About Lauren Elkin:
\nLauren Elkin is the author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse, a New York Times Book Review notable book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frieze, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. A native New Yorker, Elkin lived in Paris for twenty years and now resides in London.
About Scaffolding:
\nThe debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time.
Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective.
\n\nParis, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood.
\n\nTwo couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Lauren Elkin about intimacy, the eternal haunting of physical spaces, psychoanalytic terms, how feminism can save men, and more.","date_published":"2024-12-06T09:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/9ad9e26f-56d4-4ed4-9cbf-a5f8695b2f49.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":45509006,"duration_in_seconds":2844}]},{"id":"cbdc844e-d72a-4aed-92a9-a4ddcdcffbb0","title":"Episode 101: Weird Era feat. Fawn Parker","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/101","content_text":"About Fawn Parker:\nFAWN PARKER is the author of the novels What We Both Know, longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Set-Point, and Dumb-Show, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, winner of the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize and the J. M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. Her story “Feed Machine” was longlisted for the 2020 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, and her story “WunderHorse II” was anthologized in André Forget’s After Realism. Fawn is a Ph.D. student at the University of New Brunswick. She divides her time between Toronto and Fredericton.\n\nAbout Hi, It's Me:\nShortly after her mother’s death, Fawn arrives at the farmhouse. While there, she will stay in her mother’s bedroom in the house that is also occupied by four other women who live by an unusual set of beliefs.\n\nWrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother’s death. It is her responsibility to catalogue the furniture and possessions in the room, then sell or dispose of them. Instead, Fawn becomes fixated on archiving her mother’s writing and documents, searching for signs, and drawing tenuous connections to help her understand more about the enigmatic woman in the pages.\n\nI am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her.\n\nIn Hi, It’s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It’s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief, invoking the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness with astonishing precision and emotional force. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: Why must it be this way?","content_html":"About Fawn Parker:
\nFAWN PARKER is the author of the novels What We Both Know, longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Set-Point, and Dumb-Show, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, winner of the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize and the J. M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. Her story “Feed Machine” was longlisted for the 2020 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, and her story “WunderHorse II” was anthologized in André Forget’s After Realism. Fawn is a Ph.D. student at the University of New Brunswick. She divides her time between Toronto and Fredericton.
About Hi, It's Me:
\nShortly after her mother’s death, Fawn arrives at the farmhouse. While there, she will stay in her mother’s bedroom in the house that is also occupied by four other women who live by an unusual set of beliefs.
Wrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother’s death. It is her responsibility to catalogue the furniture and possessions in the room, then sell or dispose of them. Instead, Fawn becomes fixated on archiving her mother’s writing and documents, searching for signs, and drawing tenuous connections to help her understand more about the enigmatic woman in the pages.
\n\nI am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her.
\n\nIn Hi, It’s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It’s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief, invoking the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness with astonishing precision and emotional force. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: Why must it be this way?
","summary":"Alex is joined by Fawn Parker to discuss her latest novel, Hi, It's Me, how grief and humour relate, writing poetry VS writing a novel, experiencing the natural world as a city kid, and why PHD students are not (always) sexy.","date_published":"2024-11-29T09:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/cbdc844e-d72a-4aed-92a9-a4ddcdcffbb0.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":37302465,"duration_in_seconds":2199}]},{"id":"876b34f2-66b8-4253-8298-7a233bdbf1e7","title":"Episode 102: Weird Era feat. Sofia Ajram","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/102","content_text":"About Sofia Ajram:\nSofia Ajram (he/she) is a metalsmith and literary horror writer who specializes in feverish stories of anomalous architecture and gay pining. He is the editor of the forthcoming Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror. She has also given lectures on contemporary horror films at Monstrum Montreal and serves as a moderator of r/horror on Reddit. Sofia lives in Montreal with her cat Isa. Find them on Twitter and Instagram @sofiaajram.\n\nAbout Coup de Grâce:\nA mindbending and visceral experimental horror about a young man trapped in an infinite Montreal subway station, perfect for readers of Mark Z. Danielewski and Susanna Clarke.\n\nVicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.\n\nDetermined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.\n\nThe more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.\n\nA terrifying psychological nightmare from a powerful new voice in horror.","content_html":"About Sofia Ajram:
\nSofia Ajram (he/she) is a metalsmith and literary horror writer who specializes in feverish stories of anomalous architecture and gay pining. He is the editor of the forthcoming Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror. She has also given lectures on contemporary horror films at Monstrum Montreal and serves as a moderator of r/horror on Reddit. Sofia lives in Montreal with her cat Isa. Find them on Twitter and Instagram @sofiaajram.
