Burned By Books

Kristopher Jansma, Our Narrow Hiding Places (Ecco, 2024), Revisionaries (Quirk Books, 2024)

Kristopher grew up in Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels, OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES (Ecco/2024) WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY (Viking/2016) and THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, (Viking/2013). His book of essays on the creative process is REVISIONARIES: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE LOST, UNFINISHED, AND JUST PLAIN BAD WORK OF GREAT WRITERS. And Kristopher is the director of the creative program and SUNY New Paltz.

Recommended Books:

E. Lily Yu Break Blow Burn and Make

Kate Hamilton, Mad Wife

Amy Reading, The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024)

Amy Reading is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library. She is the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, A Cunning Revenge, and A Small History of the Big Con. She lives in upstate New York, where she has served on the executive board of Buffalo Street Books, an indie cooperative bookstore, since 2018.

Recommended Books:

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

Clara Bingham, The Movement

Maggie Dougherty, The Equivalents

Ursula Villareal-Moura, Like Happiness (Celadon Books, 2024)

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner, and Like Happiness (Celadon Books, 2024). A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, among many others. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015.  Like Happiness has been listed as a best books of the year so far by Elle, Bookshop.org, Libby.

Recommended Books:

Raquel Gutierrez, Brown Neon

Mohammed El-Kurd, Rifqa

Catherine Lacey, Pew

SJ Naudé, Fathers and Fugitives (Europa, 2024)

S.J. Naudé is the author of two collections of short stories and two novels. He is the winner of the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize, and the kykNet-Rapport prize, and is the only writer to win the Hertzog Prize twice consecutively in its 100-year history. His first novel, The Third Reel, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times prize. His work has been published in Granta and other journals in the US, UK, the Netherlands, and Italy. He spent half his life as a corporate lawyer in London and now is a full-time writer in South Africa.

Book Recommendations:

John Ransom, The Whale Tattoo

Brandon Taylor, Filthy Animals

JM Coetzee, The Pole

Rachel Kusnner, Creation Lake (Scribner, 2024)

Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels CREATION LAKE, THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K, and THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and is now three times a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Recommended Books:

Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Mary Jones, The Goodbye Process (Zibby Books, 2024)

Mary Jones’s work has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommend Reading, Subtropics, EPOCH, and The Best American Essays, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The Goodbye Process is a national bestseller. Originally from Upstate New York, she lives in Los Angeles.

Recommended Books:

Miranda July, All Fours

Taylor Koekkoek, Thrillville USA

Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

Claire Keagan, Small Things Like These

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader Press, 2024)

Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Here short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, The Willowherb Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and Extra Teeth, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.

Recommended Books:

Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr

Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland

Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman (Little, Brown, 2024)

Chelsea Bieker is the author of the debut novel GODSHOT which was longlisted for The Center For Fiction’s First Novel Prize, named a Barnes and Noble Pick of the Month, and was a national indie bestseller. Her story collection, HEARTBROKE won the California Book Award and was a New York Times “Best California Book of 2022” and an NPR Best Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Cut, Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s, and others. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, as well as residencies from MacDowell and Tin House. Raised in Hawai’i and California, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children.

Recommended Books:

Kimberly King Parsons, We Were the Universe

Lindsay Hunter, Hot Springs Drive

Gina Maria Balibrera, Volcano Daughters

C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude (Atria Books, 2024)

C. Michelle Lindley’s work can be found in Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for 2024 and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and a BA in English and Art History from the University of California at Berkeley. And most recently she is the recipient of the Freund Prize for exceptional creative writing.

Recommended Books:

JoAnna Novak, Domestirexia

Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love

Rose Boyt, Naked Portrait

Jessica Anthony, The Most (Little, Brown, 2024)

Jessica Anthony is the author of three previous books of fiction, most recently the novel Enter the Aardvark, a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction. A recipient of the Creative Capital Award in Literature, Anthony wrote The Most while guarding the Mária Valéria Bridge in Štúrovo, Slovakia. She Lives in Portland, Maine.

Recommended Books:

Patricia Highsmith, Price of Salt

Stories of Shirley Jackson (the tooth and the renegade)

Carson McCullers, Member of the Wedding

Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind

Andre Breton, Mad Love

Adam, Gretel and the Great War

Cally Fiedorek, Atta Boy (University of Iowa Press, 2024)

Cally Fiedorek is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and an alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship. Atta Boy is her debut novel. She lives in her native New York City with her family.

Recommended Books:

Kevin Berry, The Heart in Winter

Paul Murray, Beesting

Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings (Little, Brown, 2024)

Megan Nolan was born in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays and reviews have been published by the New York Times, the White Review, The Guardian, and Frieze, among others. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award and was short-listed for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award and long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Recommended Books:

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Anne Enright, Actress

José Saramago, Blindness

Laura Van Dem Berg, State of Paradise (FSG, 2024)

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), which was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her next novel, Ring of Night, is forthcoming from FSG in 2026.

Recommended Books:

Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night

Octavia Butler, Bloodchild

Aysegül Savas, The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Aysegül Savas is the author of the acclaimed novels Walking on the Ceiling and White on White. Her work has been translated into six languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Paris.

Recommended Books:

Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities

Alisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self

Anthony Di Renzo, Pasquinades (Cayuga Lake Books, 2024)

Anthony’s previous books include Trinacria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily, Dead Reckoning: Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America, and Bitter Greens: Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity. He teaches writing at Ithaca College.

Recommended Books:

John Keahey, Following Caesar

Iris Mwanza, The Lions’ Den (Graydon House, 2024)

Iris Mwanza is a Zambian American writer. As deputy director of the Gender Equality Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she leads strategy and investment for the Women in Leadership portfolio, and she has previously worked as a corporate lawyer in both Zambia and the US. Mwanza holds law degrees from Cornell University and the University of Zambia, and an MA and PhD in internati0onal relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In addition to her work at the foundation, Mwanza serves on the supervisory board of CARE International and on the board of directors of the World Wildlife Fund-US.

Recommended Books:

Fi, Alexandra Fuller

Greenland, David Santos Donaldson

Foster, Clare Keegan

Rachel Khong, Real Americans (Knopf, 2024)

Rachel’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. With Lucky Peach, she also edited a cookbook about eggs, called All About Eggs. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission district; she retired from that role in 2021.

Recommended Books:

Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

Kimberly King Parsons, We Were the Universe (Knopf, 2024)

KIMBERLY KING PARSONS is the author of We Were the Universe, a novel the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power,” and the short story collection Black Light, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.

Recommended Books:

Chelsea Bieker, Mad Woman

Ryan Chapman, The Audacity

Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

Jennine Capo Crucet, Say Hello To My Little Friend (Simon and Schuster, 2024)

Jennine Capó Crucet is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. She’s the author of three books, including the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, which won the International Latino Book Award, was named a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice book, and was cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, the Guardian, the Miami Herald, and other venues; it has been adopted as an all-campus read at over forty U.S. universities. Her other books include the story collection How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, the John Gardner Book Award, and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award; and the essay collection My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, which was long-listed for the 2019 PEN America/Open Book Award.

Recommended Books:

Percival Everett, Erasure

Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

Jennifer Savran Kelly, Endpapers (Algonquin Books, 2024)

Jennifer Savran Kelly lives in Ithaca, New York, where she writes, binds books, and works as a production editor at Cornell University Press. Her debut novel Endpapers (Algonquin, 2023) is a finalist for a 2024 Lambda Literary Award and was a fall/winter 2023 Indies Introduce pick. It won a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation and was selected as a finalist for the SFWP Literary Awards Program and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Her short work has been published in Potomac Review, Hobart, Black Warrior Review, Trampset, and elsewhere. 

Recommended Books: 

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story

Miriam Taves, All My Puny Sorrows

Gina Chung, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024)

Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in New York City. She is the author of the novel SEA CHANGE, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Adult Fiction Honor, a 2023 B&N Discover Pick, and a New York Times Most Anticipated Book. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from the New School.

Nell Freudenberger, The Limits (Knopf, 2024)

NELL FREUDENBERGER is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and son.

Recommended Articles:

Nell Freudenberger, “Who are the scientists here?”

