Between The Covers

  The western novel is an American literary tradition, and our guest today, John Larison, has written one of the best ones in recent memory. Whiskey When We’re Dry tells the story of teenaged Jessilyn Harney, who when her father dies in the spring of 1885, dresses up like ... Read more

  "I feel like I can't tell one story about a giant mustard penis because it's not about a mustard penis only, but about all of these incidents together, in context, and through time." So begins the title story in Renee Simms's debut short story collection, Meet Behind Mar... Read more

  How to make something vỡ, something broken, something shattered beautiful?  Cách làm cái gì đó vỡ, cái gì đó broken, cái gì đó vụn tan rạng rỡ? In Dao Strom’s collection of poetic fragments, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else,  translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen ... Read more

On today’s show, our guest is Courtenay Hameister, Portland-based author of the new book Okay Fine Whatever: The Year I Went From Being Afraid of Everything to Only Being Afraid of Most Things, in conversation with Gigi Little, editor of City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portl... Read more

  One of Granta’s Best Young American novelists, Catherine Lacey, the Whiting Award-winning author of The Answers, showcases her literary style in short fiction with Certain American States, a collection of stories about ordinary people seeking—and failing to find—the extr... Read more

  Who hasn't wondered where-aside from Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo-all the women artists are? In many art books, they've been marginalized with cold efficiency, summarily dismissed in the captions of group photographs with the phrase "identity unknown" while each male... Read more

  Gregory Pardlo's father was a brilliant and charismatic man--a leading labor organizer who presided over a happy suburban family of four. But when he loses his job following the famous air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, he succumbs to addiction and exhausts the fam... Read more

  Emily Young talks to author Elizabeth Fournier about her new book The Green Burial Guidebook. Funeral expenses in the United States average more than $10,000. And every year conventional funerals bury millions of tons of wood, concrete, and metals, as well as millions o... Read more

  Forrest Gander’s first book of poems since his Pulitzer finalist Core Samples from the World: a startling look through loss, grief, and regret into the exquisite nature of intimacy "Utterly naked and bereft, elegies, apologies, could-have-beens, Gander grieves and wonde... Read more