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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Spargo’s stories have appeared in the Antioch Review, FICTION, Glimmer Train, SOMA, and the Kenyon Review, among others. He’s also published essays on literature, culture, and rock music in Raritan, Commonweal, the Yale Review and the Chicago Tribune. He currently writes a blog, The HI/LO, on the interplay between high and low cultures for HuffingtonPost.

In Beautiful Fools, Spargo delves deeply into the final moments of one of America’s most storied couples as they take a last trip together to Cuba in 1939. At this pivotal time in world history, Scott and Zelda are experiencing internal wars of their own and what begins as a vacation ends.

Tom Perrotta calls Beautiful Fools “a vivid and revealing look at two charismatic, self-destructive people, and the love that sustained and ruined them . . . It’s a real feat of historical imagination and novelistic empathy.”

Excerpts

Complete Episode

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Mann’s book chronicles a year in the life of a minor league baseball team in Clinton, Iowa. Beyond the lives of the LumberKings themselves, Mann investigates the dedicated fans, family members, radio announcer, mascot, and the town itself as seen through the eyes of a transplant who keeps finding himself drawn back to the game, whether at Yankee Stadium or in Clinton’s Depression-era field by the Mississippi River.

David Shields writes: “[Mann’s] book is an impressively unblinking meditation on private and public failure,” and John Beckman compares him to Joan Didion or Gay Talese. Mann was born in New York City and received his MFA from the University of Iowa, where he is currently the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

Excerpt

Complete Episode

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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.

Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; The New Yorker wrote in its review that Strout “animates the ordinary with an astonishing force.”

Listen Live: Tuesday, April 9th at 3 PM CST

Complete Episode

The post #84: Elizabeth Strout appeared first on The Lit Show.

Unparalleled in her unflinching candidness, Vivian Gornick renders the political as personal and shows the self to be a mirror of the culture that made it. “Gornick is fearless,” Elizabeth Frank writes in The New York Times Book Review. “Reading her essays, one is reassured that the conversation between life and literature is mutually sustaining as well as mutually corrective.”

Best known for her acclaimed 1987 memoir, Fierce Attachments, and her work with The Village Voice, Gornick is also a frequent contributor to The Nation, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. She is the author of more than a dozen other books and essay collections, including The End of the Novel of Love, Essays in Feminism, and The Men in My Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Gornick teaches creative writing at The New School in New York, NY. Her most recent book, Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life, is out now from Yale University Press, and her essay “Letter from Greenwich Village” can be found in the 60th anniversary issue of The Paris Review (Spring, 2013).

Gornick will be reading from a selection of her work at Prairie Lights in Iowa City on Monday, April 8, at 8:00pm.

Complete episode

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Interview by Micah Bateman.

Excerpts

Complete Episode

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On this Lit Show, Roxane Gay discusses her prolific body of work, the perils of frequent publication, and her two upcoming books: a novel, An Untamed State, and essay collection, Bad Feminist.

It would be hard to keep up with the online literary world and not be constantly running into Gay’s byline. She is everywhere. Her heavily anthologized fiction and essays have appeared in VQR, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, Melville House, mud luscious, The Indiana Review, and dozens of other venues. Her criticism appears in the New York Times and on the Wall Street Journal’s website, where she reviews and live-blogs reality TV, including and especially ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. She is a frequent contributor to HTMLGIANT, Salon, Bookslut, and The Rumpus, where she is the essays editor. She is also the co-editor of [PANK] Magazine.

Gay’s works have earned her fourteen Pushcart nominations the last three years. She is, in other words, one of contemporary literature’s most prolific voices, and she is this year’s Writer-in-Residence at the Mission Creek Festival taking place from April 2 – April 7 in Iowa City. Unsurprisingly, she maintains an active online presence, tweeting here, and blogging on tumblr and on her website, I Have Become Accustomed to Rejection.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

Excerpt

Complete Episode

The post #81: Roxane Gay appeared first on The Lit Show.

Russell Jaffe

Terry Tempest Williams

Lawrence Weschler

The post appeared first on The Lit Show.

On April 26th The Lit Show will host Daily Rituals, an evening of reading and discussion, at powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn. Guests Ben Greenman, Heidi Julavits, and Sam Lipsyte read from their work and take part in conversation moderated by Mason Currey and Lit Show host Joe Fassler.

