“Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to its infantile worldview.” —Jesse Ball Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, Hurricane Season is the English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers, and her conversation on Between the Covers is Melchor’s first radio/podcast discussion of it in English....
May 18, 2020•2 hr 5 min
“ A Fortune for Your Disaster proves that, if you pay attention, Black people have defined and still define themselves for themselves amid roses and dandelions, cardinals and violets, the blues of music and police uniforms, prayer and swagger. . . . The disaster is not us or ours but what we endure, forced and as a matter of course, whether our presence is acknowledged or not, on our terms or not. As death insists on invading our lives, we keep making more and more beauty in order to survive it....
May 08, 2020•1 hr 30 min
The New Yorker poetry editor and host of The New Yorker poetry podcast, Kevin Young, delivered this talk, “How to Write a Hoax Poem,” at the 2014 Tin House Writers Workshop. He discusses some of the more notable modern poetry hoaxes, glimpsing into the secret history of the poem as something conceived to tempt or even trick. By understanding the ways the hoax works, Young suggests that we may better know our own assumptions, habits, and hurts, and how to subvert them in our writing....
May 01, 2020•52 min
“Whether speaking about motherhood, grief, or poetry, Zucker’s unrelenting eye and wittily critical voice peel back these experiences to reveal insights that are both deeply human and uncompromisingly analytic. . . . Above all, this book is open—open about difficult subjects, open in the way its language operates, open in its willingness to create a psychological intimacy between the speaker and the reader.” —Morgan Levine for The Columbia Review
Apr 24, 2020•3 hr 5 min
Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ talk “ Power & Audience: On Not Writing for White People” was given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon. In this talk she references a 2019 Publishing Industry Survey and a series of pie charts showing the racial, gender, sexual orientation, and ability breakdown of various subsets of the publishing industry. Contreras also further discusses these themes, in relationship to the recent controversy over the book American Dirt, in her new essay at T...
Apr 15, 2020•37 min
Dorothy Allison treated the participants of the 2011 Summer Workshop to a spirited discussion of how characters should speak on the page. Not only “ he said, she said, none of them said a thing,” but a whole range of language issues—what is said and not said, dialect and rhythm, pacing, patterns in speech, and most importantly, the language of gesture and avoidance.
Apr 08, 2020•53 min
“Reinhardt’s Garden is one of those perfect books that looks small and exotic and melancholic from the outside but, once in, is immense and exultant in the best possible way. Think Amulet by Roberto Bolaño, think Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, think Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, think Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, think Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto, think The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. Think.” —Rodrigo Fresán
Apr 01, 2020•1 hr 26 min
“Novelists don’t need to dream the end of the world anymore—they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today’s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it’s as if they are all cut from one diamond.” –Jonathan Dee
Mar 11, 2020•1 hr 46 min
“Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what it is to be alive.” —Carole Maso
Mar 02, 2020•2 hr 9 min
Alexander Chee delivered this craft lecture, from “First Draft to Plot,” at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop. Chee is the author most recently of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel .
Feb 21, 2020•37 min
“Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. Cleanness is the act of a master.” —Frank Bidart
Feb 14, 2020•1 hr 50 min
“ In the Dream House . . . confronts the issues of credibility, self-doubt, and disbelief that all too frequently arise when survivors of domestic abuse speak out. But the work also stands as an intervention explicitly aimed at the silences, erasures, and lacunae of the culture at large . . . Machado’s In the Dream House shows us that a narrative of lesbian domestic abuse can be her story told in precisely her way—a human story, full of artistry, candor, and grace.” —James W. Fuerst...
Feb 03, 2020•1 hr 39 min
Jericho Brown gave these two talks, on suicide, and on joy, at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon. His latest poetry collection The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press) was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award.