Jennifer Spitzer, “No Way to Say Goodbye,” New York Times

 Recommended Books:

Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral

Magda Szabó, The Fawn

Percival Everett, The Trees

Some poetry, novels, and nonfiction related to Oceania, nuclear testing, and the deep ocean:

Poetry 

Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner : https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/

Flora Aurima Devatine, Au Vent de la Piroguière : https://www.editions-brunodoucey.com/products/au-vent-de-la-piroguiere-tifaifai

Fiction:

Titaua Peu, Pina, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman: https://bookshop.org/p/books/pina-titaua-peu/18212103

Mutismes: https://www.amazon.com/Mutismes-LITTERATURE-French-Titaua-PEU/dp/2367343853

Chantal Spitz, Island of Shattered Dreams: https://www.amazon.com/Island-Shattered-Dreams-Chantal-Spitz/dp/1869692993

Nonfiction:

Sea People, Christina Thompson

The Moruroa Files: https://moruroa-files.org/

At Home and in the Field: Ethnographic Encounters in Asia and the Pacific Islands: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/at-home-and-in-the-field-ethnographic-encounters-in-asia-and-the-pacific-islands/

Aphrodite’s Island, Anne Salmond: https://www.amazon.com/Aphrodites-Island-European-Discovery-Tahiti/dp/0520271327

The Brilliant Abyss, Helen Scales: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-brilliant-abyss-exploring-the-majestic-hidden-life-of-the-deep-ocean-and-the-looming-threat-that-imperils-it-helen-scales/14929095?ean=9780802158222 

Below the Edge of Darkness, Edith Widder: https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=below+the+edge+of+darkness

Marie Mutsuki Mockett, The Tree Doctor (Graywolf Press, 2024)

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a previous novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and two books of nonfiction, American Harvest, which won the Nebraska book award, and the northern California book award, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the Pen Open Book Award. A graduate of Columbia University in East Asian studies she has been awarded NEA – JUSFC and Fulbright Fellowships, both for Japan.

Recommended Books:

Royall Tyler, The Disaster of the Third Princess: Essays on The Tale of Genji

Emily Raboteau, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse"

Martin Puchner, Culture

Scott Alexander Howard, The Other Valley (Astria Books, 2024)

Scott Alexander Howard lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where his work focused on the relationship between memory, emotion, and literature. The Other Valley is his first novel.

Jan Zwicky, The Long Walk

Morgan Talty, Fire Exit

Lily Wang, Silver Repetition

Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland (FSG, 2024)

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels PARAKEET (New York Times Editors’ Choice) and 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS (NPR Best Books 2014), and the story collection SAFE AS HOUSES (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, McSweeneys, and elsewhere. She has been awarded The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference. Her work has twice been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing program at Yale University.

Recommended Books:

Tea Obreht, The Morning Side

Diana Khoi Nguyen, Root Fractures

Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, American Gun: The True History of the AR-15 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023)

Cameron McWhirter is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in Atlanta. He has covered mass shootings, violent protests and natural disasters across the South. He is also the author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Previously, he reported for other publications in the U.S., as well as Bosnia, Iraq, and Ethiopia.

Zusha Elinson is a national reporter, writing about guns and violence for the Wall Street Journal. Based in California, he has also written for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times Bay Area section.

Recommended Books:

Robert Caro, The Path to Power

William Shawcross, Sideshow

Dexter Filkins, The Forever War

Adam Winkler, Gun Fight

Tim Mak, Misfire

Doug Stanton, Horse Solidiers

Samantha Harvey, Orbital (Grove, 2024)

Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief, The Western Wind and Orbital. She is also the author of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease.

Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, among many others. She lives in Bath, England, and teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Recommended Books:

Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

Allen Rossi, Our Last Year

Miranda Pountney, How to Be Somebody Else

Julius Taranto, How I Won A Nobel Prize (Little, Brown, 2023)

Julius’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, and some other places. For a while he was a lawyer. Julius attended Yale Law School and Pomona College. He lives in New York.

Recommended Books:

Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

Tom Holland, Dominion

Kabat, The Eighth Moon

Raul Palma, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton Books, 2023)

Raul Palma is a second generation Cuban American, born and raised in Miami. His short story collection In This World of Ultraviolet Light won the 2021 Don Belton prize. His writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Greensboro Review, Hayden Ferry Review and elsewhere. He teaches Fiction at Ithaca College, where he is the associate dean of faculty in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He has also taught at the Elmira Correctional Facility through Cornell University’s prison education program. He lives with his wife and daughter in Ithaca New York.

Recommended Books:

Alejandro Nodarse, Blood in the Cut

Claire Jimenez, What Ever Happened to Ruthie Ramirez

Courtney Denelle, It’s Not Nothing (SFWP, 2022)

Courtney Denelle is the author of IT’S NOT NOTHING (SFWP, 2022), a novel-in-fragments drawn from her experience of homelessness and recovery, and the forthcoming novel Real Piece of Work, an art world satire that explores image-craft and the unbidden toll of a life lived in persona. Her stories have appeared in the Alembic, Tahoma Literary Review, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Courtney was also winner of the 2021 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen award, and she has been granted a Hawthornden Fellowship and a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, as well as residencies from Hedgebrook and the Jentel Foundation.

Recommended Books:

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger

Kate Doyle, I Meant It Once

Isle McElroy, People Collide

Kerri Schlottman, Tell Me One Thing

Kimberly King Parsons, We Were The Universe

Lucas Mann, Attachments

Yiyun Lee, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Emily St. John Mandel, Last Night in Montreal

Sarah Manguso, Liars

Mark Ernest Pothier, Outer Sunset (University of Iowa Press, 2023)

Mark’s work has won a Nelson Algren Short Story Award, been long-listed for the Pirates Alley/Faulkner — William Wisdom prize, and been published in the Chicago Tribune, LitHub, Santa Clara Review, Connotation Press, Kindle Singles, and elsewhere.

Mark grew up in Western Massachusetts and New York's "North Country," earned a BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, and moved to San Francisco in 1987, where he earned an MFA from SF State. He worked nearly 30 years in nonprofit communications, including a wonderful spell with the California Council for the Humanities. He lives with his wife and kids in San Francisco.

Recommended Books:

Joy Williams, Harrow

Jaime Cortez, Gordo

Stuart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster

Rebecca Turkewitz, Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, 2023)

Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, July 2023), a collection of thirteen spooky literary stories. Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in The Normal School, Chicago Quarterly Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, SmokeLong Quarterly, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University. She has been a resident at Hewn oaks Artist Residency and won a 2020 Maine Literary Award in the short works category. She loves cats, the ocean, and ghost stories. 

Recommended Books: 

NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, Chain Gang All-Stars

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, What We Fed to the Manticore

Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow

Kevin Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

Kyle Dillon Hertz is the author of The Lookback Window, a New York Times Editors' Choice. His work can be found in Esquire, Freeman’s, Time, and more. He received his MFA from NYU and a residency from Yaddo. He teaches at The New School. 

Recommended Books:

Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

Evan S. Connell, Mrs Bridge

Lexi Freiman, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, 2023)

Lexi Freiman is the author of the novel Inappropriation, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. She is a graduate of Columbia’s MFA in fiction and worked as fiction editor at George Braziller for five years. She also writes for television.

Recommended Books:

Jordan Castro, The Novelist

Herve Guibert, Crazy for Vincent

Eliza Minot, In the Orchard (Knopf, 2023)

Eliza Minot is the author of the critically acclaimed novels THE TINY ONE, THE BRAMBLES, and IN THE ORCHARD published by Knopf/Vintage. Her books have been named to various lists, including The New York Times Notable, Booksense 76, Nancy Pearl’s, and Oprah’s Top Ten Summer Picks. She went to Barnard College and received her MFA from Rutgers-Newark, where she was a Presidential Fellow. She has taught at Rutgers-Newark, Barnard College, and NYU. She received the Maplewood Library Literary Award in 2023. She grew up the youngest of seven children in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. She lives in Maplewood, NJ, with her family.

Recommended Books:

Anne Patchett, Tom Lake (audiobook)

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (audiobook)

Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA, Ghost in the Throat

Booksellers’ Best Books of the Year, 2023

Christine Bollow is the Co-Owner and Director of Programs for Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, DC and Silver Spring, MD. She is a 2022 Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree, graduate of Barnard College, and currently serves on the American Bookseller Association’s DEI Committee. Christine is passionate about championing marginalized authors both at Loyalty and on her Bookstagram @readingismagical.

Lisa Swayze is the General Manager and Buyer at Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca's indie co-op bookstore. She serves on the board of the American Booksellers Association and works every day towards making indie bookselling more sustainable.