Currey’s book, Daily Rituals (Alfred A. Knopf), collects insights and anecdotes about writers’ daily work–and the workaday reality of writers will be our conversation topic. It’s easy to become smitten with rosy notions of the creative process: the artist alone at a battered desk, composing in epiphanic fits. But inspiration, as most working artists can testify, is trickier and more elusive than romantic narratives suggest. (“Blank pages inspire me with terror,” said no less a writer than Margaret Atwood.)

What habits, large and small, help writers overcome creative fear and continue working–day after day, year by year? How to forge a relationship with words that lasts and sustains a lifetime?

This event is free and open to the public, complimentary beverages will be served, and a signing will follow. Audio and video recording by Yellow Hook Productions. Artwork by Sean Ford of Only Skin Comics.

The Lit Show + powerHouse Arena present Daily Rituals
Friday, April 26th at 6 PM
Readings by Ben Greenman, Heidi Julavits, Sam Lipsyte, and Mason Currey
Conversation moderated by Joe Fassler and Mason Currey
37 Main Street, Brooklyn NY

RSVP

CONTRIBUTORS

Ben Greenman‘s new novel is The Slippage. He’s an editor at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Superworse, and A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love.

Heidi Julavits‘ most recent novel is The Vanishers. A founding editor of The Believer magazine, she is also the author of The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace.

Sam Lipsyte is the author of collections The Fun Parts and Venus Drive, as well as three novels: The Ask, The Subject Steve and Home Land. He teaches writing at Columbia University.

Mason Currey is author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. He blogs at dailyroutines.typepad.com.

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The project was created by Becky Tuch, who wanted to create a resource that would help writers stay on top of the vast and always-changing world of journal publishing. “With over 600 print and online journals,” she says in her site’s mission statement, “it can be hard to know where to begin.” But the Review Review does writers an invaluable service by sifting through the monthly glut of lit mags, praising the best and decrying the worst.

Individual journal issues are reviewed like books or albums, and the selection and presentation are evaluated closely before the whole production’s assigned a grade. Reading through, it’s easy to get a sense of who’s publishing what each month or quarter, what kind of job they’re doing, and whether you might want to read, buy, or submit work. Especially illuminating are The Review Review’s interviews with editors, which tend go beyond the stern advice “Just read us.”

Becky Tuch and I spoke by email.

Your decision to start a site that reviews literary magazines, paradoxically, grew out of a frustration with the world of literary magazines. How would you describe what you were feeling in 2008, before you founded The Review Review?

Overwhelmed! I felt that there was just this forest of literature and I had no way of navigating through it. But also, I was curious. I really wanted to know what was so great and important about these journals. I was hungry for everything that was inside of them. So my interest in reading them was partly frustration, and partly just real desire to explore them.

At the time, I was also thinking of going back to school to get an MA in Literature. So I was hungry not just to be reading more, but to be thinking about and discussing literature in a critical and focused way. As a writer, you read so much and get inspired in so many different ways, and often you feel like, “Hey. I just read this amazing scene. Who can I talk to about it?”

So all these needs fused in my mind at once (in the midst of waiting tables!) and I realized I wanted to start a site where I could provide much-needed information for writers while also satisfying my own intellectual cravings.

How did that analysis of the literary magazine scene grow into The Review Review? How would you describe your vision for the project?

If I had to summarize my vision in two words, it would be: Full Disclosure. I want writers to have as much information as possible about literary magazines. Which ones are well-edited, which are full of typos, which are beautiful, which are politically offensive, which are inspiring, and so on. Knowing which journals specialize in what can save writers a lot of time and money. Also, to be constantly on the submitting-and-being-judged side of things can get wearisome. Having more knowledge about a variety of lit mags is a way writers can feel empowered.

In addition to that, I want to give editors a voice. “Stop sending us romance! We don’t publish romance!” or “Please trust us. We really do want you to succeed!” These are things editors are hungry to tell writers. So, I think of The Review Review as a place where writers can get very detailed information and editors can be fully honest about what they want and what they do. My sense of the literary scene is that it needs such a forum.

How did you experience the shift in role–from submitting writer to working editor?