About Coup de Grâce:
\nA mindbending and visceral experimental horror about a young man trapped in an infinite Montreal subway station, perfect for readers of Mark Z. Danielewski and Susanna Clarke.
Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.
\n\nDetermined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.
\n\nThe more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.
\n\nA terrifying psychological nightmare from a powerful new voice in horror.
","summary":"Alex sits down with author and artist Sofia Ajram this week to discuss their novella, Coup De Grâce, urban legends, queer tragedies, mental health struggles as body horror, and our favourite Montreal metro stations.","date_published":"2024-11-25T09:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/876b34f2-66b8-4253-8298-7a233bdbf1e7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":46431826,"duration_in_seconds":2770}]},{"id":"e75c9e23-5ceb-4162-bafb-72c46fba48c9","title":"Episode 100: Weird Era 100th Episode!","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/100","content_text":"In celebration of our 100th episode, Alex and Sruti reflect on just a few of their favourite conversations throughout the years, including conversations with Elif Batuman, Sean Thor Conroe, Lillian Fishman, Isle McElroy, Ottessa Moshfegh, Larissa Pham, and Marie-Helene Bertino.","content_html":"In celebration of our 100th episode, Alex and Sruti reflect on just a few of their favourite conversations throughout the years, including conversations with Elif Batuman, Sean Thor Conroe, Lillian Fishman, Isle McElroy, Ottessa Moshfegh, Larissa Pham, and Marie-Helene Bertino.
","summary":"In celebration of our 100th episode, Alex and Sruti reflect on just a few of their favourite conversations throughout the years.","date_published":"2024-11-22T09:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/e75c9e23-5ceb-4162-bafb-72c46fba48c9.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":55476557,"duration_in_seconds":3467}]},{"id":"1a0671c1-0d3e-4e50-b79b-f6f0a4b24a2d","title":"Episode 99: Weird Era feat. Nora Lange","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/99","content_text":"About Nora Lange:\nNora Lange's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB , Hazlitt , Joyland , American Short Fiction , Denver Quarterly , HTMLGiant , LIT , The Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Her project Dailyness was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She received her MFA from Brown University's Literary Arts Program where she was a Kaplan Fellow, and will be a 2024 fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. An earlier iteration of Us Fools was shortlisted for The Novel Prize in 2020, a prize to recognize and publish novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form. She lives in Los Angeles, California.\n\nAbout US Fools:\nA tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.\n\nJoanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents’ volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.\n\nAs Jo and Bernie’s imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents’ realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne—free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence—rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she’s learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.\n\nWith her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the","content_html":"About Nora Lange:
\nNora Lange's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB , Hazlitt , Joyland , American Short Fiction , Denver Quarterly , HTMLGiant , LIT , The Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Her project Dailyness was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She received her MFA from Brown University's Literary Arts Program where she was a Kaplan Fellow, and will be a 2024 fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. An earlier iteration of Us Fools was shortlisted for The Novel Prize in 2020, a prize to recognize and publish novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
About US Fools:
\nA tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.
Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents’ volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.
\n\nAs Jo and Bernie’s imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents’ realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne—free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence—rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she’s learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.
