Set in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, A Questionable Shape rejects the splatter and kitsch of typical genre fare in favor of meditations on the nature of consciousness and loss. It’s a zombie novel where the zombies appear only at a distance and pose little danger to Mazoch and Vermaelen, two friends who drive around the city every day, searching for an undead father and waiting for the coming hurricane to hit. With nods to Hamlet and Orpheus (not to mention Tarkovsky and Wittgenstein), Sims’s novel is a learned debut informed not just by erudition, but by nature, desire, and the persistence of memory.

Wells Tower writes: “Bennett Sims is a writer fearsomely equipped with an intellectual and linguistic range to rival a young Nabokov’s, Nicholson Baker’s gift for miniaturistic intaglio, and an arsenal of virtuosities entirely his own. A Questionable Shape announces a literary talent of genre-wrecking brilliance.”

Sims’s fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently teaches at the University of Iowa, where he is the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer in fiction.

Listen live: Wednesday, May 8 at 3 PM CST

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Listen in:

Vivian Gornick | Monday, April 8th at 3 PM CST
Elizabeth Strout | Tuesday, April 9th at 3 PM CST

Meanwhile, two new episodes are available through our podcast.

Our interview with Mary Jo Bang, whose new translation of Dante—simply called Inferno—is inventive and audaciously modern.

Our interview with Roxane Gay, essayist and literary web personality, on the Internet, feminism, and losing at Scrabble.

The post Lit Show Programming: Week of 4/9/2013 appeared first on The Lit Show.

On this Lit Show, Russell Jaffe discusses his new book, participatory poetry, small presses, the 2013 Mission Creek Festival, and building a community around art.

Jaffe is an artist, poet, teacher, event organizer, and all-around participator. His debut collection, This Super Doom I Aver, is a collection of self-described “Mad Libs poems” that are designed to be co-written by and with their reader. Despite Jaffe’s claims that “our new history is avant-doom,” CA Conrad calls the book “anything but a place where we are doomed. It’s house of Magic!!”

Jaffe is also the founder and editor of Strange Cage, the small press and long-running poetry series that returns to Iowa City on April 15. His poems appear all over the Internet and are forthcoming in [PANK] and H_NGM_N. He has exhibited found sculptures made from discarded video game systems. He teaches poetry workshops in and around Iowa City. He holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. He loves professional wrestling in what appears to be a sincere way. His work is riotously fun, doggedly unpretentious, and [________].

Interview by Ben Mauk.

Excerpt

Complete Show

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On this episode of The Lit Show, Terry Tempest Williams discusses her latest book, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice.

“I am leaving you all my journals,” Williams’ mother told her, a week before she died. “But you must promise me that you will not look at them until after I am gone.” That her mother kept a journal was a surprise, but one that paled in comparison to the shock of their contents. Every one of her mother’s journals – “three shelves of beautiful clothbound books” – was empty. What follows is a meditative memoir; fifty-four essays in miniature that circle intimacy, nature, politics, and the task of writing to pose the question: What does it mean to have a voice? By turn confessional and lyrical, When Women Were Birds grapples with the privilege of speaking and the eloquence of silence.

The Seattle Times describes When Women Were Birds as “an extraordinary echo chamber in which lessons about voice – passed along from mother, to daughter, and now to us – will reverberate,” and the San Francisco Chronicle calls the book “a Whitmanesque embrace of the world and its contradictions.”

Williams is the author of fourteen books, including Leap, Refuge, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and the essay collection, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. She is a frequent contributor to Orion Magazine and is a columnist for The Progressive. The current Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, Williams splits her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Moose, Wyoming.

Complete Episode

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Lawrence Weschler’s work fills the gap between a multifarious event and its potential meaning(s). In his narrative essays, investigative journalism, and profiles of artists and activists in exile, Weschler unspools connective tissue between seemingly disparate topics – Parkinson’s disease and woodworking, Vermeer’s serene paintings and the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal – like a mad scientist building his own idiosyncratic, supercharged brain. Whatever his subject, Weschler is determined to tease out what he describes, in that titular essay from Vermeer in Bosnia, as “felt absences” – the conspicuously excluded contradictions and convergences to be found in culture, politics, and art.

The author of more than a dozen works of nonfiction (and two-time winner of the George Polk Award), Weschler was for more than twenty years a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of eleven books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, which was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and most recently Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Bard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, NYU, and his alma mater, Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

A visiting guest of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, Weschler will deliver a lecture titled “Science and Art as Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing” this Wednesday, March 6, at 8 pm in Biology Building East.