With resentment! No…I’m kidding. But it can be a constant struggle. Some days I feel my editor self tapping her watch and saying, “Come on, Becky, put away your fictional characters. It’s time to answer emails from real people,” while my writer self (ever a child) whines, “Now? Please, let me do just one more paragraph…”

But then, of course, when I finally step into my editorial self (a more mature and level-headed adult), I really love it. I love getting to know my reviewers, reading about different journals, corresponding with editors, writing our weekly newsletter, gaining more knowledge about what journals do, and I especially love when someone contacts me and says, “Hey, your site helped me submit and publish a story” or, “Your newsletter makes me laugh out loud.”  That’s the best.

What were your challenges in getting the project off the ground?

Once I had the idea for the site, there weren’t that many challenges getting it off the ground. Or rather, whatever challenges I faced did not feel like obstacles, rather like new problems to learn about, solve, and manage.

I think when you’re really enthusiastic about something, you just do it. You ignore the people who discourage you and you find the people who want to help. At the beginning, I had a friend sit with me in a café every night and teach me how to use Drupal, the website software. Other friends and family members helped me brainstorm logos, gave me business advice, helped design the site and tested its functionality, contributed with marketing efforts, and helped in so many ways. Then too, there have been the hundreds of writers and editors who have pitched in in some way or another. The collective generosity and enthusiasm of all these people makes everything simply feel do-able.

What role does The Review Review play in today’s marketplace? And how is it different from other establishments that collect information about literary magazines, like Duotrope or The Writers’ Market?

Increasingly, The Review Review seems to be establishing itself as a fixture in the literary community. As for what role we play, I’ll let history be the judge of that.

Insofar as how we differ from other resources, for one thing we do very comprehensive reviews. Writers’ Market is phenomenal but doesn’t go into much detail about each individual journal, or it might classify a magazine as “political.” What does that mean, political? At The Review Review, we’ll tell you! Also, unlike Duotrope, our content is 100% free and will remain that way.

What also distinguishes The Review Review is that we publish reviews that aren’t always 100% favorable to the magazine. Our mission is not to talk about how great all lit mags are no matter what. Our mission is to treat lit mags as artistic objects worthy of analysis and criticism. Sometimes that means a review will be glowing. Other times it means a review will be more critical, in the vein of any book review in a major newspaper. I don’t know any other website or publication that does this.

I think many up-and-coming writers dread the submission process: it’s time-consuming, costs money, and rejection is by far the most likely outcome. What advice to you have for writers who want to make submission worthwhile?

So many writers long to be published and yet don’t send out their work! I doubt this has to do with anguish over the occasional $3 reading fee or weariness over a few Submishmash forms. It really has to do with a fear of being seen, of being judged.

What can I tell you, people? Get over yourselves. If you’re hungry for publication—which is a perfectly valid hunger—go after that nourishment like an animal. Tigers don’t think, “Oh, what if this antelope doesn’t like my approach to eating?” or “What if this wild boar rejects me on account of my sharp teeth and yellow fur?”

When animals are hungry, they eat. You, dear writer, are hungry for recognition. Go feast.

Why do you choose to review specific issues, as opposed to a magazine’s general editorial approach?

I think it’s important to treat literary journals as relevant, readable entities, as ends in themselves. You can read a journal’s mission statement on their website. But what you can’t know is how that mission statement translates into the work they actually publish on a semi- or annual basis.

Reviewing individual issues lets us engage more deeply with the writing and artwork in each magazine as well as the work of specific editors at a specific time. If lit mags are relevant cultural products, which I believe they are, then each issue of each magazine is significant unto itself.

I was impressed by your review of StoryQuarterly’s 2011 Winter Issue, which pointed out some jaw-dropping editorial gaffes. The comments section on that post shows that other individuals–including one of the contributing writers in that issue–were irked as well. Do you think this review made it back to the editorial staff? Have you ever heard from editors about negative or critical reviews?

Oh, thanks! I was actually planning on taking a break from reviewing for a few months and then I came across that issue of StoryQuarterly and indeed, my jaw did drop. I felt I just had to write about those shocking typos. I never heard from the editors. I don’t know if they’ve seen it.

I have heard from a few other editors who have been less than thrilled with our reviews. It’s not common but it has happened. Sometimes the editor’s points are totally valid. Other times it’s just a clash of aesthetic between the editor and the reviewer. Then, too, there are some editors who simply hate hearing criticism. One editor wrote a very long response to my review of his magazine in addition to sending me numerous emails. He then blogged about how terrible my review was and even made a cartoon of me depicted as a donkey!