\n\nWith her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the
","summary":"Sruti talks to Nora Lange about horny parents, how revenge is a desperate mode of imitation, mythology, bodies, femininity, and asks: where are the eyes? ","date_published":"2024-11-15T11:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/1a0671c1-0d3e-4e50-b79b-f6f0a4b24a2d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":37893752,"duration_in_seconds":2368}]},{"id":"a00e13c7-6788-4a9b-8df8-219b51b21770","title":"Episode 98: Weird Era feat. Kevin Lambert","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/98","content_text":"About Kevin Lambert:\nBorn in 1992, Kevin Lambert grew up in Chicoutimi, Quebec. May Our Joy Endure won the Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. His second novel, Querelle de Roberval, was acclaimed in Quebec, where it was nominated for four literary prizes; in France, where it was a finalist for the Prix Médicis and Prix Le Monde and won the Prix Sade; and Canada, where it was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, also widely acclaimed, won a prize for the best novel from the Saguenay region and was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. Lambert lives in Montreal.\n\nDonald Winkler is a translator of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He is a three-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English translation. He lives in Montreal.\n\nAbout May Our Joy Endure:\nWinner of the 2023 Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet\n\nCéline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumph she anticipates in finally bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is excoriated by critics, who accuse her of callously destroying the social fabric of neighborhoods, ushering in a new era of gentrification, and many even deadlier sins. When she is deposed as CEO of her firm, Céline must make sense of the charges against herself and the people in her elite circle. For the first time in danger of losing their footing, what fictions must they tell themselves to justify their privilege and maintain their position in the world that they themselves have built?\n\nMoving fluidly between Céline’s perspective and the perspectives of her critics, and revealing both the ruthlessness of her methods and the brilliance of her aesthetic vision, May Our Joy Endure is a shrewd examination of the microcosm of the ultra-privileged and a dazzling social novel that depicts with razor-sharp acuity the terrible beauty of wealth, influence, and art.","content_html":"About Kevin Lambert:
\nBorn in 1992, Kevin Lambert grew up in Chicoutimi, Quebec. May Our Joy Endure won the Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. His second novel, Querelle de Roberval, was acclaimed in Quebec, where it was nominated for four literary prizes; in France, where it was a finalist for the Prix Médicis and Prix Le Monde and won the Prix Sade; and Canada, where it was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, also widely acclaimed, won a prize for the best novel from the Saguenay region and was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. Lambert lives in Montreal.
Donald Winkler is a translator of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He is a three-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English translation. He lives in Montreal.
\n\nAbout May Our Joy Endure:
\nWinner of the 2023 Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet
Céline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumph she anticipates in finally bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is excoriated by critics, who accuse her of callously destroying the social fabric of neighborhoods, ushering in a new era of gentrification, and many even deadlier sins. When she is deposed as CEO of her firm, Céline must make sense of the charges against herself and the people in her elite circle. For the first time in danger of losing their footing, what fictions must they tell themselves to justify their privilege and maintain their position in the world that they themselves have built?
\n\nMoving fluidly between Céline’s perspective and the perspectives of her critics, and revealing both the ruthlessness of her methods and the brilliance of her aesthetic vision, May Our Joy Endure is a shrewd examination of the microcosm of the ultra-privileged and a dazzling social novel that depicts with razor-sharp acuity the terrible beauty of wealth, influence, and art.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Kevin Lambert about the montreal housing crisis, female ambition, how the shape of our spaces define our lived experiences, and writing from the perspective of the, \"bad guys.\"","date_published":"2024-11-08T11:45:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/a00e13c7-6788-4a9b-8df8-219b51b21770.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49018895,"duration_in_seconds":3063}]},{"id":"f53d5ac2-0f94-4438-83a7-e730298f4f9f","title":"Episode 97: Weird Era feat. Kristen Felicetti","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/97","content_text":"About Kristen Felicetti:\nKristen Felicetti is a writer based in Rochester, NY. For over a decade, she edited the literary magazine The Bushwick Review. Log Off is her debut novel.\n\nAbout Log Off:\nIn the early 2000s, from a dial-up connection in a Western New York suburb, sixteen-year-old Ellora Gao logs on to the Internet to start a secret LiveJournal. Abandoned as a child by her troubled mother and left with her former stepfather Brian, an emotionally distant alcoholic, Ellora hopes to find the close relationships online that are missing from her real life. \n\nBut her online diary isn't entirely serious, it's also where she can gossip and rant about music, books, and everyone at her high school, including two intriguing new friends, Alice, a reformed bad girl, and Tiff, a cocky musical prodigy. As the school year unfolds, Ellora shares every challenge she faces with her growing LiveJournal readership: memories of her estranged mother, frustration with Brian's lack of parenting, concern for Alice's health, romantic feelings for Tiff, and her place in a post-Y2K world on the cusp of major change.","content_html":"About Kristen Felicetti:
\nKristen Felicetti is a writer based in Rochester, NY. For over a decade, she edited the literary magazine The Bushwick Review. Log Off is her debut novel.