Complete Episode

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Season 07
Episode 06
Friday, February 22 at 5 PM CST

After centuries of suffering the cold shoulder from scholars and critics (Michel de Montaigne’s blockbuster collections were, after all, released in 1580) the essay’s stylistic strategies are finally given their due in Understanding the Essay, a scholastic cri de ceour edited by Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter.

Understanding the Essay’s contributors are writers who have made their own mark on the form, including Eula Biss (writing on Ann Carson), Sven Birkerts (writing on Cynthia Ozick), Honor Moore (writing on James Baldwin), and the editors themselves. In line with the book’s central premise that “close reading is inextricably tied to the art of writing,” and that reading in and of itself, “is nothing more nor less than an exchange of wits,” the collection features nineteen critical essays written in response to exemplars of the form, from William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasures of Hating” to David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”

“Teachers, students, and essayists will be bending back pages and marking the margins for years to come,” says Dinty W. Moore, editor of Brevity Magazine.

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (2002) and Just Beneath My Skin (2004). A recipient of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for nonfiction and the Fred Bonnie Award for a first novel, she is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa where she teaches in the MFA Program in Nonfiction.

Jeff Porter is the author of Oppenhiemer is Watching Me (2007). His essays have appeared in Missouri Review, Isotope, Hotel Amerika, and Antioch Review, among other journals. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa where he also teaches in the MFA Program in Nonfiction.

Complete Episode

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Season 07Episode 05Air date: Friday, February 22, 2013

On this Lit Show, Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumni Dan Beachy-Quick and Sally Keith discuss their recent collections, their relationship as fellow poets and readers of one another’s work, and their relationship to Iowa City.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of several books, spanning the realms of poetry, collaboration, essay, and philosophical inquiry. His most recent book, Works from Memory, is a collaboration with Matthew Goulish that interrogates “the nature of memory, of the book, and of authorship in pages one hesitates to label as merely criticism, memoir, or lyric,” according to Robert Archambeau. Beachy-Quick is also the author of Circle’s Apprentice, This Nest, Swift Passerine, and other poetry collections, and his collections of essays include A Whalers Dictionary, and Wonderful Investigations. He currently resides in Fort Collins, Colorado where he teaches at Colorado State University in the Creative Writing Program.

Sally Keith is the author of a delighting handful of poetry collections. These include Design, which was the winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry, Dwelling Song, and most recently The Fact of the Matter (available through Milkweed Editions). Rare is the poet with such grace in twining the world to the body, the corymb to the stained hand. Of The Fact of the Matter, Martin Corless-Smith writes, “These poems are the still moments between actions; time slowed to its instants, then silently reassembled, so that a thousand years ago is yesterday…. Herein is purest magic.” Keith currently resides in the ether between Washington, D.C. and Fairfax, Virginia. She teaches Creative Writing at George Mason University.

Interview by Grant Souders.

Complete Episode

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Season 07
Episode 03
Friday, February 15th at 2 PM CST

“Words are the distant home.”
-Thread

Born in 1943, Michael Palmer has written twenty books of poetry, most recently Thread (New Directions, 2011). Known as the “foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations” (citation for the Poetry Society of America’s Wallace Stevens Award, which he won in 2006), Palmer accepts language in all its imperfection—fissures, breaks, echoes, inability to sound like a singular utterance—because he trusts that a fragment can communicate a possible whole, or a number of wholes. Words may be slippery, exceeding our reach, yet, in Palmer’s work, it is through this very distance that we reach words and call them home.

Palmer’s effort is to discover, by means of poetry, what remains of truth in “these times that I have called dark, when language itself seems under daily assault, and when the living arts are declared suspect or more frequently simply ignored by those in power” (“On the Sustaining of Culture in Dark Times,” Active Boundaries, New Directions, 2008). An accomplished translator and non-fiction writer, Palmer’s recent essay collection, Active Boundaries, includes a series of talks, “Counter-Poetics and Current Practice,” delivered at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1986.

Palmer will return to Iowa City to read from his work on February 15th, at 8pm, in the Dey House.