Bryan Washington, Family Meal (Riverhead, 2023)

Bryan Washington is the author of a previous novel, Memorial, and a collection of short stories, Lot. He’s also a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 winner, a New York Public Library Young Lions Award recipient, an Ernest J. Gaines Award recipient, an International Dylan Thomas Prize recipient, a Lambda Literary Award recipient, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction award, the James Tait Black Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize finalist, a National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize finalist, the recipient of an O. Henry Award, and was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30. He is a columnist for the New York Times Magazine.

Recommended Books:

Maya Binyam, Hangman

Dolki Min, Walking Practice

Adania Shibli, Minor Detail

Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Happy Stories Mostly

Julie Schumacher, The English Experience (Doubleday, 2023)

Julie’s first novel, The Body Is Water, was published by Soho Press in 1995 and was an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Schumacher’s other books include the national best-seller, Dear Committee Members (winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor); The Shakespeare Requirement, Doodling for Academics (a satirical coloring book); and five novels for younger readers. Schumacher lives in St. Paul and is a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English.

Book Recommendations:

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You

Alexandra Chang, Tomb Sweeping (Ecco, 2023)

Alexandra Chang is the author of the fabulous novel Days of Distraction. She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Ventura County, California with her husband, and their dog and cats.

Recommended Books:

Rachel Khong, The Real Americans

Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story

Cleo Quian, Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go

Laura Sims, How Can I Help You (Putnam, 2023)

HOW CAN I HELP YOU is a LibraryReads Top Ten Pick of July, an Amazon Editors’ Pick of the Month, a Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week, and one of CrimeReads’ 10 Best Books of July. Laura Sims’s first novel, LOOKER, was chosen as a “Best Book” by Vogue, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire UK, and more, and is now in development for television by eOne and Emily Mortimer’s King Bee Productions. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, and Electric Lit. She and her family live in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a reference librarian and hosts the library’s lecture series.

Recommendations:

Nathan Oates, A Flaw in the Design

Marianna Enriquez, Our Share of Night

Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story

Mina Seçkin, The Four Humors (Catapult, 2022)

Mina Seckin completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she received the Felipe De Alba Fellowship and where she also received her bachelor degree. Her work has been published in Refinery 29, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She serves as managing editor of Apogee Journal.

Recommended Books:

Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors

Lina Wolff, Carnality

Aria Aber, Hard Damage

Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth, 2023)

Happiness Falls was an instant New York Times bestseller. Angie’s debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award, the ITW Thriller Award, the Strand Critics’ Award, and the Pinckley Prize and was named one of the hundred best mysteries and thrillers of all time by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and the Today show. One of Variety Magazine’s inaugural “10 Storytellers to Watch,” Angie has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Vogue, Glamour, and numerous literary journals. She lives in northern Virginia with her family.

Recommended Books:

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump

Daniel Mason, North Woods

Hang Kan, Greek Lessons

Andrew Ridker, Hope (Viking, 2023)

Andrew’s debut novel, The Altruists, was published by Viking in the United States and in seventeen other countries. The Altruists was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Paris Review staff pick, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, and the People Book of the Week.

Andrew is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Le Monde, Bookforum, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Andrew lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Recommendations:

Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach

Joyce Carol Oates, Wonderland

Leonard Michaels, The Men’s Club

Caroline O’Donoghue, The Rachel Incident (Knopf, 2023)

Caroline O’Donoghue is an Irish author, journalist and host of the award-winning podcast SENTIMENTAL GARBAGE. Her previous work includes a trilogy for young adults, the first of which, ALL OUR HIDDEN GIFTS, is under option to a major international indie with Caroline adapting for long form TV drama. On publication of her first novel, Promising Young Women, she was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards’ Newcomer of the Year and the Kate O’Brien Award. Her next adult novel, Scenes of a Graphic Nature, was published in 2020 and it is in development as a feature. She has a regular column for The Irish Examiner. Caroline was born in Cork but currently lives in London.

Check out Caroline’s fantastic, award winning culture podcast, Sentimental Garbage

Recommendations:

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

Zadie Smith, Fraud

Esi Edugyan, Washington Black

Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story (Ecco, 2023)

Hilary Leichter is the author of the novel Temporary, which was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Hilary’s other writings have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, The New York Times, Conjunctions and Harper’s Magazine. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches at Columbia University where she is the Undergraduate Creative Writing Adviser in Fiction.

Recommendations:

Alexandra Chang, Tomb Sweeping

Yuri Herrara, Ten Planets

John Fulton, The Flounder: Stories (Blackwater Press, 2023)

John Fulton  is the author of four books of fiction, including Retribution, which won the Southern Review Short Fiction Award in 2001, the novel More Than Enough, which was a finalist for the Midland Society of Authors Award, and The Animal Girl, a collection of two novellas and three stories, which was a Story Prize Notable Book.

His short fiction has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, twice cited for distinction in the Best American Short Stories, short-listed for the O. Henry Award, and published in numerous journals, including Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The Southern Review. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and is a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing. And his most recent book of stories is The Flounder.

Recommended Books:

Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

Colin Barrett, Young Skins

Natalia Ginsberg, Family

William Trevor, Collected Stories

Katherine Heiny, Games and Rituals: Stories (Knopf, 2023)

Katherine Heiny is the author of Early Morning Riser, Standard Deviation, and Single, Carefree Mellow, a previous collection of short stories. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and many other places. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and children.

Recommended Books and Podcasts:

Katherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

Elif Batuman, Either/Or

Elizabeth Crane, This Story Will Change

Celebrity Memoir Book Club (Podcast)

Cold Case Murder Mysteries (Podcast)

My Dad Wrote a Porno (Podcast)

Mission to Zyxx (Podcast)

Nazli Koca, The Applicant (Grove Press, 2023)

Nazli’s debut novel, The Applicant, was published on February 14, 2023. While writing The Applicant, Nazli worked as a cleaner, dishwasher, and bookseller in Berlin, South Bend, Chicago, and New York. She has taught and studied Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Denver. Her previous work has appeared in Narrative, The Threepenny Review, Bookforum, Second Factory, QSQOQST, books without covers, and The Chicago Review of Books.

Recommended Books:

Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth

Ebru Ojen, Lojman

Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton University Press, 2023)

Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which in 2019 he helped incorporate as the first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling. He lives in Chicago.

Recommended Books:

Lewis Hyde, The Gift

Leon Forrest, Divine Days

Toya Wolf, Last Summer on State Street

Pierre Hadot, Don’t forget to Live

W.B. Yates, “Words for Music, Perhaps”

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Kate Doyle, I Meant It Once (Algonquin Books, 2023)

A former bookseller at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, Kate Doyle has published her stories in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Split Lip, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. In 2021 she was selected from 1100 emerging writers as an A Public Space Writing Fellow, and she has received support for her work from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hawthornden, the Adirondack Center for Writing, NYU Paris, and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County. She currently lives in Amsterdam.

Recommended Books:

Cara Blue Adams, You Never Get It Back

Alexandra Chang, Tomb Sweeping

Stephanie Vaughn, Sweettalk

Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy (Catapult, 2023)

Originally from Moldova, Ruth Madievsky is a novelist, poet, and essayist living in Los Angeles. Her debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, has been named a Most Anticipated 2023 Book by The Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Emergency Brake ,was the winner of the Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series and spent five months on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers list. She was the winner of The American Poetry Review's Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, The Iowa Review's Tim McGinnis Award for fiction, and a Tin House scholarship in poetry.

Recommended Books:

Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate

Tembe Denton-Hurst, Homebodies

Mina Seckin, Four Humors

Maggie Milner, Couplets

Victor LaValle, Lone Women (One World, 2023)

Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, five novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, The Changeling, and Lone Women, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of two comic books Victor LaValle's DESTROYER and EVE.

His novel, The Changeling, will soon be airing on Apple TV+ starring LaKeith Stanfield.

He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens.

He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in the Bronx with his wife, the writer Emily Raboteau, and their kids. He teaches at Columbia University.

Recommended Books:

Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night

Nathan Ballingrud, The Strange

Molly Lynch, The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (Catapult, 2023)

Molly Lynch is a writer. She grew up on the West Coast of Canada and lived in Ireland as a teenager. She worked in Europe and traveled extensively through the Middle East, before studying Literature in Montreal. She did an MFA in Baltimore during the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement and became involved in community activism against racist policing and apartheid. She now teaches creative writing as well as literature courses on social justice at the University of Michigan.