About Log Off:
\nIn the early 2000s, from a dial-up connection in a Western New York suburb, sixteen-year-old Ellora Gao logs on to the Internet to start a secret LiveJournal. Abandoned as a child by her troubled mother and left with her former stepfather Brian, an emotionally distant alcoholic, Ellora hopes to find the close relationships online that are missing from her real life.
But her online diary isn't entirely serious, it's also where she can gossip and rant about music, books, and everyone at her high school, including two intriguing new friends, Alice, a reformed bad girl, and Tiff, a cocky musical prodigy. As the school year unfolds, Ellora shares every challenge she faces with her growing LiveJournal readership: memories of her estranged mother, frustration with Brian's lack of parenting, concern for Alice's health, romantic feelings for Tiff, and her place in a post-Y2K world on the cusp of major change.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Kristen Felicetti about writers who started off as livejournal girlies, what it is about music that can evoke a feeling never really experienced, Fiona Apple, Queer culture in the 2000s, and much more.","date_published":"2024-11-01T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/f53d5ac2-0f94-4438-83a7-e730298f4f9f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":47194493,"duration_in_seconds":2817}]},{"id":"f85c7b4a-5af5-4fcb-8a2e-e1f7e4093fdf","title":"Episode 96: Weird Era feat. Jeff VanderMeer","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/96","content_text":"About Jeff VanderMeer:\nJeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding.\n\nAbout Absolution:\nThe surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series—and the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.\n\nWhen the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.\n\nAnd yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?\n\nStructured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one","content_html":"About Jeff VanderMeer:
\nJeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding.
About Absolution:
\nThe surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series—and the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.
When the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.
\n\nAnd yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?
\n\nStructured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one
","summary":"Alex chats with Jeff VanderMeer about Absolution, the surprise fourth volume in his Southern Reach series, how it feels to return to Area X ten years later, pushing his readers, environmentalism, and magic mushrooms!","date_published":"2024-10-25T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/f85c7b4a-5af5-4fcb-8a2e-e1f7e4093fdf.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":40862379,"duration_in_seconds":2422}]},{"id":"d69ffbb9-e01a-49a2-9c98-f5a358135b86","title":"Episode 95: Weird Era feat. Kenzie Allen","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/95","content_text":"About Kenzie Allen:\nKenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Best New Poets, Poets.org, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway; and the Oneida reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin.\n\nAbout Cloud Missives:\nIntimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.\n\nCloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you—and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.","content_html":"About Kenzie Allen:
\nKenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Best New Poets, Poets.org, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway; and the Oneida reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
About Cloud Missives:
\nIntimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.
Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you—and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.
