne, comes bearing secrets that could help Toranaga tip the scales of power. Toranaga's and Blackthorne's fates become tied to their translator, Toda Mariko, a mysterious Christian noblewoman. While serving her lord amidst this fraught political landscape, Mariko must reconcile her newfound companionship with Blackthorne, her commitment to the faith that saved her and her duty to her late father.Shōgun is created for television by Rachel Kondo (Co-Creator/ Executive Producer/Writer) & Justin Marks (Co-Creator/Showrunner/Executive Producer/Writer). Marks wrote Disney's hit film The Jungle Book and co-wrote the Academy Award®-nominated Top Gun: Maverick. Kondo has written for various publications and her story “Girl of Few Seasons” was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories and selected as a juror favorite by Elizabeth Strout. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.
This conversation features best-selling author and book store owner Ann Patchett, interviewed by author and professor Kevin Wilson. They discuss Patchett's book “Tom Lake” before a live audience at the Kentucky Author Forum. This conversation was recorded on February 12th, 2024 at the Kentucky Center in Louisville. ANN PATCHETT is the author of nine novels, four books of nonfiction and one children's book. Patchett has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a National Humanities Medal, England's Women's Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Book Sense Book of the Year, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her novel “The Dutch House” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In November, 2011, she opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee. She has since become a spokesperson for independent booksellers, championing books and bookstores. KEVIN WILSON is the author of two story collections, and four novels. His book “Nothing to See Here” was a New York Times bestseller and a “Read with Jenna” book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. Wilson is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of the South.
Yiyun Li (winner of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction) chats with Prize Director Michael Kelleher about French Catholic monarchist author Georges Bernanos's Mouchette, the joys of reading together, and why inarticulate characters often live the deepest lives. Reading list: Mouchette by Georges Bernanos, tr. by J.C. Whitehouse • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy • Tolstoy Together • Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Wednesday's Child, The Book of Goose, Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life as well as the book Tolstoy Together. She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
This week, Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his new book A Man of Two Faces, a highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir in which he rewinds the film of his own life with insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism. Nguyen is joined by writer and professor Vu Tran. This conversation originally took place October 23, 2023 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum. AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME About A Man of Two Faces: Viet Thanh Nguyen expands the genre of personal memoir in A Man of Two Faces by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son. At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICA™. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening. Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today. VIET THANH NGUYEN was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles. VU TRAN is the author of Dragonfish—a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year—as well as a forthcoming novel, Your Origins. His writing has also appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly, and the New York Times. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, and is also the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts.
"In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination. I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility."How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston."In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination.I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility."https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston."In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination.I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility."https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination. I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility."How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston."It's a thrill to work with actors you admire. And I got to work with Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston and their wonderful actors. The whole business of film runs on compliments because then if you compliment people, you don't have to pay them. And so I got to be on the set in the Carpathians when they were filming, and I got a steady diet of, 'Oh my God, you're such a good writer. This is such a good screenplay!' And I was just basking in it. As a fiction writer, you don't get that very often. So, I was just happy to have a little narcissistic warm bath and float around in that for a while and imagine myself as Casey Affleck's favorite writer, which I think I was for 30 minutes or something like that.Cinema is not very good at interiority. Cinema is good at behavior, at action, at allowing us to figure out through exterior signals what's going on...is very appealing to me. So as soon as you tell me that this was the biggest tsunami ever, I'm like, I want to know more about that. And that kind of childlike wonder about the visual is often what drives me to sit down and do a story in the first place. So I start with a much more visual and a much more spectacular, and I'm sure cinema drove me in that direction in the first place."https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"It's a thrill to work with actors you admire. And I got to work with Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston and their wonderful actors. The whole business of film runs on compliments because then if you compliment people, you don't have to pay them. And so I got to be on the set in the Carpathians when they were filming, and I got a steady diet of, 'Oh my God, you're such a good writer. This is such a good screenplay!' And I was just basking in it. As a fiction writer, you don't get that very often. So, I was just happy to have a little narcissistic warm bath and float around in that for a while and imagine myself as Casey Affleck's favorite writer, which I think I was for 30 minutes or something like that.Cinema is not very good at interiority. Cinema is good at behavior, at action, at allowing us to figure out through exterior signals what's going on...is very appealing to me. So as soon as you tell me that this was the biggest tsunami ever, I'm like, I want to know more about that. And that kind of childlike wonder about the visual is often what drives me to sit down and do a story in the first place. So I start with a much more visual and a much more spectacular, and I'm sure cinema drove me in that direction in the first place."How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston."Once the Columbine shooting happened, I remember thinking that discussion that we had would have been very different if that kid had had access to automatic weapons because the argument that we used to talk him out of it was you're not going to kill enough people to make it worth it. And that kind of alienation I never forgot. Because I also remembered the way adolescence is so apocalyptic. That's something that seems unendurable on Wednesday. On Thursday you sort of go, Okay, I think I can get through that."https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"Once the Columbine shooting happened, I remember thinking that discussion that we had would have been very different if that kid had had access to automatic weapons because the argument that we used to talk him out of it was you're not going to kill enough people to make it worth it. And that kind of alienation I never forgot. Because I also remembered the way adolescence is so apocalyptic. That's something that seems unendurable on Wednesday. On Thursday you sort of go, Okay, I think I can get through that."How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