Excerpt

Complete Episode

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Season 07
Episode 01
Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013 at 3 PM CST

Nugent’s first book, a cultural memoir, is American Nerd: The Story of My People; Good Kids continues the project described in that subtitle. Here the “people” in question are bourgeois families in New England and the bright but compromised children they send into the world: indie rock also-rans in L.A.; budding first-world anarchists in Boston; good kids whose understanding of fidelity is complicated by their parents’ dalliances and divorces.

When, in 1994, high-school sophomores Josh Paquette and Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn catch his father and her mother kissing in an organic grocery store, it sparks a strange and intense friendship that is soon suspended for 13 years by Khadijah’s mother’s retreat to Boston. When they finally reconnect, both are engaged to other people and on solid trajectories toward settled adulthood. But mutual attraction forces them to revisit their parents’ mistakes, and make potentially ruinous course corrections to avoid remaking them.

With swiftness and wit, Nugent traces the Oedipal crises of a generation of well-heeled twentysomethings trying to make their mark on the world. Michelle Huneven calls Good Kids “terrifically smart and funny—and catchy, like a hit song.” Curtis Sittenfeld says that “Nugent’s writing is alive with intelligence, authenticity, and angst.” Nugent will read from his novel at Prairie Lights Bookstore this Friday, February 1, at 7 PM.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

Excerpt

Full Episode

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Season 06
Episode 16
Wednesday, Dec. 6th, 2012 at 10 AM CST

On this Lit Show, Iowa Writers’ Workshop visiting professor Arda Collins discusses her book of poems, It Is Daylight.

Winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and championed by Louise Glück, It Is Daylight is an abrasive, brutal, and very funny collection that speaks of modern desolation through a voice that is both ironic and afraid. Collins’s speaker inhabits kitchens and department stores in a state of holy terror, never finding God but asking all the right questions: “Can I guess what I am thinking? Can I tell you what it is?”

Collins’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and A Public Space, among other venues. She studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Denver, and is a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Glück described It Is Daylight as “a book of dazzling modernity…caustic, pithy, ruthlessly sharp witted and keen eyed.” Collins will read from her work in Iowa City at the Dey House on Thursday, December 6, at 8:00 PM.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

Complete Interview

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Season 06
Episode 15
Wednesday, Dec. 6th, 2012 at 3 PM CST

Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan where he headed up its MFA program for several years. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Baxter is the author of 5 novels, including First Light, The Feast of Love, and The Soul Thief, 5 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, 2 collections of essays on fiction, and has served as the editor for such works as A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations and Best New American Voices 2001.

In her review of Baxter’s Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “Beneath the shadowless equanimity of Norman Rockwell’s America … Baxter evokes something like the chilling starkness and human isolation of the work of Edward Hopper: that bleakly beautiful art in which mannequinlike figures are positioned without seeming awareness of one another, tentatively or clumsily posed, staring vacantly into space in scenes that both invite and repel nostalgia.”

Over the course of his career, Baxter has received countless awards for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His novel, The Feast of Love, which was made into a feature film in 2007, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his most recent book on craft, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, won the 2008 Minnesota Book Award for General Non-fiction.

Excerpts

Complete Episode

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Season 6
Episode 14
Wednesday, November 28th at 3 PM CST

On this Lit Show, Dylan Nice discusses his first collection, Other Kinds.

Set in the spaces between a melancholic Pennsylvania mining town and Midwestern college, the stories in Other Kinds follow a bright but disillusioned young man as he navigates the social codes of his class, fails repeatedly at love, and struggles to communicate with his stoic father and unmotivated brother. By turns nostalgic and solipsistic, each connected story reveals some small truth couched in dirty rust-belt realism.

Diane Williams says: “[Nice’s] voice is startlingly mature and powerful — capable of probing the darkness with a lyricism that illuminates and enlivens the spirit.” His stories and essays have appeared in NOON, Indiana Review, MAKE, Hobart, Brevity, and Quick Fiction. He lives in Iowa and is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

Excerpt: Dylan Nice on the surreal and remote beauty of the Allegheny Mountains, the region’s influence on his work, and what it’s like when Google Maps kills your hometown.

Complete Episode

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Season 6
Episode 14
CANCELLED: Monday, November 26th at 10 AM CST
Rescheduled Interview TBA

On this Lit Show, Julie Orringer and Ryan Harty will discuss their work.

Julie Orringer is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a novel, and the short story collection How to Breathe Underwater. Her work has appeared in The Yale Review, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Zoetrope All-Story, and the Washington Post Magazine as well as a number of anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Scribner Anthology of Short Fiction. She has been awarded an NEA grant and two Pushcart Prizes. She was a Stegner Fellow and a McCall Lecturer at Stanford, and she has taught at Michigan, Columbia, and NYU.