Books Recommended:

Hanan Al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahara

Anne Enright, The Gathering

Tania James, Loot (Knopf, 2023)

Tania James is the author of Atlas of Unknowns, Aerogrammes, and Other Stories, and The Tusk That Did the Damage. Her stories have appeared in Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing, Granta, the New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and One Story, and have been featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. The Tusk that Did the Damage was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Tania lives in Washing D.C. where she is an associate professor of English at George Mason University.

Recommended Books:

Hua Hsu, Stay True

Marcy Dermansky, Very Nice

Rita Chang-Eppig, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea

*A video of a period expert playing Tipu’s Tiger at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhIIEv5Rt9g

Anne Berest, The Post Card trans. Tina Kover (Europa Editions, 2023)

Anne Berest is the bestselling co-author of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Doubleday, 2014) and the author of a novel based on the life of French writer Françoise Sagan. With her sister Claire, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse. For her work as a writer and prize-winning showrunner, she has been profiled in publications such as French Vogue and the Haaretz newspaper. The recipient of numerous literary awards, The Postcard was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize, winner of the American Choix Goncourt, and it has been a long-selling bestseller in France.

Tina Kover is the translator of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, and Anna Gavalda’s Life, Only Better. Her translations have twice been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award and she was the recipient in 2009 of a Literary Translation Fellowship from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Translators Aloud, a youtube channel that spotlights translators reading from their own work. She lives in the northeast of England.

Books Recommended:

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: The Search for Six of Six million

Patrick Modiano, Scene of the Crime

Irene Nemirovsky, trans. Sandra Smith, Suite Francaise

Orianna Ramunno, trans. Katherine Gregor, Ashes in the Snow

Julya Rabinowich, trans. Claire Story, Me, In between

Jane Roper, The Society of Shame (Anchor, 2023)

JANE ROPER is the author of two previous books: a memoir, Double Time, and a novel, Eden Lake. Her short fiction, essays, and humor have appeared in publications including McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Millions, The Rumpus, Salon, and Poets & Writers and on NPR. Jane is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in the Boston area with her husband and two children.

Book Recommendations:

Julia Argy, The One

Ashley Audrain, The Push

Andrew Porter, The Disappeared (Knopf, 2023)

ANDREW PORTER is the author of the story collection The Theory of Light and Matter and the novel In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, and Ploughshares, and on public radio’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Recommended Books:

Sarah Majka, Cities I’ve Never Lived In

Cara Blue Adams, You Never Get It Back

Stuart Dybek, The Coast of Chicago

Eirinie Carson, The Dead are Gods (Melville House, 2023) 

Eirinie Carson is a Black British Londoner and writer living in California. She is a mother of two children, Luka and Selah. A member of the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, Eirinie is a frequent contributor to Mother magazine, and her work has also appeared in Mother Muse and You Might Need To Hear This, with an upcoming piece in The Sonora Review’s Fall edition. She is also the recipient of the Teaching Fellowship from Craigardan, NY. Eirinie writes about motherhood, grief and relationships and is awaiting the release of her first book, The Dead Are Gods (on Melville House 2023) about the loss of her best friend, Larissa, and what love looks like after death.

Recommended Books:

Jinwoo Chong, Flux

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Ottessa Mossfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Jenny Jackson, Pineapple Street (Viking, 2023)

Jenny Jackson is a Vice President and Executive Editor at Alfred A. Knopf. A graduate of Williams College and the Columbia Publishing Course, she lives in Brooklyn Heights with her family. Pineapple Street is her first novel.

Recommended Books:

Katherine Heiny, Games and Rituals

Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You (Viking, 2023) 

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. 

Her work has  been translated into 20 languages, and her short fiction has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize XLI (2017), The Best American Short Stories 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 and 2009, New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Fantasy, and featured on Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts and This American Life.   

Recommended Books: 

Khalid Khalifa, No Knives in the Kitchen of this City 

Magda Szabo, The Door  

Sabhattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat 

Rasheed Newson, My Government Means to Kill Me (Flatiron Books, 2023)

Rasheed Newson is a writer and producer of Bel-Air, The Chi, and Narcos. He currently resides in Pasadena, California with his husband and two children. My Government Means to Kill Me is his debut novel.

Recommended Books:

Xochitl Gonzalez, Olga Dies Dreaming

Richard Mirabella, Brother and Sister Enter the Forest

Jeffrey Escoffery, If I Survive You

Prince Shakur, When They Tell You to Be Good

Rasheed’s Socials!

Twitter: @rasheednewson

TikTok: @rasheednewson

Instagram: rasheed.newson.author

Jinwoo Chong, Flux (Melville Books, 2023) 

Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, published March 21, 2023 in the US and UK from Melville House.,His work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Rumpus, LitHub, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature. He received the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Fiction from The Southern Review and a special mention in the 2022 Pushcart Prize anthology. He received an MFA from Columbia University and is an editorial assistant at One Story.

Recommended Books:

Julia Bartz, Writing Retreat

Gina Chung, Sea Change

Julia Langbein, American Mermaid (Doubleday, 2023)

JULIA LANGBEIN spent her formative years doing sketch, stand-up and improv comedy in New York before getting her doctorate in Art History. She is the author of a non-fiction book about comic art criticism (Laugh Lines, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022) and has since written about food, art and travel for Gourmet, Eater, Salon, Frieze and other publications. A native of Chicago, she lives outside of Paris with her family. American Mermaid is her first novel. 

Recommended Books:

Molly Kean, Good Behavior

Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital

Alexandra Kollontai, Love of Worker Bees

Kashana Cauley, The Survivalists (Soft Skull, 2023)

Kashana is the author of the novel THE SURVIVALISTS, which was published in January 2023 by Soft Skull Press. She’s also a TV writer who has written for The Great North and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She has also written for The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone, among other publications.

Recommended Books:

Chris Terry, Black Card

Alejandro Varela, The Town of Babylon

Priscilla Gilman, The Critic’s Daughter (Norton, 2023) 

Priscilla Gilman is the author of the previous memoir The Anti-Romantic Child and a former professor at Yale and Vassar. Her other writings have appeared in the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City. 

-Guest Hosted with Professor Corey McEleney, Fordham University 

Recommended Books: 

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You 

Paul Harding, This Other Eden 

Anne Beattie, Onlookers 

De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Decent People 

Claire Dederer, Monsters 

Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice (Riverhead, 2023)

Deepti Kapoor grew up in northern India and worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi. The author of the novel Bad Character, she now lives in Portugal with her husband.

Recommended Books;

Rafael Chirbes, Crematoria

Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

Daisy Florin, My Last Innocent Year (Henry Holt, 2023)

Daisy Alpert Florin attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019–20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, Daisy lives in Connecticut with her family.

Recommended Books:

Kevin Wilson, Now is Not the Time to Panic

Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves

Elena Ferrante, The Lying Lives of Adults

Christopher Hood, The Revivalists (Harper, 2023)

 Christopher M. Hood is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the Dalton School in New York City and lives nearby with his wife and daughter. He received an MFA in Poetry from UC Irvine. The Revivalists is his debut novel.

Book Recommendations:

Chang-rae Lee, My Year Abroad

Jenny Liou, Muscle Memory

Sanaë Lemoine, The Margot Affair (Hogarth, 2021)

Sanaë Lemoine is the author of The Margot Affair and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. She was born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, and raised in France and Australia, and now live in New York. She received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University.

Book Recommendations:

Meera Sodha, Made in India

Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow

Sarah Freeman, Tides

Matthew Salesses, The Sense of Wonder (Little Brown, 2023)

MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of eight books, including The Sense of Wonder, which comes out in January 2023 from Little, Brown. Most recent are the national bestseller Craft in the Real World (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others) and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics (out of print). Also forthcoming is a memoir-in-essays, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.

Book Recommendations:

Kristin Chen, Counterfeit

Alice Munroe, Selected Stories

Ryan Lee Wong, Which Side Are You On?

Dan Kois, Vintage Contemporaries (Harper Books, 2023)

Dan Kois is the author of three nonfiction books: how to be a family, a memoir; the world only spins forward, an oral history of Tony Kushner's Angels in America (with Isaac Butler); and facing future, part of the 33 1/3 series of music criticism. He's a longtime writer, editor, and Podcaster at Slate. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his family.