That’s cool with me, though. We’re all passionate here. I invite editors to leave comments and I hope conversations will open up around literary magazines. That is, afterall, the mission of the site.

Besides, whether an individual review is favorable or critical, the most important thing is that we are shining a light on literary magazines overall, thus highlighting their importance to our culture. We are saying that they are important enough to take seriously. The majority of editors I’ve encountered are completely on board with this mission. They appreciate having coverage of their work, regardless of whether it’s favorable or critical. Most of the editors with whom I have corresponded have been incredibly gracious and supportive.

And all that said, I always tell my reviewers to review journals as if the contributing writers are in the room with them. Be honest, but don’t be harsh or discouraging. Always give the writers and the editors the benefit of the doubt. Remember that many of these writers are getting published for the first time. Be forgiving, keep an open mind.

What does a magazine have to do to get a TRR 5-star rating?

A journal that gets 5 stars is one that really blew the reviewer away. Usually the reviewer expresses a sentiment along the lines of, “I don’t normally read poetry but now I love it…” or “I normally hate postmodern experimentation but this was unlike anything I’ve ever read before…” The journal should open doors in the reader’s mind, change his/her perspective in some way. Also, there should be nothing wrong with it, by the standards of that reviewer. If there’s even one or two stories that fall flat or a few maudlin poems, the rating will go down to 4. This, of course, is totally subjective, and depends solely on a single reviewer’s responses. But as I’ve said, people are always invited to leave responses on the site, and are welcome to disagree.

What role does humor play in The Review Review?

Are you saying you think I’m funny?

Well, I do consider myself to be a rather humor-loving individual. I do think my sense of humor comes through in the site, especially in the newsletter. One newsletter subscriber came up to me at AWP this year and said, “Hey! I love you! You’re funny!” and then walked away.  That was pretty cool.

I think a lot of writers are intimidated by the world of publishing because that’s the realm of Professionalism. Agents, editors, lit mag editors, lit mags–it can all feel like such Serious Business. But if the mission of my site is to demystify part of this world, then why not make people laugh in the process?

In your reviews, do you differentiate between print and online-only venues? Do you think the prestige gap between online and print publications is shrinking? What advice do you have about online-only publications?

Yes, we make the distinction, but we review both formats equally. I do think online journals are becoming much more prestigious. There are several anthologies that cull the best work from the web, and that has made a big impact on how these journals are perceived. Also, the mass readability of online journals is wonderful for writers.

My advice for writers who publish in online journals is to put your contact information clearly in your bio, so if people want to re-post your story or learn more about you, they can contact you directly. In this age of rampant intellectual property theft, writers should make sure they are able to retain complete ownership of their work, especially if they’re not getting paid, which is the case with most literary journals, both online and print.

To what degree is publishing a distraction for unagented writers? Do you find a lot of younger writers spending time on submissions that they should be spending on writing and revision? 

I think the hunger for recognition is always a distraction, whether it’s the desire to get your work published, the desire be retweeted, the desire to have your comments liked on Facebook, or what-have-you.

But until writers get financial subsidies from the government, until art programs are not the first thing to go in school spending cuts, until poetry is read on a national scale, until literature is discussed on TV at night, until commercial magazines start publishing fiction like they used to, until intellectual life is valued and taken seriously in our culture–it will remain hard to stay disciplined and motivated to do one’s work.

The question is not, “What’s wrong with writers who get distracted?” but “How do writers continue to stay motivated and inspired in a culture that constantly pushes them away from making serious art?” It’s just hard, every way you slice it. I have total compassion for any writer who gets distracted by a need to feel recognized and valued in our current society.

What do you think about the age-old writer’s conundrum: should you submit your best, most polished story to a more accessible, up-and-coming publication, or try to hold out for somewhere more established and “big?”

My advice: Submit to the journals you like. “Big” might not mean best, not for you anyway. Submit to the journals that excite you. If that excitement is there for a big-name journal, sobeit. But don’t get too hung up on prestige. Get to know the many, many, many incredible magazines out there that are exciting simply because people like you—whoever you are, dear writer—are publishing in them.

Then, go get ‘em, tiger.

The post Interview with Becky Tuch, editor of The Review Review 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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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.

The post #79: Terry Tempest Williams (3-12-2013) appeared first on The Lit Show.