Her husband Ryan Harty won the John Simmons Award for Short Fiction for his short story collection Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, which was named a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. His stories have been published in a variety of national magazines and journals, have been performed on NPR’s Selected Shorts, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize. His award-winning story “What Can I Tell You About My Brother” was recently adapted for film. He was a Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, and has taught at Michigan and Columbia.

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Season 6
Episode 13
November 1, 2012 at 2 PM CST

Johnston is the author of Corpus Christi, a collection of short stories set in Texan hurricane country. Acts of violence and kindness, illness and forgiveness inform the world of these deeply felt works of fiction. Corpus Christi was named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, and has received The Southern Review’s Annual Short Fiction Award, the Texas Institute of Letters’ Debut Fiction Award, the Christopher Isherwood Prize, and the James Michener Fellowship.

Since the publication of Corpus Christi in 2004, Johnston has edited an anthology of creative writing exercises (Naming the World), become the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, and written a documentary film (Waiting for Lightning) about his lifelong passion: skateboarding.

Johnston is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the recipient of the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and a National Book Award for writers under 35. He has written essays for Slate.com and is a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

Ben Mauk asks Bret Anthony Johnston about his advice “write towards what scares you”:

Complete Episode

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Season 06
Episode 12
October 24, 2012 at 3 PM CST

On this Lit Show, Joe Fassler speaks with Lorin Stein and Sadie Stein–the Editor and Deputy Editor of the Paris Review–about their new fiction anthology.

In order to create Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, the editors turned to 20 distinguished masters of the form. They asked each author to consult the the venerable magazine’s 60-year archive, choose a favorite fiction, and introduce it for the book. The result? A collection that’s diverse and freewheeling, ungoverned by any dominant aesthetic or approach.

“The editors have never believed that there was one single way to write a short story,” Stein and Stein write in their introduction. “We’ve never espoused a movement or school….We think every good story writes its own rules and solves problems of its own devising.”

The earliest story is Evan S. Connell’s wry “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge,” chosen by Wells Tower, a wry and affecting skewering of fifties primness. The most recent is Mary-Beth Hughes’ “Pelican Song,” chosen by Mary Gaitskill, in which a young woman laments–and becomes complicit in–her stepfather’s abuse of her mother. A whole world lies in between these bookends: stories that span from the understated mania of Jane Bowles to Denis Johnson’s livid, nightmarish jazz. This is as good a guide to the diversity and range of postwar American fiction as we’re likely to get.

Lorin Stein and Sadie Stein discussed the process of assembling Object Lessons; the book’s many takeaways for writers, young and old; and the short story’s ongoing importance in the literary arts.

Joe Fassler conducted this interview from the Paris Review offices in New York.

Excerpt: The Paris Review’s editors discuss OBJECT LESSONS, their new and highly-varied anthology of great stories from the magazine. Loren Stein recalls the way he would have wanted this book as a young writer; Sadie Stein addresses curation in the digital age.

Complete Interview

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Season 06

Kenneth Goldsmith is an American artist, conceptual poet, editor, and radio personality. He is the 2012 keynote speaker for the Works-in-Progress Festival in Iowa City. Currently at work on the rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, he is also the author of numerous books of poetry, a book of essays, and an anthology of conceptual writing. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he edits UbuWeb and PennSound.

Interview by Micah Bateman and Ben Mauk.

Kenneth Goldsmith discusses the conception and creation of UbuWeb:

Complete Interview

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Clockwise from upper left: Genevieve L. Asenjo, Alisa Ganieva, Christopher Mlalazi, Stephanie Ye, Pandora, and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman.

Season 06
Episode 10
Air date: Wednesday, October 17 at 3 PM CST

On this Lit Show, writers from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program read fiction, poetry, and non-fiction.

Since 1967, over a thousand writers from more than 120 countries have attended the IWP at the University of Iowa. Every fall semester, several dozen established and emerging creative writers—poets, fiction writers, dramatists, and non-fiction writers— come to the University to make time for their writing, take part in Iowa City’s literary culture, and experience daily life in America. For many IWP writers, the residency provides their first direct experience of the United States.

We’re pleased to feature six writers whose work is as varied as their backgrounds.