Book Recommendations:

Luke Healy, Con Artists

Peter and Maria Hoey, The Bend of Luck

Linnea Sterte, A Frog in Fall

Vanessa A. Bee, Home Bound: An Uprooted Daughter's Reflections on Belonging (Astra House, 2022)

Vanessa A. Bee is a consumer protection lawyer with a freelancing habit. Primarily interested in inequality, corporate power, the American Left, and Washington D.C. She also loves a good meandering essay.

Book Recommendations:

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

Hernan Diaz, Trust

Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You

Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil

Booksellers Best of 2022

Lisa Swayze is the General Manager and Buyer at Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca’s cooperatively owned independent bookstore. You’ve heard me mention Buffalo Street Books on all episodes—and it is Lisa who has really transformed the store into a community space for all of our community, where anyone can find themselves represented in the books, events, and atmosphere of the bookstore.

Hillary Smith is Southern Pomo and Coastal Miwok and originally from Northern California. She has been a bookseller on and off since 2009. In December 2021 she left her job as an indie bookstore manager in California and moved to Glens Falls, New York. She started Black Walnut Books as a queer and Native pop-up and online bookstore focusing on Indigenous, BIPOC and queer authors. In January Black Walnut Books will become a brick-and-mortar bookstore in the Shirt Factory in Glens Falls. 

Hannah Oliver Depp is the owner of Loyalty Bookstores in Petworth, DC and Silver Spring, MD. Loyalty serves all readers as a diverse, intersectional feminist bookstore and programming space. Oliver Depp is a founding member of the American Bookselling Association Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and serves on the boards of Bookshop.org and as The President of the New Atlantic Independent Bookseller’s Association (NAIBA). 

Anna Hogeland, The Long Answer (Riverhead, 2023)

Anna Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School of Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. She lives in Vermont.

Books Recommended:

Lisa Marchiano, Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself

Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark

Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Chrysa Bilton, Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings (Little Brown, 2022)

CHRYSTA BILTON is an American writer who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. Her first book, the memoir Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings, was published in July 2022 by Little, Brown in the US and Octopus in the UK.

Chrysta's work has appeared in The Guardian, Literary Hub, and Newsweek. Normal Family was listed among Kirkus's Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 and named a 'best' or 'must-read' book of Summer 2022 by Amazon, The Los Angeles Times,Vanity Fair, People, USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, Cup of Jo, Parade, Today, Apple, and elsewhere.

Book Recommendations:

David Sheff, Beautiful Boy

Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road

Jonathan Escoffrey, If I Survive You (Macmillan, 2022) 

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, If I Survive You, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and an Indie National Bestseller. If I Survive You was long-listed for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and elsewhere, and is a finalist for the Southern Book Prize and the California Bookseller Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award.   

Jonathan has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, The Work Room, The Porch, and at GrubStreet in Boston, where, as former staff, he founded the Boston Writers of Color Group, which currently has more than 2,000 members. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA Program (Fiction) and attends the University of Southern California’s Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature Program as a Provost Fellow. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.  

Books Recommendations: 

Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch 

Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different 

Laura Warrell, Sweet Soft Plenty Rhythm 

Meg Howrey, They’re Going to Love You (Doubleday, 2022)

Meg Howrey is the author of the novels THEY’RE GOING TO LOVE YOU, THE WANDERERS, THE CRANES DANCE, and BLIND SIGHT. She is also the coauthor, writing under the pen-name Magnus Flyte, of the New York Times Bestseller CITY OF DARK MAGIC and CITY OF LOST DREAMS. Her non-fiction has appeared in Vogue and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She currently lives in Los Angeles. 

Meg was a professional dancer who performed with the Joffrey Ballet and City Ballet of Los Angeles, among others. She made her theatrical debut in James Lapine's TWELVE DREAMS at Lincoln Center, and received the 2001 Ovation Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical for her role in the Broadway National Tour of CONTACT.

Book Recommendations:

Bojan Lewis, Sinking Bell

Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

Ursula Villarreal-Moura, Math for the Self-Crippling (Gold Line Press, 2022)

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner, and Like Happiness (forthcoming with Celadon Books). A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, Washington Square, Story, Bennington Review, Wigleaf Top 50, and Gulf Coast. She contributed to Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, a flash anthology by writers of color, and in 2012, she won the CutBank Big Fish Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry Contest. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015.

Recommended Books:

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water

Billy Ray-Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

Alejandro Varela, The Town of Babylon

Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

Amy Fusselman, The Means (Mariner Books, 2022)

Amy Fusselman is the author of five books. Her latest, The Means, is her first novel.
Fusselman’s previous four books, all nonfiction, have been translated into several languages. Her work has been nominated for The Believer Book Award and the University of Iowa's Krause Essay Prize. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other places. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches creative writing at New York University.

Book Recommendations:

Holly Pelesky, Cleave

Violaine Swartz, Papers

Sheng Wang, Sweet and Juicy (Netflix Stand-Up Comedy)

Lynn Steger Strong, Flight (Mariner, 2022)

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University and will be the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College for the 2022-2023 school year. She was born and raised in South Florida.

Recommended Books:

Sheila Heti, Pure Color

Claire Keegan, Foster

Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

Giada Scodellaro, Some of Them Will Carry Me

Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark (Riverhead Books, 2022)

Kayla Maiuri holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Born in the greater Boston area, she now lives in Brooklyn. Mother in the Dark is her first novel.

Kayla Recommends:

Anna Hogeland, The Long Answer

Kevin Wilson, Now is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco, 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

Matthew Delmont, Half American (Viking, 2022)

Matthew Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of four books: Black Quotidian, Why Busing Failed, Making Roots, and The Nicest Kids in Town. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, NPR, and several academic journals. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his B.A from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University.

@mattdelmont (twitter)

Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch (Knopf, 2022)

Born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, Tess holds a B.A. in English with an Honor’s Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. After graduating in 2015, she began an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. After earning her MFA, Tess worked alongside her former professor Jonathan Safran Foer, providing research and writing for his book of nonfiction about the climate crisis. We Are the Weather was published by FSG in 2019.

As a freelance writer, editor, and research assistant, Tess’s experience also includes documenting the history of the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns; contributing a history of Westside, Atlanta to an urban revitalization plan by Thadani Architects + Urbanists; creating science content for the American Museum of Natural History; editing Bruce Rits Gilbert’s debut book, John Prine, One Song at a Time, a tribute to the folk musician written in the wake of Prine’s death from the novel coronavirus; and working as a fact-checker on Mysteries of Mental Illness, a PBS docuseries about the history of psychiatry in America.

In 2021, the publishing houses Knopf (North America), Éditions Gallmeister (France), Guanda (Italy), and Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Germany) preempted Tess’s debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, along with her sophomore novel Honeydew.

Recommended Books:

Hernan Diaz, Trust

Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden

Andrea Barrett, Natural History (Norton, 2022)

Andrea Barrett began writing fiction seriously in her thirties and published her first novel, Lucid Stars, in 1988. She’s particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction.Barrett, whose work reflects her lifelong interest in science and natural history, received the National Book Award for her fifth book, Ship Fever, a collection of stories featuring scientists, doctors, and naturalists. In 2001 she received a MacArthur Fellowship and was also a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. In addition to other prizes and awards she’s also been a finalist for The Story Prize and received the Rea Award for the Short Story.

Barrett has lived in Rochester, NY and in western Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing for fifteen years at Williams College. She and her husband, photographer Barry Goldstein, now live on the eastern side of the Adirondack Mountains, in the Champlain Valley.

Recommended Books:

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature

A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book

Ed Yong, An Immense World

Chelsea Martin, Tell Me I’m An Artist (Soft Skull, 2022)

Chelsea Martin's first novel, tell me i'm an artist, is published with Soft Skull Press. Her previous books include caca dolce (soft skull, 2017), even though i don't miss you (short flight/long drive, 2013), and others. She currently lives in spokane, wa with her husband and child.

Recommended Books:

Emma Bolden, The Tiger and the Cage

AM Homes, The Unfolding (Viking, 2022)

A.M. Homes most recent book is The Unfolding. Her previous work includes, This Book Will Save Your Life, which won the 2013 Orange/Women’s Prize for Fiction, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collections, Days of Awe, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, the best selling memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter along with a travel memoir, Los Angeles: People, Places and The Castle on the Hill, and the artist’s book Appendix A:

A.M. Homes has been the recipient of numerous awards including Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYFA, and The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, along with the Benjamin Franklin Award, and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis.