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On this episode of The Lit Show, current Iowa Writers’ Workshop student Dina Nayeri discussed her debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea. Dina was born in Iran and moved to Oklahoma at the age of ten. Her work is scheduled for publication in over twenty countries, and has appeared in Granta New Voices, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Glamour, and elsewhere. She holds an MBA from Harvard and a BA from Princeton, and is currently a Teaching Writing Fellow at the Workshop.

Dina reads from her novel on Tuesday, Feb. 25 at 7:00pm at Prairie Lights.

Interview by Elizabeth Weiss.

Complete Episode

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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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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.

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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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. 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).

Interview by Grant Souders.

The post #75: Dan Beachy-Quick and Sally Keith appeared first on The Lit Show.

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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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie tells the story of Hattie Shepherd, who, in 1923, flees the violence and oppression of Jim Crow Georgia for Philadelphia, hoping for a brighter future and a share of the American dream. Winfrey has said she picked The Twelve Tribes of Hattie for her much-coveted book club partially because of Mathis’s compassionate characterization of Hattie, an indomitable heroine who does battle with the cruel forces of poverty, prejudice, and heartbreak in order that others might have a chance at something better.

The post #74: Ayana Mathis appeared first on The Lit Show.

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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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.

The post Episode 0703: Michael Palmer (2-15-2013) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Season 07
Episode 04
Air date: Wednesday, 2/20/13 at 3 PM CST

On this episode of the Lit Show, Deborah Kennedy talks with University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum and visiting fiction professor Ayana Mathis about her debut novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which has not only received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist, but was also singled out by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club 2.0 series.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie tells the story of Hattie Shepherd, who, in 1923, flees the violence and oppression of Jim Crow Georgia for Philadelphia, hoping for a brighter future and a share of the American dream. Winfrey has said she picked The Twelve Tribes of Hattie for her much-coveted book club partially because of Mathis’s compassionate characterization of Hattie, an indomitable heroine who does battle with the cruel forces of poverty, prejudice, and heartbreak in order that others might have a chance at something better.

“There were so many other black women like Hattie, who struggled and survived and did the best they could, and made a better life for the people who followed — people like me,” Winfrey said. “And that shouldn’t be forgotten.”

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times had this to say about Mathis’s skill as a storyteller: “Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters’ stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison’s writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own.”

Mathis is a native of Philadelphia and the recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner, the painter Nikki Terry, and will read from her work on February 25 at the Englert Theater in Iowa City.

Excerpt

Full Interview

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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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Draft: The Journal of Progress publishes working drafts of stories and poems, plus interviews that emphasize the creative process and investigate the aesthetics of revision. Editors Mark Polanzak and Rachel Yoder will discuss the journal’s inception and its recently released second issue, which features the work of Donald Dunbar and Alicia Erian.

Ink Lit Mag is the one-year-old literary journal of the Iowa Writers Living-Learning Community at the University of Iowa. Designed, staffed, and published by undergraduate editors, Ink has just released its third issue.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

The post Episode 0702: Lit Scene Roundup, Iowa City (2-5-2013) appeared first on The Lit Show.

Season 07 Episode 02 Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013

This episode of The Lit Show welcomes the editors of two new Iowa City-based literary journals.

Draft: The Journal of Progress publishes working drafts of stories and poems, plus interviews that emphasize the creative process and investigate the aesthetics of revision. Editors Mark Polanzak and Rachel Yoder will discuss the journal’s inception and its recently released second issue, which features the work of Donald Dunbar and Alicia Erian.

Ink Lit Mag is the one-year-old literary journal of the Iowa Writers Living-Learning Community at the University of Iowa. Designed, staffed, and published by undergraduate editors, Ink has just released its third issue.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

Complete Episode

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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.

Interview by Ben Mauk.

The post Episode 0701: Benjamin Nugent (1-30-2013) appeared first on The Lit Show.

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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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.

The post Episode 0616: Arda Collins (12-06-2012) appeared first on The Lit Show.

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.

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.

The post Episode 0615: Charles Baxter (12-06-2012) appeared first on The Lit Show.

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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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.

The post Episode 0614: Dylan Nice (11-28-2012) appeared first on The Lit Show.

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.

The post Julie Orringer and Ryan Harty appeared first on The Lit Show.

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.

The post Episode 0613: Bret Anthony Johnston appeared first on The Lit Show.

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.

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.

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