","summary":"This week, Alex sits down with Haudenosaunee poet Kenzie Allen to discuss her debut poetry collection Cloud Missives, movement in poetry, Disney's problematic portrayal of Indigenous characters, the search for identity, and love poems about crabs.","date_published":"2024-10-18T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/d69ffbb9-e01a-49a2-9c98-f5a358135b86.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52508768,"duration_in_seconds":3281}]},{"id":"5f3c90d4-d4e8-4545-931d-2c26e2f45e4b","title":"Episode 94: Weird Era feat. Charlotte Shane","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/94","content_text":"About Charlotte Shane:\nCharlotte Shane is a nonfiction author and essayist. She is the author of Prostitute Laundry and N.B., both published by TigerBee Press, which she cofounded in 2015. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Bookforum, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere.\n\nAbout An Honest Woman:\nIn her early twenties, Charlotte Shane quit her women’s studies graduate program to devote herself to sex work because it was a way to devote herself to men. Her lifelong curiosity about male lust, love, selfishness, and social capital dovetailed with her own insatiable desire for intimacy to sustain a long career in escorting, with unexpectedly poignant results.\n\nShane uses her “unsparing honestly” (The New York Times Book Review) and her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at a romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions. As she takes stock of her relationships—with clients, with her father, with friends, with married men, and later, with her own husband—she tells a candid and haunting tale of love, marriage, and (in)fidelity, as seen through the eyes of the perpetual “other woman.”\n\nBraiding the personal and the universal, An Honest Woman is a merciless and moving love letter to men and an indictment of habitual dishonesty, a condemnation of every social constraint acting on heterosexual unions, and a hopeful affirmation of the possibility for true connection between men and women.","content_html":"About Charlotte Shane:
\nCharlotte Shane is a nonfiction author and essayist. She is the author of Prostitute Laundry and N.B., both published by TigerBee Press, which she cofounded in 2015. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Bookforum, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere.
About An Honest Woman:
\nIn her early twenties, Charlotte Shane quit her women’s studies graduate program to devote herself to sex work because it was a way to devote herself to men. Her lifelong curiosity about male lust, love, selfishness, and social capital dovetailed with her own insatiable desire for intimacy to sustain a long career in escorting, with unexpectedly poignant results.
Shane uses her “unsparing honestly” (The New York Times Book Review) and her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at a romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions. As she takes stock of her relationships—with clients, with her father, with friends, with married men, and later, with her own husband—she tells a candid and haunting tale of love, marriage, and (in)fidelity, as seen through the eyes of the perpetual “other woman.”
\n\nBraiding the personal and the universal, An Honest Woman is a merciless and moving love letter to men and an indictment of habitual dishonesty, a condemnation of every social constraint acting on heterosexual unions, and a hopeful affirmation of the possibility for true connection between men and women.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Charlotte about loving cis-hetero men, being worshipped as a woman, sex work and Libra-ness, Britney Spears, and much more.","date_published":"2024-10-11T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/5f3c90d4-d4e8-4545-931d-2c26e2f45e4b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50731514,"duration_in_seconds":3170}]},{"id":"ee4315bd-4ccd-4e63-98c0-ca3b673534b8","title":"Episode 93: Weird Era feat. Danzy Senna","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/93","content_text":"About Danzy Senna:\nDanzy Senna is the author of four previous works of fiction, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, New People, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.\n\nAbout Colored Television:\nA brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia\n\nJane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.\n\nBut things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.\n\nFunny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.","content_html":"About Danzy Senna:
\nDanzy Senna is the author of four previous works of fiction, including the bestselling Caucasia and, most recently, New People, as well as a memoir. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.
About Colored Television:
\nA brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia
Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.
\n\nBut things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.
\n\nFunny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Danzy Senna about selling out, the insatiable appetite of Hollywood, solitude in marriage, and more.","date_published":"2024-10-04T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/ee4315bd-4ccd-4e63-98c0-ca3b673534b8.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":51411224,"duration_in_seconds":3213}]},{"id":"b4c841a7-c431-4ed4-bfc3-b8a92a10b247","title":"Episode 92: Weird Era feat. Rumaan Alam","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/92","content_text":"About Rumaan Alam:\nRumaan Alam is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and adapted into a major motion picture, as well as two other novels. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.\n\nAbout Entitlement:\nA novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind\n\nBrooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?\n\nTaut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.","content_html":"About Rumaan Alam:
\nRumaan Alam is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and adapted into a major motion picture, as well as two other novels. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.
About Entitlement:
\nA novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind
Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?