She was a Co-Executive Producer and Writer on David E. Kelly and Stephen King’s, Mr. Mercedes, Co-Executive Producer and Writer on Falling Water and has created original television pilots for HBO, FX and CBS and was a writer/producer of the Showtime series The L Word.

Recommended Books:

Melissa Febos

Maria Popova, Figuring

—”The Marginalian”

Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts (Penguin, 2022)

Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts.

Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. 

Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazon's Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications, the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and has spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Little Fires Everywhere has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

Recommended Books:

Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Woman of Light

Andrew Sean Greer, Less is Lost (Little, Brown, 2022)

 Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Books Recommended:

A.B. Yehoshua, A Journey to the End of the Millennium

Byline: 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.

Courtney Zoffness, Spilt Milk (McSweeney’s, 2022)

Courtney Zoffness is the author of SPILT MILK, out now with McSweeney’s, and forthcoming in paperback in September 2022. Spilt Milk was named a best debut of 2021 by BookPage and Refinery29, and a “must-read” by Good Morning America. Also a fiction writer, Zoffness won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award, the most valuable international prize for short fiction, amid entries from 38 countries. She joined a list of winners that includes Anthony Doerr and Junot Díaz. Other honors include an Emerging Writers Fellowship from The Center for Fiction and two residency fellowships from MacDowell. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Guernica, No Tokens, and other venues, and she had essays listed as “notable” in Best American Essays in 2018 and 2019.

Zoffness holds graduate degrees from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona, and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught English at a dozen different institutions, including Yale University and the University of Freiburg (Germany), and delivered readings and talks at venues across the US and abroad. Currently she directs the creative writing program at Drew University. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Books Recommended:

Emerson Whitney, Heaven

Carmen Marie Machado, In the Dream House

Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022)

Vauhini Vara was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, as a child of Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in Oklahoma and the Seattle suburbs. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (W.W. Norton), is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize; reviewing it in the Times, Justin Taylor called it “a monumental achievement.” It will be followed by a story collection, This is Salvaged, in 2023.

She studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Zyzzyva, and other journals. It has received an O. Henry Award, as well as honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo.

Vara began her writing career as a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal; after nine years, she spent two years launching, editing and writing for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. Since then, her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Businessweek, and elsewhere. She is a Wired contributing writer and can sometimes be found working as a story editor at the New York Times Magazine.

Books recommended:

Javier Marias, A Heart So White (Un Corazón tan Blanco)

Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different (Viking, 2022)

donate to: https://www.bedstuystrong.com/

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She is a recipient of a Best American Short Stories 2020 award and fellowships from the Asian American Writers Workshop and the Iowa Writers Workshop. All This Could Be Different is her first novel.

Books Mentioned:

All This Could Be Different

Sarah’s Recommendations:

Halle Butler, The New Me

Akil Kumarasamy, Meet Us By the Roaring Sea

Dhumketu, The Shehnai Virtuoso

Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches

Title: Elaine Hsieh Chou, Disorientation (Penguin, 2022)

Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, her short fiction appears in The Normal School, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online and Ploughshares. Her debut novel DISORIENTATION is out now from Penguin Press (US) and Picador (UK). Her short story collection WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM? is forthcoming from Penguin Press in spring 2024.

Books Recommended in this Episode:

Don Lee, The Collective

Brandon Taylor, Real Life

David Lodge, Changing Places

Julia May Jonas, Vladimir (Avid Reader Press, 2022)

Julia May Jonas is a writer, director, and the founder of theater company Nellie Tinder. (www.nellietinder.org) She has taught at Skidmore College and NYU and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Vladimir is her first novel.

Books Recommended in this Episode:

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter In the Dark

—-Pnin

Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

Elisa Albert, Human Blues

Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man (Riverhead, 2022)

Mohsin Hamid is the author of five novels -- The Last White Man, Exit West, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Moth Smoke -- and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations. His writing has been translated into forty languages, featured on bestseller lists, and adapted for the cinema. Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Mohsin Recommends:

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point (Simon and Schuster, 2022)

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist.  Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and has been translated into many languages. "In the Gloaming," a story, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of The Century and was made into films by HBO and Trinity Playhouse. Her non-fiction reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many anthologies. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark in the English department and the MFA program.  

Books Recommended in this episode: 

Fellowship Point 

Alice Recommends: 

Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Quartet 

Jean Stafford, The Catherine Wheel 

Willa Cather, The Professor’s House 

Joanne Beard, Festival Days 

Mary Oliver, Upstream 

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses 

Rachel Krantz, Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy (Harmony Books, 2022)

Rachel Krantz is the author of the reported memoir, OPEN: AN UNCENSORED MEMOIR OF LOVE, LIBERATION, AND NON-MONOGAMY. She is the host of HELP EXISTING, a new podcast offering help on, well, existing. She is one of Bustle’s three founding editors. At Bustle, she served as Senior Features Editor for three years, and Senior News Editor before that. She also worked at The Daily Beast as Homepage Editor, and at the nonprofit Mercy For Animals as Lead Writer. She’s the recipient of the Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights International Radio Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Radio Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Award for her work as an investigative reporter with YR Media.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy 

Rachel Recommends:

Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World

Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother

Susan Burton, Empty

Maureen Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey

Rebecca van Laer, How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022) & Shannon McLeod, Whimsy (Long Day Press, 2021) 

Rebecca van Laer’s writing appears in TriQuarterly Review, joyland, Columbia journal, the Florida review, Salamander, Hobart, monkeybicycle, electric literature and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University. Shannon McLeod is the author of the essay chapbook Pathetic from Etchings Press, and her writings have appeared in Tin House, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, and Smokelong Quarterly. She lives in Virginia where she teaches high school English. Rebecca and Shannon join me to discuss their debut novellas, How to Adjust to the Dark and Whimsy, both out with Long Day Press. 

Books Recommended in this episode: 

How to Adjust to the Dark and Whimsy 

Rebecca Recommends: 

Nate Lippens, My Dead Book 

Naomi Washer, Subjects We Left Out 

Shannon Recommends: 

Chloe Caldwell, Women  

Chantal V. Johnson, Post-Traumatic 

Ursula Villarreal-Moura, Math for the Self-Crippling 

Sebastian Castillo, Not I 

Julia Glass, Vigil Harbor (Pantheon, 2022)

Julia and I discuss her latest novel, Vigil Harbor, a story of the near future in which many of our current crises are amplified in terrifying yet recognizable ways. The Covid pandemic and its aftereffects are still felt, coastal communities are being swept into the sea, a violent wave of xenophobia and anti-immigrant anti-refugee sentiment stokes fire everywhere—such is the world a little more than a decade from now in Julia’s imaginings. Like so many of Julia’s works of fiction, it is the voices of the characters that populate this world that make the novel sing. There’s the architect, Austin Kepner, who obsesses over building houses that are made to withstand the furies of an angry planet’s weather. Margo, the sardonic, brainy teacher. Brecht, home from NYU after escaping a domestic terrorist attack, and so many other unique and compelling voices. Life in the small coastal town of Vigil Harbor is roiled by two unexpected visitors, one a stranger, and the other well-known to certain inhabitants. The result is a novel of many pleasures that unsettles even as it delights.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Vigil Harbor

Julia Recommends:

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

Elliott Ackerman, 2034: A Novel of the Next War

Stewart O’Nan, Ocean State

Elisabeth Anker, Ugly Freedoms (Duke University Press, 2022) 

With me on today’s show is Professor Elisabeth Anker, whose most recent book, Ugly Freedoms, works to understand how the idea of freedom, seemingly so fundamental to our understanding of the American experience, is often the very concept that allows for the brutal deprivation of the freedom of others. As she writes, “ugly freedom entails a dynamic in which practices of freedom produce harm, brutality, and subjugation as freedom.” Today we will be discussing Professor Anker’s theory of ugly freedom in the context of our unending crisis of gun violence in the United States. This show’s topic feels as essential as any that I have offered thus far. I hope you will find something hopeful in our conversation. And now, Ugly Freedoms with Elisabeth Anker. 