The Creative Process in 10 minutes or less · Arts, Culture & Society
"In terms of what I'm writing, I'm always trying to make myself a more interesting human being. And so that means I'm coming across these human dilemmas where I'm like what would it have been like to be in that position? And that snags my emotional imagination. I do think that literature is all about extending the empathetic imagination. And so I'm always looking to educate myself in emotional terms, too. Because I'm very interested in the way we respond in those situations where it feels like we both have responsibility, and we don't have responsibility."How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston."What the arts offer is what kids need. Which is some kind of human companionship. Some sense that you're not alone out there. And certainly reading is on the decline, and that's a huge problem. I'm not willing to concede that we all should give up reading and critical thinking, but our culture is pushing us in that direction. I have three children five years apart. And the youngest is 21 years old and her connection to the phone is way more profound than the oldest one. We all are dependent on our phones now. But that sense we have that we need to be checking it all the time, that sense we have that we will not immerse ourselves in the arts anymore because there might be something on our phone we have to check, that's way more widespread now than it used to be."https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"What the arts offer is what kids need. Which is some kind of human companionship. Some sense that you're not alone out there. And certainly reading is on the decline, and that's a huge problem. I'm not willing to concede that we all should give up reading and critical thinking, but our culture is pushing us in that direction. I have three children five years apart. And the youngest is 21 years old and her connection to the phone is way more profound than the oldest one. We all are dependent on our phones now. But that sense we have that we need to be checking it all the time, that sense we have that we will not immerse ourselves in the arts anymore because there might be something on our phone we have to check, that's way more widespread now than it used to be."How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.https://jimshepard.wordpress.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Yiyun Li is the author of the story collection Wednesday's Child, available from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Li is the author of several works of fiction--The Book of Goose, Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl--and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram YouTube TikTok Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Deesha and Dawnie sit down with Jamil Jan Kochai, whose short story “Enough!” from his collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking / Penguin Random House Audio), was featured in our previous episode. Kochai discusses how he fell in love with storytelling and short stories as a form—reflecting on his family, his childhood, and how his stories, characters, and themes come naturally because they're rooted in his upbringing. Kochai also talks about the challenge of writing as a public experience as he becomes more well-known in the literary world, and how he approaches writing personally, where he consistently returns to the idea of writing as writing — separating writing from “the noise.” “In storytelling, sometimes you have to build walls in order to dance within them.” *** Support our show: https://ursastory.com/join/ *** Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Books Mentioned The Haunting of Hajji Hotak (Jamil Jan Kochai) The Haunting of Hajji Hotak audiobook One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez) “Sonny's Blues” (James Baldwin) Sandra Cisneros In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Daniyal Mueenuddin) “Train to Harbin” (Asako Serizawa) Inheritors (Asako Serizawa) Toni Morrison About the Author Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and a finalist for 2022 National Book Award. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. More from Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (Deesha Philyaw) The Final Revival of Opal & Nev (Dawnie Walton) *** Episode editor: Kelly Araja Associate producer: Marina Leigh Producer: Mark Armstrong Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://ursastory.com/join
First pages are impossible… so we're hearing from authors about how they got them right. In this episode, Frances de Pontes Peebles discusses the first pages of her latest novel, The Air You Breathe, her powerful use of a reminiscent narrator, how to plant the seeds of what your reader needs to know (and leave out what they don't), how best to include lists and dialog to wake up your prose, and how to stick to your decisions as a writer.Peebles's first pages can be found here.Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.Frances de Pontes Peebles is the author of the novels The Seamstress and The Air You Breathe. She is a Creative Writing Fellow in Literature for 2020 from The National Endowment for the Arts. Her books have been translated into ten languages and won the Elle Grand Prix for fiction, the Friends of American Writers Award, and the James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Fellowship. Her second novel, The Air You Breathe, was a Book of the Month Club pick. Born in Pernambuco, Brazil, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received a Fulbright Grant, Brazil's Sacatar Foundation Fellowship, and was a Teaching Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her short stories and essays have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Guernica, Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Catapult, and Real Simple. Her novel, The Seamstress, was adapted for film and mini-series on Brazil's Globo Network. She is proud to serve as Chair of the Board of the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights. In Spring 2019, she served as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com
Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton introduce “Enough!”, a short story by Jamil Jan Kochai, from his collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. Kochai's story discusses intergenerational trauma, violences of both war and refuge, and rage as we follow Rangeena, a mother reflecting on her family and own past. The story is performed by Suehyla El-Attar Young, and it's excerpted from the audiobook of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, produced by Penguin Random House Audio. Our thanks to them for sharing this story with Ursa's listeners. Jamil Jan Kochai's writing is lyrical, his images surreal, and because of the cyclical narrative, the repetition, and obsession with themes of rambling, the story leaves us breathless. “Enough!” interrogates the ways in which we suffocate, the ways we're haunted, and the ways we survive. “Enough rambling, enough advice, enough pills, enough nightmares, enough lung damage, enough ghosts, enough beautiful dying boys, enough bomb smoke, enough burning apple trees, enough staring white neighbors, enough heavy breathing…” Come back next week for our conversation with Jamil Jan Kochai. Help Us Fund Future Seasons and Shows Ursa Short Fiction is supported by our listeners. Share this podcast with a friend—or become a Member to help fund production: https://ursastory.com/join/ Reading List The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, by Jamil Jan Kochai (Penguin Books) The Haunting of Hajji Hotak audiobook (Penguin Random House Audio) More stories and essays by Jamil Jan Kochai About the Author Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and a finalist for 2022 National Book Award. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. More from Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (Deesha Philyaw) The Final Revival of Opal & Nev (Dawnie Walton) *** Episode editor: Kelly Araja Associate producer: Marina Leigh Audio excerpted courtesy Penguin Random House Audio from THE HAUNTING OF HAJJI HOTAK by Jamil Jan Kochai, excerpt read by Suehyla El-Attar Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://ursastory.com/join