Complete Program

Genevieve L. ASENJO (fiction writer, poet, translator; Philippines) is the author of four books including Lumbay ng Dila (The Melancholy of the Tongue), winner of the country’s 2011 National Book Award. Her short stories and poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She translates into the Philippine languages Kinaray-a, Hiligaynon, and Filipino, and is the founder-director of Balay Sugidanun (Storytelling House). She is Associate Professor of literature and creative writing at De La Salle University-Manila.  Her participation is made possible by a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Alisa GANIEVA (fiction writer, children’s writer, critic; Russia) edits NezavisimayaGazeta‘s weekly supplement ExLibris. Her stories, articles, and reviews have been widely published and anthologized. In 2009 Ganieva won the Debut Prize for her novel Салам тебе, Далгат! [Salam, Dalgat!] written under the pseudonym Gulla Khirachev. She is also the winner of the Gorky Literary Prize (2008), October magazine’s award for literary criticism (2009) and Triumph Prize for fiction. Her second novel Праздничная гора [Holiday Mountain] is due out later this year. She participates courtesy of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Jeffrey Paparoa HOLMAN (poet, nonfiction writer; New Zealand) has worked as a sheep-shearer, postman, lecturer, psychiatric social worker and bookseller. He is the author of a book of nonfiction, Best of Both Worlds: The Story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (2010), and seven collections of poetry, including As Big As A Father (2002) and, most recently Shaken Down 6.3. His memoir, The Lost Pilot is forthcoming. His participation is supported through a grant from Creative New Zealand.

Christopher MLALAZI (fiction writer, playwright; Zimbabwe) is the author of the novels Many Rivers (2009) and Running With Mother (2012), and the short story collection Dancing With Life: Tales From the Township (2008), which won the Best First Book award at the National Arts Merit Awards. Mlalazi’s eight plays, including the 2008 Oxfam/Novib PEN Freedom of Expression Award winner “The Crocodile Of Zambezi,” have all been staged. His poems and stories are online and in print, including in the Caine Prize’s anthology The Obituary Tango (2006) and in The Literary Review. He participates courtesy of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Pandora (poet; Burma/Myanmar) is the editor of the forthcoming [Tuning: An Anthology of Myanmar Women Poets], due out this August. Her poems have been anthologized in Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets (2012), and translations of her work have been published in international literary journals and magazines, including Asymptote, Poetry Review, and Sampsonia Way. She currently works for the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore.

Stephanie YE (fiction writer; Singapore) has been published in journals such as the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Mascara Literary Review, and Sci-Fi Short Story Magazine. Her first solo publication is a chapbook titled The Billion Shop, published by Math Paper Press in 2012. She has worked as a copyeditor, arts reporter, and book critic for The Straits Times. Ye’s participation was made possible thanks to a grant from the Singapore National Arts Council.

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Jeremy Jackson is the author of two novels, Life at These Speeds and In Summer. Life at These Speeds was a selection of the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program, a Booklist Editor’s Choice, and is currently being developed as a feature film. Jackson is also the author of young adult novels under the name Alex Bradley, and several cookbooks, including The Cornbread Book, which was nominated for a James Beard Award, and A Good Day for a Picnic. He has written about food for the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post.

According to Leif Enger, I Will Not Leave You Comfortless is built upon layers of well chosen detail. “The result is like peering through a new lens at a familiar hillside, or walking through the pastures of your childhood and discovering they were bigger, not smaller, than you recall. Bigger, not smaller – now that is the mark of a generous writer.”

A graduate of Vassar College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Jackson lives in Iowa City with his wife and two daughters.

Jeremy Jackson reads from I Will Not Leave You Comfortless

Complete Episode

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Season 06

On this Lit Show, Antoine Wilson discusses his second novel, Panorama City (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which Publisher’s Weekly called “fresh and flawlessly crafted as well as charmingly genuine” in a recent starred review.

Oppen Porter, bicycle enthusiast, lover of binoculars, is convinced he’s dying. On the night he thinks will be his last, the self-declared “slow absorber” records the story of his 40 days and nights in Panorama City, and his struggle to become a man of the world, for the edification of his unborn son. “The world operates according to a mysterious logic, Juan-Gorge,” Oppen says, “I want to illustrate some of its intricacies.”

In his short time outside his hometown of Madera, CA, Oppen navigates romance, heartbreak, religion, and difficult friendships with a winsome light-heartedness and, occasionally, an incisiveness that seems beyond his years. “I’m only twenty-eight years old,” Oppen tells his son. “When you get to be my age you’ll know how young that is.”

Antoine Wilson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. His first novel, The Interloper, was published by Other Press in 2007. He lives, surfs, and writes in Los Angeles.

Antoine Wilson will read from and discuss Panorama City in Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, IA, on October 9 at 7:00pm.

Antoine Wilson reads from Panorama City

Complete Episode

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On this episode of The Lit Show, Geoff Dyer discusses his latest book, Zona — a critical and personal exploration of Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic 1979 film Stalker – and places it in the context of his large and wide-ranging body of work.

Dyer is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, essay, and criticism. His recent collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, was published in the U.S. in April 2011 and won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Criticism. His novels include Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; Paris Trance; The Search; and The Color of Memory; but he is perhaps even better known for his formally innovative investigations into jazz (But Beautiful), photography (The Ongoing Moment), war and memory (The Missing of the Somme), travel (Yoga for People who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It), and literary obsession (Out of Sheer Rage).

Writing in The New Republic, David Thomson describes Zona as “the most stimulating book on a film in years,” and The New York Times calls Dyer’s analysis “acute and sometimes brilliant.”

He is a frequent contributor to The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and many other publications, was the guest director at this year’s Telluride Film Festival, and is currently a visiting professor of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. He was born in Cheltenham, England, educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and lives in London.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

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Season 06

On this episode of The Lit Show, Cole Swensen talks about her newest book of poetry. Gravesend (University of California Press) is a meditation on ghosts as they have appeared throughout history and across societies as emblems of grief, objects of terror, and as a means to contemplate what might lie beyond the grave. The book lends particular emphasis to the English town of Gravesend at the mouth of the Thames, which was its own kind of threshold between one life and the next when emigrants used its port to begin their journeys to the New World.

Cole Swensen is the author of fourteen books of poetry including Goest, a finalist for the National Book Award and Try, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award. She is also the author of the acclaimed Ours: poems on the gardens of Andre Le Notre and many books of translation. Before joining the faculty of Brown University’s Literary Arts Program she was on the permanent faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Publisher’s Weekly has said of her work, “Swensen’s thematic book-length sequences… combine meticulousness with a postmodern flair for dislocation, cementing Swensen’s reputation as an important experimental writer.”

Complete Episode

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On this episode of The Lit Show, poets Jenny Zhang and Zachary Schomburg discuss and read from their recent books,  Dear Jenny, We Are All Find  (Octopus Books), and Fjords, Vol.1 (Black Ocean), wildly diverging meditations and exultations on love, death, myth, and other bodily functions.

Jenny Zhang lives in New York, where she teaches and writes for Rookie Magazine. She is a graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Elizabeth Robinson writes, “With dizzying energy and intelligence, Zhang forages through familial, global, and even anatomical configurations vainly outlining an identity that manifests only to shift and move restlessly on. [Dear Jenny, We Are All Find] brings to mind a 21st century Whitman, only female, Chinese, and profoundly scatological.”

Zachary Schomburg lives in Portland, Oregon and edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. The author and co-author of of several chapbooks and other collaboration projects, his previous full-length poetry collections includeScary, No Scary (2009) and The Man Suit (2007), both from Black Ocean. Lara Glenum writes, “The souls of these poems have been put into them backwards. They unapologetically wear their wings on their chests.”

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Season 06

On this episode of The Lit Show Hisham Matar discusses his new novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance. Born in New York City and raised in Libya, Egypt, and London, Matar is the author of In the Country of Men, his debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Both of Matar’s novels are concerned with the extraordinary circumstances of his childhood and family. His father was a political dissident under Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime while Matar was growing up in Libya. Later, after the family had been exiled to Cairo, his father was kidnapped by agents of the dictator and taken to a Libyan prison notorious for its human rights abuses. His circumstances remain unknown, although Matar and his mother have received smuggled letters and frustratingly occasional evidence of his father’s survival. In both In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, Matar grapples with the tyranny of dictatorship and the mysteries of loss by exploring the relationship between a young protagonist and his missing father.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

Matar is a guest of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. He will read from his new novel on Wednesday, September 19th, at 7:00 pm at Prairie Lights.

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Karen Thompson Walker was born and raised in San Diego, California, where The Age of Miracles is set. She studied English and creative writing at UCLA, where she wrote for the UCLA Daily Bruin. After college, she worked as a newspaper reporter in the San Diego area before moving to New York City to attend the Columbia University MFA program.

A former book editor at Simon & Schuster, she wrote The Age of Miracles in the mornings before work—sometimes while riding the subway.

She is the recipient of the 2011 Sirenland Fellowship as well as a Bomb Magazine fiction prize. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Interview by Elizabeth Weiss.

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Featuring Jerimee Bloemeke, Brian Booker, Gemma de Choisy, Carmen Machado, Rachel Milligan, Deborah Taffa, and Candice Wuehle.

This episode hosted by Elizabeth Weiss.

Complete Episode

CONTRIBUTORS

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On this Lit Show, Pauls Toutonghi discusses his new novel, Evel Knievel Days, with R. Clifton Spargo. Toutonghi, born in Seattle to immigrant parents, a mother who emigrated from Latvia and a father who emigrated from Egypt, is the Puschart Prize-winning author of the novel Red Weather (2006). He is an assistant professor of English at Lewis & Clark College where he teaches fiction writing and American literature. His work has appeared in Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, Zoetrope, The Boston Review, and One Story.

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Today’s program features four recent graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: Nick Dybek, Daniel Khalastchi, Madeline McDonnell, and Vinnie Wilhelm.

Nick Dybek, author of When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man (Riverhead Books), and Vinnie Wilhelm, author of In the Absence of Predators, will read from their work at Prairie Lights Books on Wednesday, April 18th, at 7 PM.

This episode also features two other writers associated with Rescue Press, the publisher of Wilhelm’s debut: fiction writer Madeline McDonnell, author of There is Something Inside, It Wants to Get Out, and poet Danny Khalastchi, Rescue Press Assistant Editor, author of Manoleria.

We discussed first books, the challenges of post-MFA life, small presses and large ones, and what happens when writers marry.

GUEST BIOS

Vinnie Wilhelm was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is a graduate of
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of literary fellowships
from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the National
Endowment for the Arts. Wilhelm’s fiction has appeared in the Virginia
Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere, and
his first collection of stories, In the Absence of Predators, was
released last fall from Rescue Press. He lives in Philadelphia.

Nick Dybek is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop. He is the recipient of a Hopwood Award for Short
Fiction, a Maytag Fellowship, a 2010 Michener-Copernicus Society of
America Award, and a Granta New Voices selection. His first novel,
When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, was just released from
Riverhead Books. He lives in New York City.

Madeline McDonnell is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a
former lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. Her work has
appeared in Harvard Review and Cutbank, and her first collection of
stories, There is Something Inside, It Wants to Get Out was published
by Rescue Press in 2010. She lives in New York City, where she is at
work on a novel and a longer collection of short stories.

Daniel Khalastchi is a graduate of the University Wisconsin-Madison
and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of Manoleria (2011),
winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Prize, and his poems have
recently appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals
including Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and the Iowa
Review. He currently lives in Iowa City where he is the Assistant
Director of the University of Iowa’s Undergraduate Certificate in
Writing Program and a co-editor and founder of Rescue Press.

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Featuring Henry Finch, Jake Fournier, Jessica Laser, Adam Soto, and Alex Walton.

Henry Finch: “Waking in Debt (after Kenneth Koch)”

Adam Soto‘s “Solutions” is a story in three parts: “Advice,” “Plans,” and “The Summer We Ended Global Warming”

Jake Fouriner: “Nonetheless Unless No,” “The Lotus Eaters,” and Charles Baudelaire’s “A Carcass”

Alex Walton: “Iron”

Jessica Laser: “Monger,” “Two,” “Television,” “Wife,” “Manger,” and “Ten”

Full Episode:

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Iowa City is one of five world cities recognized by the United Nations for distinguished literary history and ongoing cultural contributions, the only such city in the United States. Most Iowa Citians are aware of our community’s UNESCO designation—but what exactly does it mean to be an official “City of Literature?”

On this Lit Show, Jeanette Pilak, Executive Director of City of Literature USA, and BJ Love will discuss Iowa city’s UNESCO status—and help explain the responsibilities, privileges, opportunities, and challenges that come with it.

We’ll talk about how Iowa City achieved its official designation, City of Literature USA’s mission and objectives, our role within the greater network of UNESCO “Creative Cities,” and the way UNESCO’s—perhaps threatened—backing will continue to foster Iowa City’s literary culture in years to come.

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