\n\nTaut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.
","summary":"This week, Alex sits down with Rumaan Alam to discuss real estate, where wealth and religion overlap, whether artists can ever truly be in competition with each other, and more.","date_published":"2024-09-27T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/b4c841a7-c431-4ed4-bfc3-b8a92a10b247.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":38853686,"duration_in_seconds":2428}]},{"id":"63f3abb2-3e6b-481f-9f94-ab36e7586bf7","title":"Episode 91: Weird Era feat. Monica Datta","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/91","content_text":"About Monica Datta:\nMonica Datta received degrees in architecture and urban design from the City University of New York, the London School of Economics, and the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), as well as an MFA in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis, from which she received a Divided City/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study segregation in fiction and urban morphology in France, Morocco, and Germany. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Conjunctions, and many other journals. She teaches at Pratt Institute and the Cooper Union.\n\nAbout Thieving Sun:\nIn this searing debut novel, for readers of Katie Kitamura and Rachel Cusk, the tragic aftermath of a youthful relationship years after its end brings the life of a mourning woman in New York--and the pursuit of art--into stark relief.\n\nTold in short passages through a musical device, this international story follows Julienne and Gaspar to Syria, China, Germany and elsewhere.\n\nJulienne, a student of sculpture, and Gaspar, a young composer, fall in love at a small college and share a home for more than a decade before encountering the fundamental rift that will change their lives. The reverberations of grief force Julienne to confront her painful past including the mystery of her own birth and the fantastical story ascribed to it by her flight attendant mother, so that she can envision, for the first time, a real future.\n\nUltimately, Thieving Sun is a profound and contemporary meditation on art, grief, debt, suicide, loss, and the danger of being alive.","content_html":"About Monica Datta:
\nMonica Datta received degrees in architecture and urban design from the City University of New York, the London School of Economics, and the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), as well as an MFA in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis, from which she received a Divided City/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study segregation in fiction and urban morphology in France, Morocco, and Germany. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Conjunctions, and many other journals. She teaches at Pratt Institute and the Cooper Union.
About Thieving Sun:
\nIn this searing debut novel, for readers of Katie Kitamura and Rachel Cusk, the tragic aftermath of a youthful relationship years after its end brings the life of a mourning woman in New York--and the pursuit of art--into stark relief.
Told in short passages through a musical device, this international story follows Julienne and Gaspar to Syria, China, Germany and elsewhere.
\n\nJulienne, a student of sculpture, and Gaspar, a young composer, fall in love at a small college and share a home for more than a decade before encountering the fundamental rift that will change their lives. The reverberations of grief force Julienne to confront her painful past including the mystery of her own birth and the fantastical story ascribed to it by her flight attendant mother, so that she can envision, for the first time, a real future.
\n\nUltimately, Thieving Sun is a profound and contemporary meditation on art, grief, debt, suicide, loss, and the danger of being alive.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Monica Datta about last words, a need for closure, what Desi parents constitute as a, \"really good North American,\" and how everyone in your MFA program is seeing the same Lacanian therapist. ","date_published":"2024-09-20T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/63f3abb2-3e6b-481f-9f94-ab36e7586bf7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48937977,"duration_in_seconds":2926}]},{"id":"e3d082e6-75a8-4dcb-9a87-23ca51bebb55","title":"Episode 90: Weird Era feat. Heather O'Neill","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/90","content_text":"About Heather O'Neill:\nHeather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent novel, When We Lost Our Heads, was a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives there today.\n\nAbout The Capital of Dreams:\nFrom the hugely acclaimed author beloved by literary lights, including Emily St. John Mandel, Kelly Link, and Mona Awad, a dark dystopian fairytale about an idyllic country ravaged by war—and a girl torn between safety and loyalty. \n\nSofia Bottom lives in Elysia, a small country forgotten by Europe. But inside its borders, the old myths of trees that come alive and faeries who live among their roots have given way to an explosion of the arts and the consolations of philosophy. From the clarinetists to the cabaret singers, no artist is as revered as Sofia’s brilliant mother, the writer Clara Bottom. How can fourteen-year-old Sofia, with her tin ear and enduring love of ancient myths, ever hope to win her mother’s love?\n\nWhen the country’s greatest enemy invades, and the Capital is under threat, Clara turns to her daughter to smuggle her new manuscript to safety on the last train evacuating children from the city. But when the train draws to a suspicious halt in the middle of a forest, Sofia is forced to run for her life and loses her mother’s most prized possession. Frightened and alone in a country at war, Sofia must find a way to reclaim what she has lost. On an epic journey through woods and razed towns, colliding with soldiers, survivors, and other lost children, Sofia must make the choice between kindness and her own survival.\n\nIn this stunning novel set in an imaginative world yet reflective of our own times, Heather O’Neill delivers a vivid, breathtaking dark fairytale of life, death, and betrayal.","content_html":"About Heather O'Neill:
\nHeather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent novel, When We Lost Our Heads, was a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives there today.