Kenan Orhan's fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Common, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. His story collection, I Am My Country and Other Stories, is published by Random House. Kenan teaches literature and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute and lives in Kansas. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about the collection, his relationship with Turkey, how his approach to the short story form has changed over times, how his stories exemplify and depart from the Joy Williams' rules of short stories, and much more. Kenan also talks about finding his agent and his path to publication. A reminder that April is the one-year anniversary of our Patreon page, and 2023 is the 25th anniversary of the show. We're winding down the month, but still offering some additional perks and incentives through the end of April. To learn more, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. (Recorded on April 11, 2023) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Co-Host: Marrie Stone Music and sound design: Travis Barrett
Themes of food in literature inspire questions of resistance, cultural memory, gender and identity. This episode titled Khayali Pulao: On Food Writing touches upon food and food politics in Indian writing. Here, it is not merely a marker of identity, but can be a source of joy as well as pain and alienation. Writers Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Sumana Roy discuss the ways in which food operates to construct nostalgia and to evoke historical and individual memory. Along the way, it can also expose class, caste and gender divides in society. It may mean coming together as family and sharing bonds of sisterhood but fictions about food can also express hunger, poverty, displacement and subsequent marginalization. Roy reads the poem "The Astonishing Smell of Rice" by Birendra Chattopadhyayon which is about hunger and how the refrain is a reminder of circadian rhythms broken by hunger pangs. Divakaruni's writings use food as symbols of diasporic identity and even feminist solidarity. She argues that food can bring about an ethos of feminist empowerment and sisterhood beyond the stereotypes of gender. Both writers come together to engage food in Indian writing across various registers. They highlight the significance of “eating cultures” and also reveal their favorite foods and what they like to cook! Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. Divakaruni started out as a poet and her poetry collections include Black Candle and Leaving Yuba City. Her first collection of stories Arranged Marriage won an American Book Award and a PEN Josephine Miles Award. Her novels include The Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, Queen of Dreams, One Amazing Thing, Palace of Illusions, Oleander Girl and Before We Visit the Goddess. She has also written a young adult fantasy series called The Brotherhood of the Conch which is located in India and draws on the culture and folklore of that region. Divakaruni's work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in anthologies including the Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Her fiction has been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Indonesian, Bengali, Turkish and Japanese. Divakaruni's novel The Mistress of Spices was made into film of the same name in 2005 starring Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai. and her novel Sister of my Heart was made into a television series by Suhasini Maniratnam in Tamil and aired in India, as Anbulla Snegithiye (Loving Friend). Sumana Roy is an Indian writer and poet. Her works include How I Became a Tree (2017), a work of non-fiction; Missing (2019), a novel; Out of Syllabus (2019), a collection of poems; and My Mother's Lover and Other Stories (2019), a short story collection. Her unpublished novel Love in the Chicken's Neck was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (2008). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal On Eating : A Multilingual Journal of Food and Eating. Her first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, was shortlisted for the 2017 Shakti Bhatt Prize. Roy is from Siliguri, a city in Darjeeling district of West Bengal. She writes a monthly column, Treelogy, in The Hindu about plant life. Her poems and essays are published in Granta, The Caravan, Guernica Himal Southasian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, American Book Review, The White Review, Journal of South Asian Studies, and Journal of Life Writing. She is currently an Associate Professor at Ashoka University.Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing
Author Jai Chakrabarti explores unexpected avenues to discovering family and identity in his new short story collection. Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf), which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf, Feb 2023). His short fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize and also performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. His nonfiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer's Digest, Berfrois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and is a trained computer scientist. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.
Patricia Engel is the author of Infinite Country, a New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club selection; The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of Colombia's national book award, the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, and herself a dual citizen, Patricia is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Miami. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Richard Bausch (“A master of the novel as well as the story ” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times) previews a chapter of his 13th novel, PLAYHOUSE, scheduled for release by Alfred A. Knopf on February 14, then talks with Alan Rifkin about the book and his craft. Bausch's works have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman's Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including in The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story. The Modern Library published The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch in March, 1996. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. In 1995 he was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Since Cassill's passing, in 2002, he has been the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard is the 2013 Winner of the REA award for Short Fiction. He is currently a professor at Chapman University in Orange, California. Host Alan Rifkin's novels, essays and short stories of Los Angeles have been published widely. Learn more at www.alanrifkin.com.Intro music is from the song "Slow," performed by Sally Dworsky. Written by Sally Dworsky and Chris Hickey. Available on iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music and all other streaming platforms.Podcast art by Ryan Longnecker.Special thanks to Ben Rifkin.