Books Recommended in this episode: 

Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022) 

Shelly Oria and Kirstin Valdez Quade, I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom (McSweeney’s Books, 2022) 

Shelly Oria has just produced an anthology of writings on reproductive freedom that is available now from McSweeney’s Books, in partnership with The Brigid Alliance. Spanning nearly every genre of writing, the collection greatly broadens the parameters for how we might speak of reproductive freedoms and fight for their continuation even in this particularly bleak time. She is joined by the novelist, Kirstin Valdez Quade, author most recently of The Five Wounds. It was an honor to talk to Shelly and Kirstin about their hopes and fears for a future after Roe vs Wade and the potential for writers to enter the fray as defenders of the right to abortion, but also to be issuers of a clarion call for the many other natural rights that are being trammeled upon. Please consider supporting I Know What’s Best for You by purchasing it directly from McSweeney’s or your local bookstore. The work within is moving, empathetic, horrifying, touching, and unforgettable. 

Books Recommended in this episode: 

I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom 

Peter Ho Davies, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself 

Torry Peters, Detransition Baby 

Lydia Conklin, Rainbow Rainbow 

Marcy Dermansky, Hurricane Girl (Knopf, 2022) 

An interview with novelist Marcy Dermansky. Hurricane Girl brings us another unforgettable Dermansky-character, Allison Brody, whose rashness and seeming detachment are matched only by her commitment to finding a place in the world that is truly her own. Allison has just fled an abusive relationship, albeit one that provided a great deal of privilege, and has spent her own savings to buy a cottage on the ocean. When that cottage is lost in a freak storm, what little control Allison had felt spins slowly out of reach, first with another violent interaction with a man that leaves her with severe brain trauma, and later in Allison’s suspicions that everyone around her would like her to be someone else. In classic Dermansky style, what could be a horror novel is in fact a comedy, often riotously funny even in scenes of intense dread and violence. The final product is a novel that entertains even as it disorients, forcing us to admit that Allison’s brain injury may in fact be a source of clarity and insight into a world that operates with a cruel illogic. 

Books Recommended in this episode: 

Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen. 

Peter C Baker, Planes

Books Recommended in this episode: 

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

Elif Batuman, Either/Or (Penguin, 2022) 

 An interview with novelist Elif Batuman. The international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot now has a sequel. In Either/Or, Batuman picks up the story as her character, Selin, returns for her sophomore year at Harvard. Either/Or, like its predecessor, is a novel of ideas wrapped in a campus novel, told in a voice so unique that you may never get over it. Elif and I talk Cartesian dualism, Voltron’s tardiness, the novel of ideas vs the thinking novel, eros defused over the body, and so much more. You can’t miss this episode. 

 Books Recommended in this episode: 

Either/Or 

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go 

John William, Stoner 

Nino Haratischvili, The Eighth Life 

Grant Ginder, Let’s Not Do That Again (Henry Holt, 2022)

An interview with novelist Grant Ginder. In his latest dramady of familial disfunction, Let’s Not Do That Again, Grant starts with political intrigue that bridges New York and Paris, mixes it with a wealthy and connected family in freefall, and ties it together with a transnational criminal coverup. The result is one of the most engrossing novels of the year. Grant’s work reminds us why the novel form can be both beautiful and ribald, literary and popular. I had such a wonderful time talking to Grant about how families inevitably disappoint, and how great writers can show how they manage to love each other despite themselves.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Let’s Not Do That Again

Grant Recommends:

Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind

Jennifer Close, Marrying the Ketchups

Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

Fernanda Melchor and Sophie Hughes Paradais (New Directions, 2022)

An interview with Fernanda Melchor, finalist for the International Booker Prize, and author most recently of Paradais. And Sophie Hughes, the English translator of Fernanda’s two novels, and winner of the Pen Translates Award. In a wide-ranging discussion, we touch upon the ways in which translation is akin to friendship, and how a translation can be the greatest interpretation of your work. Fernanda discusses her understanding of violence as inseparable from the story of humanity, and how she sees her style as that which persists after she has let go of the text, while Sophie addresses the question of the translator’s invisibility and the lexicons required for each new writers work that she takes on. This episode features a bilingual reading from Paradais by Fernanda Melchor. It is not to be missed.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Paradais

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

José Agustín, De Perfil

Nona Fernandez, The Twilight Zone

Marianna Enriquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

Alia Trabucco Zerán, The Remainder

Andrea Abreu, Dogs of Summer

Natasha Brown, Assembly (Little Brown, 2021)

An interview with Natasha Brown, winner of the London Writers Award, and author of Assembly, the story of a young black British woman, marked by success in education and work, who asks a fundamental question: does my country care whether or I live or die? At a mere one hundred and two pages, Assembly manages to evoke more feeling, more sensorial reality than many novels twice its length. Natasha has gone to the novel’s primary function—its vision into the inner life of a character—and she has brought it to bear on the precariousness of black life. The result is a work of literary fiction that is profoundly beautiful, with passages of poetic form and lyrical description of a world that her narrator experiences as ultimately negating. Negating of her agency, her accumulated wealth and status, her education, her citizenship, and ultimately of her bare life. Suffused with its contemporary moment, with references to the police killing of Philando Castille and the white nationalist resurgence in Britain, Assembly is fundamentally a reminder that the sun has yet to set on the imperial mindset, and that the black body and the black intellect still do not register within that logic.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Assembly

Natasha Recommends:

Meena Kandasamy, Exquisite Cadavers

Rachel Long, My Darling from the Lions

Hannah Sullivan, Three Poems

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness”

Jennifer Egan, The Candy House (Scribner, 2022)  

An interview with Jennifer Egan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and author most recently of The Candy House, the story of the intersections across space and time of characters desperate to understand their interior lives. At the hub of these stories, a machine capable of capturing and sharing memories, and even offering the possibility of joining a collectivity of consciousness. Jennifer Egan, as always, balances beautifully the profound intellectual problems of existence with characters who feel deeply real by virtue of their uncommon minds. We get to talking about how her process is one of discovery through the unconscious practice of writing, and the ways in which certain ideas of what the reader should feel and experience guide her structure. We discuss her creation of the futuristic machine in The Candy House that, in the end, fashions what only the novel can produce: a window into the minds and memories of another. On the subject of movement back and forth through time and place, Jennifer credits a marvelous children’s novel for the concept of parallel worlds into which characters can dip in and out of. In an incredibly wide-ranging discussion, we touch upon Dungeons and Dragons, the longest and possibly best 18th century novel, the possibility of reading The Candy House as the predecessor to A Visit from the Goon Squad, and so much more.

Books Recommended in this episode: 

The Candy House 

Jennifer Recommends: 

Lauren Groff, Matrix 

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa 

Rye Curtis, Kingdomtide 

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones 

Caitlin Barasch, A Novel Obsession (Dutton, 2022)

 An interview with Caitlin Barasch, author of A Novel Obsession, a debut novel about a young woman convinced that she must be a writer, but entirely uncertain that she has a story worth sharing. Her solution: concoct a real-life romantic triangle featuring her boyfriend’s ex and herself as the protagonists. Caitlin and I discuss how she goes about building anticipatory dread scene by scene, and how plotting is not a dead artform in the novel. We talk about the relationship between obsession and writing, the pleasures of writing awkward sex scenes, the need for more women characters behaving badly, failing to avoid social media in art, and so much more.