About The Capital of Dreams:
\nFrom the hugely acclaimed author beloved by literary lights, including Emily St. John Mandel, Kelly Link, and Mona Awad, a dark dystopian fairytale about an idyllic country ravaged by war—and a girl torn between safety and loyalty.
Sofia Bottom lives in Elysia, a small country forgotten by Europe. But inside its borders, the old myths of trees that come alive and faeries who live among their roots have given way to an explosion of the arts and the consolations of philosophy. From the clarinetists to the cabaret singers, no artist is as revered as Sofia’s brilliant mother, the writer Clara Bottom. How can fourteen-year-old Sofia, with her tin ear and enduring love of ancient myths, ever hope to win her mother’s love?
\n\nWhen the country’s greatest enemy invades, and the Capital is under threat, Clara turns to her daughter to smuggle her new manuscript to safety on the last train evacuating children from the city. But when the train draws to a suspicious halt in the middle of a forest, Sofia is forced to run for her life and loses her mother’s most prized possession. Frightened and alone in a country at war, Sofia must find a way to reclaim what she has lost. On an epic journey through woods and razed towns, colliding with soldiers, survivors, and other lost children, Sofia must make the choice between kindness and her own survival.
\n\nIn this stunning novel set in an imaginative world yet reflective of our own times, Heather O’Neill delivers a vivid, breathtaking dark fairytale of life, death, and betrayal.
","summary":"Alex is joined by Heather O’Neill (for her sophomore episode!) to discuss her latest novel, The Capital of Dreams, how wartime affects art, leaving Montreal behind as a setting, Disney adults, and motherhood.","date_published":"2024-09-06T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/e3d082e6-75a8-4dcb-9a87-23ca51bebb55.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44637860,"duration_in_seconds":2658}]},{"id":"fde6c92b-0cff-4da0-83c5-067b1be3b5fa","title":"Episode 89: Weird Era feat. Tony Tulathimutte","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/89","content_text":"About Tony Tulathimutte:\nTony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens and Rejection. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, n +1, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. The recipient of an O. Henry Award and a Whiting Award, he runs the writing class CRIT in Brooklyn. \n\nAbout Rejection:\nFrom the Whiting and O. Henry–winning author of Private Citizens (“the first great millennial novel,” New York Magazine), an electrifying novel-in-stories that follows a cast of intricately linked characters as rejection throws their lives and relationships into chaos.\n\nSharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.\n\nIn “The Feminist,” a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics” spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.\n\nThese brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.","content_html":"About Tony Tulathimutte:
\nTony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens and Rejection. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, n +1, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. The recipient of an O. Henry Award and a Whiting Award, he runs the writing class CRIT in Brooklyn.
About Rejection:
\nFrom the Whiting and O. Henry–winning author of Private Citizens (“the first great millennial novel,” New York Magazine), an electrifying novel-in-stories that follows a cast of intricately linked characters as rejection throws their lives and relationships into chaos.
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.
\n\nIn “The Feminist,” a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics” spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.