Jan 24, 2020•26 min
“In The Magical Language of Others , E. J. Koh writes of the boundary between anonymity and naming, between absence and abandonment, between cruelty and safety for four generations of mothers and daughters, each speaking with an occupied heart and crossing narrative borders between Korea, Japan, and America. As a reader, you give yourself over to her narrative territory and the resetting of the borders of lineage, language, and lives lost.” —Shawn Wong
Jan 13, 2020•1 hr 39 min
“In this retelling of the Mahabharata from the point of view of its hitherto minor female characters, Karthika Naïr uncovers a seminal feminist text. Until the Lions makes dazzling use of concrete verse and surreptitious rhyme to tell a story you think you know. By poem’s end you understand, with gratitude, that you know nothing and the old world has been made new. This is nervy and accomplished poetry. Listen.” —Jeet Thayil
Jan 06, 2020•1 hr 53 min
“CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence.” —Eileen Myles
Dec 16, 2019•2 hr
“Older’s spellbinding novel is a fever dream full of magic and loss, wickedness and grace, faith and love, spirit and power.” —Marlon James; “A lyrical, beautiful, devastating, literally haunting journey of assimilation, resistance, and family. Older just gets better and better.” —N.K. Jemisin
Dec 01, 2019•1 hr 43 min
“Jake Skeets takes us to ‘The Indian Capital of the World,’ a landscape of erosion and erasure, where ‘boys only hold boys / like bottles’ and eros is a dangerous thing. In the brush and horseweed, ghosts and trains and abandoned trailers, a young Diné attempts to answer all the question marks of adolescence and early adulthood, desire and death commingling around him. These are poems born of unspokenness, testing the limits of language, love, and silence.”―D. A. Powell
Nov 20, 2019•1 hr 51 min
Recorded on the final day of the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the panel “On Writing Towards Joy” ended the week on a high note. Moderated by Tin House Assistant Books Editor Elizabeth DeMeo, panelists Kelly Link, Garth Greenwell, and Justin Torres unpack a rarely discussed topic. How does one create joy on the page, in the reader? What are the craft questions and existential ones regarding joy? And what exactly is joy and to what ends should it be pursued?
Nov 12, 2019•37 min
“This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It’s not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed.”—Bill McKibben
Nov 02, 2019•1 hr 30 min
“Grand Union is an unusual creature, combining all the experimental exuberance of a writer discovering a form with the technical prowess of one at the height of her abilities. The result is exhilarating. Between the covers of one book, readers will find such disparate forms as allegory, parable, speculative thriller and satire, as well as shorter incarnations of Smith’s characteristic social comedy . . . Smith’s voracious intellect is on full display.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Oct 21, 2019•54 min
Recorded at the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, today’s episode is a medley of readings from three different nights. Garth Greenwell reads from his upcoming novel Cleanness (FSG January 2020), Michelle Tea from her novel-in-progress, Little Faggot, and Kaveh Akbar the short and long poems “Vines” and “The Palace” respectively.
Oct 16, 2019•1 hr
“Rob Schlegel has a voice you’d follow into the dark woods, knowing full well it’s hard, awful, daily, plain, living truth you’re running toward. The speaker in this book is a heartbreaker of a storyteller—a synesthesiac of mixed feelings, bad news, and wordsmithery. I feel known, caught out, believed in, vulnerable, when I read this book.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize
Oct 02, 2019•2 hr 2 min
“Finding the Life of the Story: Vision & Revision” was recorded at the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Panelists Karen Shepard, Danielle Evans, R.O. Kwon and Jamel Brinkley talk strategies to draft and revise. Moderated by David Naimon, host of Between the Covers.
Sep 25, 2019•48 min
“Filled with characters who mirror the chaos and anxiety, exhilaration and despair, desire and fear of the world around them, Home Remedies offers searing portraits of millennial Chinese immigrants. . . . Wang’s shimmering words offer proof that even the most mundane of these lives have the potential to become something extraordinary. . . . A great, explosive talent.”—Nylon Magazine
Sep 18, 2019•1 hr 31 min
“These are stories that reflect the author’s Turkish heritage and a curiosity about our human search for meaning as profound as it is lyrical. The stories are music. They beguile and illuminate with narratives about yearning and desire, circumstance and courage, resilience and discovery.”—NPR
Sep 04, 2019•1 hr 43 min
“If someone asked me what a poet’s history might look and read like, I would say Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall. It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces—through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, where are you from? I would answer, from The Grave on the Wall.”—Don Mee Choi
Aug 15, 2019•1 hr 50 min
“J. G. Ballard meets William Gibson meets Jeff VanderMeer. Oval is an up-to-the-minute story about the twilight zones of corporate design, aesthetics, pharmacy, and bioengineering, where there’s nothing consultants won’t break in the quest for ‘innovation.’ What could possibly go wrong? Find out in Elvia Wilk’s crisp and stylish debut book.”—McKenzie Wark
Aug 01, 2019•1 hr 42 min
“In Lanny Max Porter has expanded on his innovative hybrid mode while remaining faithful to our species-wide tradition of storytelling through myth, magic, and parable, but also through the harrowing minutiae of being alive in the trying hours of a small town ruptured by loss. The result is a powerful yet tender reclamation of the imagination, love, and artmaking—all of it a brilliant defense of the outsider’s tenuous foothold in society.” —Ocean Vuong
Jul 14, 2019•1 hr 50 min
“Ted Chiang has no contemporary peers when it comes to the short story form. His name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Carver, Poe, Borges, and Kafka. Every story is a universe. Every story is a diamond. You will inhale Exhalation in a single, stunned sitting, because true genius doesn’t come along nearly as often as advertised. This is the real thing.”—Blake Crouch, author of Dark Matter
Jul 01, 2019•1 hr 10 min