The first story in Jamil Jan Kochai's newest collection has an interesting title and premise. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking: 2022). But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan, how its borne the brunt of generations of imperial and geopolitical conflict–and how that history is etched on its people. Jamil's book is about Afghanistan–as well as Afghans and Afghan-Americans, grappling with history and strife, conflict and tension, family and community, often amidst the backdrop of an unfeeling U.S. invasion. Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking: 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Today, Jamil and I will talk about his short stories, his Afghan and Afghan-American characters, how they relate to today's Afghanistan–and some of the surprising inspirations for some of his stories. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
The first story in Jamil Jan Kochai's newest collection has an interesting title and premise. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking: 2022). But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan, how its borne the brunt of generations of imperial and geopolitical conflict–and how that history is etched on its people. Jamil's book is about Afghanistan–as well as Afghans and Afghan-Americans, grappling with history and strife, conflict and tension, family and community, often amidst the backdrop of an unfeeling U.S. invasion. Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking: 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Today, Jamil and I will talk about his short stories, his Afghan and Afghan-American characters, how they relate to today's Afghanistan–and some of the surprising inspirations for some of his stories. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies
The first story in Jamil Jan Kochai's newest collection has an interesting title and premise. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking: 2022). But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan, how its borne the brunt of generations of imperial and geopolitical conflict–and how that history is etched on its people. Jamil's book is about Afghanistan–as well as Afghans and Afghan-Americans, grappling with history and strife, conflict and tension, family and community, often amidst the backdrop of an unfeeling U.S. invasion. Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking: 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Today, Jamil and I will talk about his short stories, his Afghan and Afghan-American characters, how they relate to today's Afghanistan–and some of the surprising inspirations for some of his stories. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies
The first story in Jamil Jan Kochai's newest collection has an interesting title and premise. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking: 2022). But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan, how its borne the brunt of generations of imperial and geopolitical conflict–and how that history is etched on its people. Jamil's book is about Afghanistan–as well as Afghans and Afghan-Americans, grappling with history and strife, conflict and tension, family and community, often amidst the backdrop of an unfeeling U.S. invasion. Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking: 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Today, Jamil and I will talk about his short stories, his Afghan and Afghan-American characters, how they relate to today's Afghanistan–and some of the surprising inspirations for some of his stories. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
The first story in Jamil Jan Kochai's newest collection has an interesting title and premise. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking: 2022). But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan, how its borne the brunt of generations of imperial and geopolitical conflict–and how that history is etched on its people. Jamil's book is about Afghanistan–as well as Afghans and Afghan-Americans, grappling with history and strife, conflict and tension, family and community, often amidst the backdrop of an unfeeling U.S. invasion. Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking: 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Today, Jamil and I will talk about his short stories, his Afghan and Afghan-American characters, how they relate to today's Afghanistan–and some of the surprising inspirations for some of his stories. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review
Getting pacing right and keeping the reader's emotional and intellectual attention isn't about the stuff you make happen, but the incremental revelation of information about your characters' emotional makeup, their relationships, and the way they see (or don't see) their world as well as thematic resonances. Such revelations are often more implicit than explicit, sitting in the subtext of a scene, and giving the writer-in-process a good measuring tool to understand what they've put on the page and how to use it. To help us understand this important concept, we talk to esteemed author and teacher Jim Shepard. Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including most recently Phase Six, and The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner. Seven of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and two for Pushcart Prizes. He's also won a Guggenheim Foundation Award, the Library of Congress/ Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction and the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. He teaches at Williams College. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com
Jonathan Escoffery in conversation with Yohanca Delgado, celebrating the publication of "If I Survive You" by Jonathan Escoffery, published by Farrar Straus Giroux. This live event took place in Kerouac Alley, between City Lights and Vesuvio Cafe, and was hosted by Peter Maravelis. You can purchase copies of "If I Survive You" directly from City Lights here: https://citylights.com/if-i-survive-you/ Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Passages North, Zyzzyva, and Electric Literature, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, is a PhD fellow in the University of Southern California's PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program, and in 2021 was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. "If I Survive You" is his debut book. Yohanca Delgado is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts recipient. Her fiction appears in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2022, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021, The Paris Review, One Story, A Public Space, Story, and elsewhere. Her essays appear in TIME, The Believer, and New York Times Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University and is a graduate of the 2019 Clarion workshop. She is an assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse, a 2021 Emerging Critic at the National Book Critics Circle, and a member of the inaugural Periplus Collective mentorship program. This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation
Today I talked to Kevin Wilson about his new novel Now Is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco Press, 2022). Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You're Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South. Recommended Books: Elizabeth Tan, Rubik Gwendolyn MacEwan, Julian the Magician Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today I talked to Kevin Wilson about his new novel Now Is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco Press, 2022). Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You're Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South. Recommended Books: Elizabeth Tan, Rubik Gwendolyn MacEwan, Julian the Magician Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Today I talked to Kevin Wilson about his new novel Now Is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco Press, 2022). Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You're Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South. Recommended Books: Elizabeth Tan, Rubik Gwendolyn MacEwan, Julian the Magician Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Today I talked to Kevin Wilson about his new novel Now Is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco Press, 2022). Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You're Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South. Recommended Books: Elizabeth Tan, Rubik Gwendolyn MacEwan, Julian the Magician Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Jamil Jan Kochai in conversation with Brandon Taylor, celebrating the publication of "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories," by Jamil Jan Kochai, published by Viking Books. This event was originally broadcast via Zoom and hosted by Peter Maravelis. You can purchase copies of "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories" directly from City Lights here: https://citylights.com/haunting-of-hajji-hotak-other-storie/ Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of "99 Nights in Logar," a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Brandon Taylor is the author of "Filthy Animals," a national bestseller, and "Real Life," which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction. This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation
Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His new short story collection is The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Episode 125 Notes and Links to Jamil Jan Kochai's Work On Episode 125 of The Chills at Will Podcast, Pete welcomes Jamil Jan Kochai, and the two discuss, among other topics, his early relationship with languages and reading, an early fascination with Harry Potter, his family's proud histories and storytelling legacies, Jamil's hoop skills, his book 99 Nights and Logar and its allegory and realism, its connections to contemporary Afghan history, as well as his recent “love letter to his father” in The New Yorker. Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Jamil Jan Kochai's Website Preorder The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories “Jamil Jan Kochai on Résumés as Stories” from The New Yorker, May 2022 “Occupational Hazards”-Short Story-from May 2022, The New Yorker At about 1:40, Jamil and Pete discuss NBA loyalties as fellow Sacramentans At about 2:30, Pete shouts out some unique description from Jamil's 99 Nights in Logar At about 4:05, Jamil gives background on his family roots in Logar, Afghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistán, as well as how amorphous borders have affected loyalties and pride At about 7:00, Jamil describes his childhood moves and family circumstances that led to his family laying down roots in California, as well as his relationship with language At about 9:15, Alice Norman Elementary and Mrs. Long are shouted out as huge parts of Jamil learning and loving the English language At about 10:20, Jamil responds to Pete's questions about the roles of lore, stories, and storytellers in his life At about 12:30, Jamil lists books and writers that captivated and inspired him from an early age, as well as ideas of escape and fantasy-entering a “new world” At about 16:25, Pete wonders about “generations” of Afghan immigrants, Khaled Hosseini's impact on a younger Jamil, and Jamil's current view of The Kite Runner At about 19:30, Jamil compares The Kite Runner to a seminal book in his life, One Hundred Years of Solitude At about 21:20, Jamil discusses ideas of pressure that may come with being seen as a representative of Afghan/Afghan-American cultures At about 24:00, Pete asks Jamil about “the white gaze” and feedback and thought process that went along with not translating many words from the book At about 29:35, Pete and Jamil fanboy about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jamil details One Hundred Years of Solitude importance to him, in addition to listing 1984 and Native Son and other formative texts At about 31:40, Jamil does an almost perfect job in recounting the iconic opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude At about 34:10-35:50, Pete and Jamil sing the praises of Jess Walter, as both a writer and baller At about 35:50, Jamil diagnoses his own basketball game in a detailed scouting report At about 36:50, Pete asks a followup question regarding Jamil's growth and awareness as a writer and “ ‘Eureka' moments,” including early work done in high school English classes At about 41:40, Jamil shouts out some standout Italo Calvino work At about 43:10, Pete speaks of pitch for a future article At about 43:40, Pete fanboys over “The Gospel According to Mark” by Borges At about 45:25, Jamil responds to Pete's questions about the two epigraphs for 99 Nights in Logar At about 50:00, Jamil focuses on the Kipling epigraph in describing his objectives and challenges in writing 99 Nights in Logar At about 51:40, Jamil traces the evolution of Budabash as a character and symbol in At about 54:00, Jamil responds to Pete's questions about Marwand as a musafir and the book as charting an ephemeral journey At about 56:00, Jamil explains his mindset about giving Marwand “agency,” including how his writing training prepared him for writing about agency At about 59:40, Pete summarizes the moving story of Marwand's uncle At about 1:00:50, Jamil provides background on the genesis and role of “The Thief,” an intriguing character from the book At about 1:06:00, Jamil and Pete discuss the history of Afghanistan that is incorporated into the novel, including how Jamil finessed this history in a way that “benefited the story itself” At about 1:09:05, Jamil describes the significance and real-world links to a scene from the book involving an uncovering of bones At about 1:10:40, Pete and Jamil ruminate on praise for his writing from Jesmyn Ward At about 1:11:10, Pete and Jamil discuss Jamil's recent publication from The New Yorker, “Occupational Hazards” At about 1:14:50, Jamil highlights his upcoming collection of short stories and highlights local bookstores as great places to buy his books-Bookshop.org and The Indie Book Store, among others You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode. This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form. The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com. Please tune in for Episode 126 with Kevin Owens, a veteran of overseas professional basketball and a current teacher and basketball coach. He is an entrepreneur and founder of Overseas Famous LLC, a multimedia platform created to give athletes playing abroad a voice. These stories provide a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on with overseas sports. His 2021 book is called Overseas Famous. While he had the name first, he is now the second most popular Kevin Owens in the world. The episode will air on June 7.
Episode 124 Notes and Links to Robin Peguero's Work On Episode 124 of The Chills at Will Podcast, Pete welcomes Robin Peguero, and the two discuss, among other topics, Robin's early writing and reading influences, Pete and Robin's shared love for, and awe of, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Robin's experience in government and law that have influenced his worldviews and writing, and the background, real-life parallels, and themes featured in Robin's With Prejudice. An Afro-Latino and the son of immigrants, Robin Peguero graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He has written for the Miami Herald, the Harvard Crimson, and the Harvard Law Review, and he served as a press spokesman in the U.S. House and as a speechwriter in the U.S. Senate before becoming a lawyer. He is currently a U.S. House investigative counsel working on domestic terrorism. Buy With Prejudice by Robin Peguero Shelf Awareness: Interview with Robin Peguero The Big Thrill: “Up Close: Robin Peguero” At about 1:30, Robin describes the festivities for the first week of publication, describes the feeling as “surreal,” and talks about his At about 3:00, Robin gives background on his childhood relationship with language and literature and growing up in Hialeah, outside of Miami At about 5:35-a Natalie Lima shout out! At about 6:10, Robin details his early reading favorites and the background for his early writing, in “creating a world and making it how [you] want it to exist” At about 7:45, Robin responds to Pete's wondering about moments of discovery and influence on his road to writing, including how Garcia Marquez and Faulkner's work influenced and inspired, and Robin's time on the school newspaper At about 11:50, Pete and Robin commiserate on the difficulty of The Sound and the Fury At about 12:20, Robin details his love of Marquez's work, including his blockbuster and iconic novels At about 13:15, Robin describes some early birthday parties that were perfect for a literary teenage crowd, and his friend as his “first beta reader” At about 14:50, Robin talks about early jobs in government, and how his experience with the “slow-moving” government entities affected his worldview and his move to law At about 17:10, Robin details his experience with the defense and prosecution sides of the criminal justice, all the while writing on the side At about 18:20, Robin traces the journey of the book from origin to publication At about 19:35-21:32, Robin summarizes the book with an “elevator pitch” and emphasizes the importance of the jury in the legal system At about 21:35-25:03, Robin discusses the significance of the book's title At about 25:20, Robin responds to Pete's questions about his views of the criminal justice At about 26:25, Robin details a finding about the death penalty that comes from less of a value of Black lives At about 29:40, Pete highlights strengths of book and outlines some main characters and their views of the pragmatic issues of jury selection At about 30:50, Robin discusses the intriguing and powerful character of Sandy as an archetype of the legal profession, and how At about 34:15, Robin and Pete discuss the relationship between opposing lawyers, collegiality (or lack thereof) among the competing lawyers, and Robin's experience with these issues At about 37:35, Robin responds to Pete's compliments about his seamless dialogue and balance of legal jargon and common speech to capture a wide audience At about 40:35, Robin compares the legal system as represented in TV and movies to the real legal system, with Defending Jacob as one that he references as sufficiently realistic At about 42:30, Robin discusses the mechanics of the backstories and past/present tense as used in his book At about 44:40, Pete lays out the backstories of several important characters, and emphasizes the understated character of Gabriel Soto, the case's defendant At about 46:15, Robin discusses the unfortunate way in which the defendant and victim sometimes become “wallpaper” and responds to Pete's wondering about victim Melina Mora and double standards regarding women as victims At about 52:00, Pete homes in on important flashback scenes, particularly regarding Melina Mora At about 53:10, the two highlight effusive blurbs from Scott Turow and Harlan Coben and Robin talks about genre and how the book will be classified/marketed At about 54:10, Pete asks about future projects for Robin At about 56:20, Pete highlights a realistic and intriguing character from the book At about 57:45, Robin highlights social media and contact info, and shouts out Books and Books as one of many great places to buy his book You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode. This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form. The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com. Please tune in for Episode 125 with Jamil Jan Kochai, the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. The episode will air on May 31.