Books Recommended in this episode:

A Novel Obsession

Caitlin Recommends:

Alyssa Nutting, Tampa

Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

Elena Ferrante, Days of Abandonment

Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations

Allegra Hyde, Eleutheria (Vintage/Anchor, 2022)

An interview with Allegra Hyde, author of Eleutheria, a debut novel about an idealist who comes face to face with the allure and pitfalls of utopian eco-communities. Allegra and I discuss the need for hopeful narratives of a possible future in an age of climate disaster, and how and why art is poised to craft those narratives. We talk about the “stench of perfectionism” that invades some intentional communities, the pleasures of dumpster-diving with Freegans, the beautiful art of terrarium making, trying to live the solution when the world isn’t listening , and so much more.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Eleutheria

Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun

Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible

Matt Bell, Appleseed

Amitav Gosh, The Great Derangement

Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers (Simon and Schuster, 2022)

 An interview with Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers, a debut novel about the current and future terrors of state-disciplined forms of motherhood. Jessamine and I discuss the genesis of this near-future dystopia, and how she never considers genre when writing. We talk about the deep well of ingrained ideologies about the mothering and protection of children against unseen dangers, the complicated layers of the novel’s Philadelphia settings, including the real-life campus that inspired the fictional school, surveillance of racial minorities by police and child protective services, and so much more.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

Jessamine Recommends:

“Where is your mother?” The New Yorker

“Foster Care as Punishment” The New York Times

Kim Brooks, Small Animals

Liz Moore, Long Bright River

Katie Gutierrez, More than You’ll Ever Know

Ling Ma, Severance

Alyssa Songsiridej, Little Rabbit

Chloe Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Anonymous Sex (Simon and Schuster, 2022)

An interview with Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, editors of Anonymous Sex, a collection of 27 explicit sex stories unattributed to the 27 writers listed in the byline. Cheryl, Hillary, and I discuss how exactly you get writers like Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Makkai, Helen Oyeyemi, and Robert Olen Butler to contribute a story when the conceit is sex. We talk about the problem with stale erotica and the search for fresh language with which to talk about sex and desire, the necessity of understanding sex as culturally constructed, and so much more.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Anonymous Sex 

Hillary Recommends:

Michael Cunningham, Flesh and Blood

----. A Home at the End of the World

Cheryl Recommends:

Fumiko Enchi, Masks

----. The Waiting Years

The Novels of Muriel Spark

Andrew Lipstein, Last Resort (FSG, 2022)

An interview with Andrew Lipstein, author of the debut novel, Last Resort. Andrew and I discuss ownership over stories, the blurring of the commercial and the literary in contemporary publishing, the dread that accompanies a story that grows out of your control, and so much more.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Andrew Lipstein, Last Resort

Andrew Recommends:

Natasha Brown, Assembly

Sheila Heti, Pure Color

Xochitl Gonzalez, Olga Dies Dreaming (Flatiron, 2022)

An interview with Xochitl Gonzalez, author of the debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming. Xochitl and I discuss the unique narrative perspective that a wedding planner has on American privilege and inequality, the gentrification of Brooklyn, the rich and wealthy colonizers of Puerto Rico post- la Promesa, Nuyorican culture as the creole of NYC, and so much more.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Xochitl Gonzalez, Olga Dies Dreaming

Xochitl Recommends:

Cho Nam Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: A Novel

Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost

----. The Family Chao

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year (Vintage, 2014)

An interview with Joanna Rakoff, author of the memoir My Salinger Year. Joanna and I discuss the power of a novelistic memoir, breaking open literary New York, what it was like replying to J.D. Salinger’s fan mail, and working in true collaboration on a film adaptation of her memoir.

Books Recommended in this episode: 

Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point

Evan Hughes, The Hard Sell

Sara Freeman, Tides

Percival Everett, The Trees (Graywolf, 2021)

If there is such a thing as the American literary canon, then Percival Everett is at the center of it. The author of over 30 novels, books of poetry and short fiction, and children’s literature, for over thirty years Everett has been one of the great innovators of fictional forms. In our interview, we discuss how a novel about the history and present of racial violence, from the beginnings of lynching during reconstruction to the present day killing of unarmed black men and women by police officers, means something different in the Trump Era. We open up the question of whether or not literary arts are capable of being catalysts to the kinds of change that other movements have failed to enact. And Everett talks about the importance of an adapting and growing archive of the names of those killed in lynchings or extrajudicial killings, a list of names that he himself has attempted to write down as an act of remembering. 

Books Recommended in this episode: 

Alan Le May, The Searchers 

——-. Painted Ponies 

Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers 

Simone de Beauvoir 

Jean-Paul Satre, Nausea 

Robert Coover, Ghost Town 

Percival’s Gallery Show to accompany The Trees

Cara Blue Adams, You Never Get It Back (University of Iowa Press, 2021)

An interview with Cara Blue Adams, You Never Get It Back (2021). Cara and I discuss the joys of linked short story collections, the lack of adequate vocabulary to describe working people in the United States, the many moods of everyday life, and how humor works in her stories.  

These are stories of exquisite observation and the quiet beauty of everyday life. You Never Get It Back is a collection of linked stories that follows Kate, a young woman moving through her twenties and thirties, first as a research scientist and later as a budding writer. Kate is for this reader, the best of what makes us impossibly human—our need for others, matched against our desire to be meaningful as a singular person in the world.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Cara Blue Adams, You Never Get It Back

Cara Recommends:

Maria Gainza, Optic Nerve

Joan Didion, Play it as it Lays

Franz Kafka, The Trial

Sara Manguso, Very Cold People

Sara Majka, Cities I’ve Never Lived In

Kalani Pickhart, I Will Die in a Foreign Land (Two Dollar Radio, 2021)

An interview with Kalani Pickhart, I Will Die in a Foreign Land (2021), a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021. Russia is again amassing troops on the Ukrainian border. There are threats of more sanctions from the US and the EU, but those come with a tacit understanding that there is likely little that the world can do to stop Putin should he decide to invade. It is within this frightening context that Kalani Pickhart’s extraordinary novel, I Will Die in a Foreign Land, enters the scene. The novel itself is a beautiful pastiche of forms: novelistic plots mix with songs and folktales, manifests of passengers killed in downed planes or in the melee of protest, diaries and recordings, all working to build a feeling, the urge for a democratic voice to speak against violence and despair. Kalani and I discuss the burden of writing true in a work of fiction, and so much more!

Books Recommended in this episode:

Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner

God Shot, Chelsea Bieker

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Katya Apekina

The Power of the Dog (Film), Jane Campion

Best Books of the Year 2021, Booksellers Edition

A conversation with booksellers from three of the most dynamic, exciting, and community-oriented independent bookstores in the country. Lisa Swayze of Buffalo Street Books (Ithaca, NY), Michelle Malonzo of Changing Hands Bookstore (Tempe, AZ), and Alena Jones of Seminary Co-op Bookstores (Chicago, IL) join me and my special co-host, professor Kasia Bartoszynska for a roundup of their favorite books of the year, and a fascinating look into indie bookstores during the pandemic.

Books Recommended in this episode:

An interview with Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. Benjamin and I cover an enormous amount of ground in our wide-ranging interview: we touch on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal as a way of his writing; the failure of our societies to make room for overlapping, sometimes contradictory histories; his distaste for genre categories; the inevitable loss involved in translation; Chile’s frightening presidential election; and much much more. I know that you will be as enthralled and challenged and delighted by Benjamín’s capacious mind.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

Benjamín Recommends:

Juan Forn, Los Viernes

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Pascal Quignard, The Last Kingdom

Elliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing

J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

Georg Buchner, Lenz

Frantisek Vlacil, Marketa Lazarova (film)

Pola Oloixarac, Mona (Macmillan, 2021)

 An interview with Pola Oloixarac. Pola and I get to talking about the failure of the US university to live up to its massive influence, especially when it comes to making the lives of black and brown people better. We discuss whether writers are terrible people, or are they simply unfit for any other vocation? Pola introduces me to "me-search," the self-centered prancing of authors at literary conferences. And she helps me to see the folly of imagining writing as a solitary affair, instead imagining the work of the writer as a constant convening of friends.

Books Recommended in this episode: 

Pola Oloixarac, Mona

Pola Recommends:

1. Maria Gainza, Portrait of an Unknown Lady

2. Aldolfo Caseres, Borges (2023 in English)

3. Rafael Chirbes, Cremation trans. valerie miles

4. Edgardo Cozarinsky,Milongas trans. valerie miles

Season 2, Episode 5 Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

An interview with Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies (2021), longlisted for the National Book Award. Katie and I discuss the International Criminal Court, its biases and tireless fight for justice, the charisma of its translators, the attraction to violence in the novel, the inscrutability of marriages, and so much more.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

Katie recommends:

• Anna Seghers, Transit

• Adalbert Sifter, Rock Crystal

• Olga Tokarczuk, The Book of Jacob

Season 2, Episode 2, Rebecca Makkai, The Plague Before

An interview with Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Rebecca and I discuss the impact of a plague novel in the age of Covid-19, the drama and intrigue of prize juries, her archival work into the Act Up protests in Chicago, and the pleasures and complications of outside of what you know.

Books Recommended in this episode:

Rebecca Recommends her all-time nostalgic summer read:

• Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Episode 4: Summer Reading Part I

Interviews with Bob Proehl, author of A Hundred Thousand Worlds and The Nobody People, and Miller Susen, author, director, and Educational Director at LiveArts, Charlottesville VA.

Books Recommended in this episode:

• Katharine Heiny, Standard Deviation

• Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower