Students and alumni of Iowa’s graduate writing programs share new work. Featuring Charlene Choi, Michael Fauver, Deborah Kennedy, B.J. Love, Anna Morrison, Rebecca Rukeyser, Montreux Rotholtz, and Ben Shattuck.

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Season 04

Air date: 12/7/2011, 2 PM CST

Students and alumni of Iowa’s graduate writing programs share new work. Featuring Charlene Choi, Michael Fauver, Deborah Kennedy, B.J. Love, Anna Morrison, Rebecca Rukeyser, Montreux Rotholtz, and Ben Shattuck.

Authors and Works

Rebecca Rukeyser, from “The Chinese Barracks”

Montreux Rotholtz, five poems

Anna Morrison, five poems

Deborah Kennedy, from “This Is My Country”

B. J. Love, poems from Bastards

Ben Shattuck, from Ambition and a Massacre

Charlene Choi, from “Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been?”

Michael Fauver, “Marchers”

Season 04

Air date: 11/16/2011, 2 PM CST

This week, Peter Orner returns to The Lit Show to discuss Love and Shame and Love, his second novel.

We talked about the midwest, the book’s many short, impressionistic passages, memory and narrative, and the tawdry allure of Chicago politics.

Orner will read and sign copies at Prairie Lights in Iowa City on Wednesday, November 16th at 7 PM.

Peter Orner’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and many other publications. His stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice won a Pushcart Prize. Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), as well as the two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship (2007-2008). A film version of one of Orner’s stories, “The Raft” with a screenplay by Orner and the film’s director, Rob Jones, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner.

Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin/​ Mariner, 2001) was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. Esther Stories was a 2001 New York Times Notable Book. Of the book, Margot Livesey wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Orner doesn’t simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls.”

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006) is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990′s. The novel was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo has been translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and German.

Orner is also the editor of two non-fiction books, Underground America (2008) and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives (co-editor Annie Holmes, 2010), both published by McSweeney’s/​ Voice of Witness, an imprint devoted to using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. Harper’s Magazine wrote, “Hope Deferred might be the most important publication out of Zimbabwe in the past thirty years.”

Listen to Peter Orner in his first appearance on the program, in March 2011, when he discussed his previous book, Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives.

Season 04

Episode 12

Air date: 11/11/2011, 1 PM CST

On this episode of the Lit Show, co-host Ben Mauk talks with Michael Martone about teaching, writing, and the Midwest.

Martone’s large body of work confuses the boundaries of fiction and fact, memoir and essay. At the same time he has emerged as a defining chronicler of the Midwestern experience, and he has edited several collections of essays and photographs in an effort to define that amorphous region.

Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and is currently Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama. He is the author of, most recently, Four for a Quarter, a work of fiction whose subject and structure are defined by the number four. He is also the author of Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins; Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft And the Craft of Art; Michael Martone, The Blue Guide to Indiana, and Double-Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone, which includes five of his earlier books.

Joining Martone for this episode is a roundtable of former students–fiction and nonfiction alumnae of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop–to discuss their experiences studying with him, and their own teaching and writing lives. Rachel Yoder, Dylan Nice, and Zachary Tyler Vickers join us at the half hour.

Season 04
Episode 11
Air date: 11/9/2011, 2 PM CST

On this Lit Show, Chuck Klosterman discusses his second novel, The Visible Man.

Victoria Vick is a therapist practicing in Austin, TX when she receives a call from a strange client, a man she refers to as “Y—.” He’s a peculiar case, brilliant and self-deprecating, cantankerous and contrite. Strangest of all, he only wants to conduct sessions by phone. Gradually, he lets on that he’s a former government scientist gone rogue, and he’s unlocked the secrets to human invisibility. He spends his days watching people, holed up in their homes, unseen, relishing the secret lives of his “targets.”

“I’ve consumed people’s lives without their consent,” Y— confesses to Vicki. She listens to him share the stories of the many human glimpses he has stolen, vacillating between horror and fascination; even as Y—’s stories become more sinister and menacing, she struggles to let go. “Would I ever have a patient this interesting again?” she asks herself. “This was like being Hitler’s therapist, or Springsteen’s, or Superman’s.”