Acclaimed critic Steven W. Beattie sits down with Giller Prize finalist Alexander MacLeod to discuss Animal Person , his new story collection about the needs, temptations, and tensions that exist just beneath the surface of our lives. Named a Canadian Fiction title to watch by the CBC, Quill & Quire, and 49th Shelf, and a "must-read book" by Maclean's. Featuring stories published in The New Yorker, Granta, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Startling, suspenseful, deeply humane yet alert to the undertow of our darker instincts, the eight stories in Animal Person illuminate what it means to exist in the perilous space between desire and action, and to have your faith in what you hold true buckle and give way. The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children's literacy initiatives.
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Jim Shepard, co-author of Phase Six. Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody Medal for Achievement in Jewish Literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches at Williams College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As baseball season takes hold, award-winning journalist, writer and editor Joe Donnelly reads his short story “Bonus Baby,” which was selected for the O. Henry Prize Stories collection of 2016. Donnelly's features, fiction and essays have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, The Surfer's Journal, The Washington Post, and The Times of London, as well as in numerous nonfiction and fiction print anthologies. His story “50 Minutes,” written with Harry Shannon, was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 and is the basis of a short film being directed by Paul Schneider. A 2014 finalist for the Pen Center USA Literary Award in Journalism, Donnelly serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Journalism at Whittier College and edits Red Canary Magazine. His latest collection, So Cal: Dispatches from the End of the World, was recently released by Punk Hostage Press. Learn more about him at www.joedonnellywrites.com
Author Jai Chakrabarti muses on the power of art, friendship, and love to bridge the human experience. A Play for the End of the World, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India. Travelling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves. An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction. Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf), which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, is long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a fall 2021 Oprah Magazine Pick. He is the author of the forthcoming story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf, 2023). His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize and also performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. His nonfiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer's Digest, Berfrois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and is a trained computer scientist. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.
Hannah Tinti is the author of the bestselling novels The Good Thief and The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley and the short story collection Animal Crackers. A creative writing professor in New York University's M.F.A. program, she is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference and the co-founder and executive editor of One Story magazine. Jai Chakrabarti's debut novel A Play for the End of the World was selected as one of 2021's best books by numerous periodicals. Formerly an emerging writer fellow with A Public Space, he has had his Pushcart Prize–winning short fiction anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels Parakeet and 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. A creative writing teacher at NYU and The New School, she has earned The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and The Center for Fiction. Mira Jacob is the author of the celebrated novel The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing and Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. A fiction teacher at NYU, The New School, and Randolph College, her articles, drawings, and short fiction have been published in The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, and Literary Hub. Edited by Tinti and published in partnership with the Selected Shorts literary radio program and live show, Small Odysseys presents never-before-published short stories by some of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed authors. (recorded 3/24/2022)
Caitlin Horrocks discusses her story "On the Oregon Trail" from her short story collection, Life Among the Terranauts. The story is available and should be read before listening to the podcast at www.kellyfordon.com/blog. Caitlin Horrocks is the author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This Is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selections. Her novel The Vexations was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2019 by the Wall Street Journal. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, as well as other journals and anthologies. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. She is on the advisory board of The Kenyon Review, where she formerly served as fiction editor. She teaches at Grand Valley State University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the writer W. Todd Kaneko and their noisy kids. Kelly Fordon (podcast host) Kelly Fordon's latest short story collection I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020) was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her 2016 Michigan Notable Book, Garden for the Blind, (WSUP), was an INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, (Kattywompus Press, 2019) was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist and was adapted into a play, written by Robin Martin, which was published in The Kenyon Review Online. She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and has received a Best of the Net Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in three different genres. She teaches at Springfed Arts and The InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit, as well as online, where she also runs a monthly poetry and fiction blog. www.kellyfordon.com This is the first "Let's Deconstruct a Story" podcast offered in collaboration with the Grosse Pointe Public Library in Michigan. The GPPL has committed to purchasing ten books by each author this season to give to their patrons! If you are a short story writer who has tried to make money in this game then you know what a big deal this is! My hope is that other libraries will follow the GPPL's lead and be inspired to buy books by these talented short story writers. I will be contacting many libraries this year to suggest this programming. Please feel free to do the same if you enjoy this podcast.
Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them, ''a startling debut collection'' (The New York Times) of short stories was a Wall Street Journal #1 bestseller, the 2009 Oprah Book Club Selection, and was translated in to 12 languages. It was named to several publications' ''best of the year'' lists and earned the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Open Book Award, among other honors. A professor in the University of Florida's MFA writing program and the recipient of many literary fellowships, Akpan has published stories and autobiographical work in The New Yorker, the Nigerian edition of The Guardian, and the Hekima Review, among other places. His debut novel tells the satirical story of a Nigerian editor who experiences racism and feelings of white cultural superiority underneath the façade of the Manhattan publishing industry. Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of the ''quirky, compelling'' and ''polished debut'' (Dallas Morning News) story collection Night at the Fiestas, winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, she has earned the ''5 Under 35'' award from the National Book Foundation, the Rome Prize, and a Stegner Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The O. Henry Prize Stories anthology, among other places. The Five Wounds, Quade's debut novel, finds five generations of a New Mexican family converging in the year following an unexpected birth. (recorded 11/10/2021)
Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This Is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selections. Her novel The Vexations was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2019 by the Wall Street Journal. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, as well as other journals and anthologies. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the MacDowell Colony. She is on the advisory board of the Kenyon Review, where she formerly served as fiction editor. She teaches at Grand Valley State University and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the writer W. Todd Kaneko and their noisy kids.To learn more go to Caitlin's website.Follow on Instagram - @fiveauthorquestions Follow on Twitter - @5AQpodEmail 5AQ - podcasts@kpl.gov 5AQ is produced by Jarrod Wilson. The technical producer is Brian Bankston. 5AQ is hosted by Sandra Farag and Kevin King
Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, has just entered a new relationship with Lucy Gardener—a southerner, also newly arrived in New York—when he learns his oldest friend, Misha, has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India. Travelling there alone to collect his ashes, Jaryk soon realizes this won't be as simple a trip as he thought once he learns that Misha had been in the midst of staging a play there, Rabindranath Tagore's The Post Office. Performed in Paris the night the Germans took the city, and in Bangladesh during the crackdowns of General Tikka Kahn, and in the Warsaw orphanage where Jaryk grew up as an act of resistance against the Nazis, he makes it his mission to see through the production in this Indian village. But as he becomes more involved with the play and community, Jaryk is forced to reckon with the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and learn how to accept a happiness with Lucy he is not sure he deserves. JAI CHAKRABARTI's short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Chakrabarti was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. He was born in Kolkata, India, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family. A Play for the End of the World is his first novel. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/steve-richards/support
Patricia Engel is the author of the novel Infinite Country, available from Avid Reader Press. It is the official April pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. Engel is the author of The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of Colombia's national book award, the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, Patricia teaches creative writing at the University of Miami. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Life. Death. Etc. Support the show on Patreon Merch www.otherppl.com @otherppl Instagram YouTube Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of How to Pronounce Knife. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, NOON, The Believer, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, and O. Henry Prize Stories 2019. She is the author of four books of poetry, Cluster, Light, Found and Small Arguments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. She was raised in the Mojave Desert, in Tecopa, California and across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, Freeman's, The Paris Review, Story Quaterly, New American Stories, Best of the West, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many others. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundation's “5 Under 35.” She is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A Guggenheim Fellow, Claire is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His short story “Sugarcane” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella, How to Shake the Other Man, was published by Nouvella Books. His debut novel, The Mortifications, is forthcoming in 2016 from Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. He is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI, and is a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Dan Chain SHAWN, author of Ill Will, published in March by Ballantine. Dan’s other works include the short story collection Stay Awake, the best seller Await Your Reply and Among The Missing a finalist for the National Book Award. Dan’s work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Dan teaches at Oberlin. Ill Will is a book that if you go by all the reviews will scare the hell out of you. And after having read it, I would agree with a minor caveat. I didn’t feel like locking the doors, or worry that the creak on the tread was an intruder come to abduct and do terrible things to me. No I was more nervous about myself. What was I going to to? The book forces you to question some of your own preconceptions about the construct that you find yourself in. You know, the personality that you created for yourself a long time ago. If you don’t watch out the book can create slight chinks in the armor that you have hammered to make your live more livable, more normal. And these are things that are really scary. Because you can lock your doors, you can fight off an intruder or call the police but you can’t tell your self to change real quick or to ignore warnings that may have at once been on the horizon but are now approaching in a storm, sails billowing and flags flying. In Ill Will, our protagonist is Dustin Tillman. He’s been through a lot but he has handled it with less than aplomb. Maybe he could have done things differently. He’s consumed with grief, uncertain of his place in the universe, estranged from his sons, caught in a web of murder and possible deceit and looking for a way to make things make sense (when that is what he is supposed to be doing for others) all while his universe emits this cosmic afterglow of ill will. Writing this introduction has even made me a little nervous. So with that welcome Dan and thanks so much for joining us today.
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Dan Chain SHAWN, author of Ill Will, published in March by Ballantine. Dan’s other works include the short story collection Stay Awake, the best seller Await Your Reply and Among The Missing a finalist for the National Book Award. Dan’s work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Dan teaches at Oberlin. Ill Will is a book that if you go by all the reviews will scare the hell out of you. And after having read it, I would agree with a minor caveat. I didn’t feel like locking the doors, or worry that the creak on the tread was an intruder come to abduct and do terrible things to me. No I was more nervous about myself. What was I going to to? The book forces you to question some of your own preconceptions about the construct that you find yourself in. You know, the personality that you created for yourself a long time ago. If you don’t watch out the book can create slight chinks in the armor that you have hammered to make your live more livable, more normal. And these are things that are really scary. Because you can lock your doors, you can fight off an intruder or call the police but you can’t tell your self to change real quick or to ignore warnings that may have at once been on the horizon but are now approaching in a storm, sails billowing and flags flying. In Ill Will, our protagonist is Dustin Tillman. He’s been through a lot but he has handled it with less than aplomb. Maybe he could have done things differently. He’s consumed with grief, uncertain of his place in the universe, estranged from his sons, caught in a web of murder and possible deceit and looking for a way to make things make sense (when that is what he is supposed to be doing for others) all while his universe emits this cosmic afterglow of ill will. Writing this introduction has even made me a little nervous. So with that welcome Dan and thanks so much for joining us today.
