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

Jorie Graham’s first appearance on the show in 2021, to discuss her collection Runaway, is one of the most relistened to episodes in the show’s history, a conversation that, with each revisitation, seems to reveal something new about how to will oneself into presence as an artist and as a human. And it is a […] The post Jorie Graham : To 2040 appeared first on Tin House.

Today’s craft talk, “Why So Surrealism” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, was recorded at the 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop. Prompted by a journalist who asked him to talk about how surrealistic and speculative conceits operated in and informed Black fiction, in this craft talk Adjei-Brenyah looks at the tropes of surrealist and speculative fiction within […] The post Tin House Live : Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Surrealism appeared first on Tin House.

Poet Roger Reeves calls the essays in his debut book of prose “fugitive essays.” And we explore what it means to write fugitively, to write into and from and toward fugitivity. If, as Fred Moten says, fugitivity is “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. . […] The post Roger Reeves : Dark Days appeared first on Tin House.

Isabella Hammad’s latest book Enter Ghost is about a Palestinian theater group attempting to put on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The actors come from many different Palestinian experiences, one to the next. Some have Israeli citizenship. Others live in refugee camps or Ramallah or in the diaspora in Europe. But why […] The post Isabella Hammad : Enter Ghost appeared first on Tin House.

Even though each of Max Porter’s books is a stand-alone book, some have called Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny, and his latest, Shy, a “trilogy of boyhood,” a framing Max himself embraces. After a truly electrifying short reading from Shy, Max and I explore his impulse to examine and evoke boyhood across these three […] The post Tin House Live : Max Porter on Shy appeared first on Tin House.

Spareness, economy, and distillation are often put forth as obvious virtues in poetry. But what if there were a politics undergirding this aesthetic preference? In today’s conversation with poet Megan Fernandes we look at questions of poetics and aesthetics in relation to capitalism and colonialism and how a messier, more unruly poetics can trouble borders […] The post Megan Fernandes : I Do Everything I’m Told appeared first on Tin House.

What if you gave your fictional main character all of your own biographical details and family history but had them, at every point, choose “wrong”? At every point do the thing you yourself would be against? Johanna Hedva does just that, and their novel Your Love Is Not Good is not just full of sex […] The post Johanna Hedva : Your Love Is Not Good appeared first on Tin House.

In Early Medieval Ireland there was a language called Ogham that was sometimes referred to as the “Celtic Tree Alphabet'” because its letters each corresponded to and depicted a different tree. At one point Ireland, now one of the most deforested countries in Europe, was largely covered in forest, its culture deeply entwined with the […] The post Tin House Live : Katie Holten on The Language of Trees appeared first on Tin House.

Back in 2019, when Richard Powers was a guest on Between the Covers for The Overstory, we also appeared together that very same night, in conversation again. This time, an onstage ticketed event at Revolution Hall before a live audience. I’ve wanted to share this second conversation ever since. Not only because I prepared two […] The post Tin House Live: Richard Powers on The Overstory appeared first on Tin House.

Melanie Rae Thon’s latest book, As If Fire Could Hide Us, is described not as a novel with three chapters, nor as a collection of three stories, but as “a love song in three movements.” What does it mean to see a story as song, to sing from or toward love, to experience a book’s […] The post Melanie Rae Thon : As If Fire Could Hide Us appeared first on Tin House.