The novel, presented as a draft manuscript of a forthcoming work, is an epistolary narrative updated for the 21st century: we learn about Vicki and Y—’s ongoing therapy through voicemails, blackberry texts, recorded transcripts, typed notes, and email. The account that unfolds is a chilling account of modern voyeurism, an exploration of the Promethean powers of technology, and an attempt to navigate the terrain between our physical and virtual selves.

Chuck Klosterman is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Eating the Dinosaur. His debut book, Fargo Rock City, was the winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He has written for GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Spin, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Believer, A.V. Club, and ESPN, and he now writes about sports and pop culture for Grantland.com.

Chuck Klosterman will read from and discuss The Visible Man at the Iowa City Public Library on Wednesday, November 9, beginning at 7 PM.

Episode 09
Season 04
Air date: 11/2/2011, 2 PM CST

On this Lit Show, co-host Ben Mauk speaks with Colson Whitehead about his new novel, Zone One, a darkly satiric portrait of the coming zombie apocalypse.

Whitehead is the author of the novels Sag Harbor, Apex Hides the Hurt, John Henry Days, and The Intuitionist, as well as a book of essays, The Colossus of New York. He lives in pre-apocalypse New York City.

Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Granta. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Publishers Weekly says about Zone One: “Whitehead dumpster dives genre tropes, using what he wants and leaving the rest to rot, turning what could have been another zombie-pocalypse gore-fest into the kind of smart, funny, pop culture–filled tale that would make George Romero proud.”

Whitehead read at Prairie Lights on Friday, October 28th at 7 PM.

Episode 08
Season 04
Air date: 10/26/2011

On this Lit Show, Josh Rolnick discusses his short story collection Pulp and Paper, winner of the 2011 John Simmons Award (University of Iowa Press). Pulp and Paper was selected for the honor by Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants.

The eight stories in Pulp and Paper are divided into two geographic locales—four are set in New Jersey, four in New York state. The book’s's epigraph, taken from Ethan Canin’s America America, tells us early on that these stories will address life-altering trauma and transformation: “That’s another thing this story is about, I suppose: how there’s no going back.” For Rolnick’s narrators, life-as-it-was is no longer an option.

In “Funnyboy,” a grieving father confronts the teenage cheerleader who accidentally killed his son. In “Innkeeping,” a boy mourning the recent loss of his father rages against his mother’s relationship with a new man, a guest at their lakeside inn. And in “Big River,” we meet a young couple, expecting a baby, who have been sweethearts since fifth grade; an activist pamphlet changes their feelings about their unborn child, and each other.

Rolnick’s stories have won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor’s Choice Prize. His work has appeared in in the Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, and Gulf Coast. He’s also a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Rolnick, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, will return to Iowa City on October 27th, to read at Prairie Lights at 7 PM.

On this Lit Show, Susan Orlean discusses Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend.

Susan Orlean’s new biography is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary animal. The German shepherd who became Rin Tin Tin was a puppy plucked from the ravaged battlegrounds of rural France during World War One. Through a series of happy coincidences and the persistence of his discoverer, educator, and companion, Lee Duncan, Rinty became one of the world’s first A-list movie stars.

Orlean’s book is not only a canine coming-of-age story—it explores the complexities of modern mythmaking. At first, we follow the successes and setbacks of a dog-in-real-life, Rin Tin Tin, but gradually Rin’s physical presence dissolves into his media presence, diffusing like a drop of food coloring in water. The book is a powerful inquiry into the differences between life and life-on-film, as well as the poignant, problematic ways our cultural stories diverge from our biographical histories.

Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She’s the author of many books on wide-ranging topics, including Saturday Night, a cultural history of Saturday night, and Red Sox and Bluefish, an exploration of what makes New England, “New England.” Her book The Orchid Thief was adapted into the Oscar-winning movie Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman. In addition to discussing Rin Tin Tin’s unlikely path to superstardom, Orlean addressed the surprising origins and history of the German shepherd breed, the reasons why we love watching animals on screen, and the strange twists and turns in her own life as a public figure.