Dan Chaon's most recent book is Ill Will, a novel. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon's fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lauren Groff is the author of the novel The Monsters of Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of stories, and Arcadia, a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award. Her latest novel is Fates and Furies. Her work has appeared in journals including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Tin House,One Story, McSweeney's, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three editions of theBest American Short Stories. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Subprimes (Harper) A wickedly funny dystopian parody set in a financially apocalyptic future America, from the critically acclaimed author ofTriburbia. In a future America that feels increasingly familiar, you are your credit score. Extreme wealth inequality has created a class of have-nothings: Subprimes. Their bad credit ratings make them unemployable. Jobless and without assets, they've walked out on mortgages, been foreclosed upon, or can no longer afford a fixed address. Fugitives who must keep moving to avoid arrest, they wander the globally warmed American wasteland searching for day labor and a place to park their battered SUVs for the night. Karl Taro Greenfeld's trenchant satire follows the fortunes of two families whose lives reflect this new dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-financially-fittest America. Desperate for work and food, a Subprime family has been forced to migrate east, hoping for a better life. They are soon joined in their odyssey by a writer and his family--slightly better off, yet falling fast. Eventually, they discover a small settlement of Subprimes who have begun an agrarian utopia built on a foreclosed exurb. Soon, though, the little stability they have is threatened when their land is targeted by job creators for shale oil extraction. But all is not lost. A hero emerges, a woman on a motorcycle--suspiciously lacking a credit score--who just may save the world. In The Subprimes, Karl Taro Greenfeld turns his keen and unflinching eye to our country today--and where we may be headed. The result is a novel for the 99 percent: a darkly funny comedy about paradise lost and found, the value of credit, economic policy, and the meaning of family. Praise for The Subprimes "The Subprimes holds up a funhouse-mirror version of ourselves and our era. Karl Taro Greenfeld has written a masterful, viciously funny satire of our times, one that we ignore at our peril."--Ben Fountain "Set in a meticulously, terrifyingly imagined all-too-near future, The Subprimes is a potent cocktail of North American myth, equal parts John Steinbeck and Margaret Atwood, with a dash of benzene."--William Gibson "Greenfeld has a tendency to lean toward parody in his satiric style, but here he employs enough authenticity to terrify, enough black humor to disarm the story's inherent pessimism, and a surprising admiration for faith in its myriad forms."--Kirkus "The Subprimes admirably -- amazingly -- superimposes all the populist instincts of The Grapes of Wrath onto a dystopian future that is all too visible from our current moment. Greenfeld's compassion and understanding -- this novel's beating heart -- are what grabbed me most."--Charles Bock "A little Occupy, a little Ed Abbey, and a good deal of hope for solidarity in a screwed-up world -- The Subprimes is a superhero story for the rest of us."--Bill McKibben "Greenfeld has produced a fascinating novel about life in the age of economic uncertainty. It's a colorful tale of characters living on the edge combined with sharp social insights."--Walter Isaacson "Sharply observed and engrossing, The Subprimes depicts a future that is simultaneously absurd...and plausible. It would be too scary to read if it weren't so entertaining."--Edan Lepucki Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of six previous books: the much-acclaimed novel Triburbia. The memoir Boy Alone; NowTrends; China Syndrome; Standard Deviations; and Speed Tribes. His award-winning writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, The Paris Review, The Nation, , The New York Times Magazine, Best American Short Stories 2009 and 2013, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. Born in Kobe, Japan, he has lived in Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. He currently lives in California with his wife, Silka, and their daughters, Esmee and Lola.
Jay is the author of 20 books, including two prize-winning novels (The Stolen Jew and Before My Life Began), two prize-winning non-fiction books (Imagining Robert and Transforming Madness), and three collections of award-winning stories. His stories and essays have appeared widely (in The Atlantic, Tikkun, GQ, Sport, The American Scholar, Newsweek, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and others), and have been reprinted in more than 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His screenplay for The Hollow Boy, which premiered on American Playhouse, has won many honors, including top prize at the Houston International Film Festival. He is the recipient of numerous other awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and is the only author to have won six consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes. Open Heart: A Patient's Story of Life-Saving Medicine and Life-Giving Friendship appeared in the autumn of 2003, an award winning documentary film based on Imagining Robert has been appearing nationally on PBS stations since 2004. His novel, 1940, published in 2008, was long-listed for the Impac Dublin International Literary Award. Jay was Professor and Writer-in-Residence for many years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and has taught at other universities, including Columbia, Stanford, and Freiburg (Germany). He now lives and writes in New York City, where he teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of the Columbia University School of the Arts.
MARY COIN (Blue Rider Press) In her first novel since "The God of War, " critically acclaimed author Marisa Silver takes Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" photograph as inspiration for a breathtaking reinvention--a story of two women, one famous and one forgotten, and of the remarkable legacy of their singular encounter. In 1936, a young mother resting by the side of a road in Central California is spontaneously photographed by a woman documenting the migrant laborers who have taken to America's farms in search of work--little personal information is exchanged and neither has any way of knowing that their chance encounter has produced the most iconic image of the Great Depression. Three vibrant characters anchor the narrative of "Mary Coin" Mary, the migrant mother herself, who emerges as a woman with deep reserves of courage and nerve, with private passions and carefully-guarded secrets. Vera Dare, the photographer wrestling with creative ambition who makes the choice to leave her children in order to pursue her work. And Walker Dodge, a present-day professor of cultural history, who discovers a family mystery embedded in the picture. In luminous, exquisitely observed prose, Silver creates an extraordinary tale from a brief moment in history, and reminds us that though a great photograph can capture the essence of a moment, it only scratches the surface of a life. Mary Coin is quite simply one of the best novels I have read in years . . . In her portrayal of a time in American history when survival was often a day-to-day thing, Silver drills down to the absolute essentials: family, love, loss, the perpetual uncertainty of life. Again and again I found myself wondering: How does she know that? Silver's wisdom is rare, and her novel is the work of a master.--Ben Fountain, author of the 2012 National Book Award finalist "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Marisa Silver is the author of two novels, The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist) and No Direction Home, and two story collections, Alone With You and Babe in Paradise (a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Silver lives in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin authored The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith and The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Are So Important in a Distracted Time. Photo by Bader Howar THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS ON APRIL 6, 2013 COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9780399160707
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