\n\nThese brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Tony Tulathimutte about Rejection, abjection, being very online, his least favourite character in the book, and the difference between embarrassment and shame.","date_published":"2024-08-30T08:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/fde6c92b-0cff-4da0-83c5-067b1be3b5fa.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44193811,"duration_in_seconds":2615}]},{"id":"aee23343-a0b2-41b0-96e1-0452f15233cc","title":"Episode 88: Weird Era feat. Yasmin Zaher","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/88","content_text":"About Yasmin Zaher:\nYasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer born in 1991 in Jerusalem. The Coin is her first novel.\n\nAbout The Coin:\nA bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind\n\nThe Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.\n\nIn New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.\n\nBut America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.\n\nIn enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belonging—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative, wry, and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.","content_html":"About Yasmin Zaher:
\nYasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer born in 1991 in Jerusalem. The Coin is her first novel.
About The Coin:
\nA bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind
The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.
\n\nIn New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
\n\nBut America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness, and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.
\n\nIn enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilization, beauty and justice, class and belonging—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative, wry, and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.
","summary":"Sruti and Yasmin talk about how, \"Palestine is neither a country nor the third world, it was its own thing,\" high fashion, how a body manifests a feeling, sex, and so much more.","date_published":"2024-07-05T14:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/aee23343-a0b2-41b0-96e1-0452f15233cc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":45788813,"duration_in_seconds":2861}]},{"id":"b8beb2a6-965a-4478-9d50-08abaa26af82","title":"Episode 87: Weird Era feat. Domenica Martinello","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/87","content_text":"About Domenica Martinello:\n\nAbout Good Want:\n\nExploring the value and shame ascribed to our desires both silly and serious – artistic, superficial, spiritual, relational – these poems grapple with deeply rooted questions: How can there be a relationship between goodness and godliness, if god is a character with shifting allegiances and priorities? Is clarity worth the pain of redefining your experience of the world? Is privacy the same as secrecy the same as deceit? Each caveat becomes a prayer, ritual, invocation, dream, or confession, requiring a blind faith that feels increasingly more impossible to sustain. \n\nGood Want looks inward, at once both sincere and tongue-in-cheek, to confront the hum of class and intergenerational trauma. Playing with and deconstructing received notions of ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ and ‘god,’ these poems open up a series of further possibilities: empathy for difficult people, acceptance of our difficult selves, and joy in every difficult thing.\n\n\"These are lush, provocative poems that luxuriate in unexpected detail while examining how economic precarity shapes both shame and desire. Firmly rooted in the working class, Martinello explores the hunger we inherit from our ancestors, what it means to indulge from a position of bottomless want, and to 'Waste not your wanting.' With impressive range, a sense of humor, and entrancing musicality, Good Want is a celebration of the gluttony of girlhood, the paradoxes of faith, and everyday pleasures of a “small, specific life.” – Cassidy McFadzean, author of Crying Dress\n\n\"Good Want is a baroque painting of Dutch aristocracy, but all the subjects’ garments are secretly from Walmart. I mean this in the best way. Each poem cracks me open and out shines a never-before-seen shade of light.\" – Shy Watson, author of Cheap Yellow\n\n\"Sometimes the confessor reckons with the confessional. In Good Want, it's a wracking and lucky sometimes, full of piss and vinegar, and one that finds Domenica Martinello performing the wonderment, the depth and push and pull, between what there is to reveal and what each revelation ruptures or binds. Happily, sadly, the poet scours a life lived and unearths inheritances, burdens, and selves destined for and not for the telling. And tells them brilliantly as she pleases.\" – D.M. Bradford, author of Bottom Rail on Top","content_html":"About Domenica Martinello:
\n\nAbout Good Want:
\n\nExploring the value and shame ascribed to our desires both silly and serious – artistic, superficial, spiritual, relational – these poems grapple with deeply rooted questions: How can there be a relationship between goodness and godliness, if god is a character with shifting allegiances and priorities? Is clarity worth the pain of redefining your experience of the world? Is privacy the same as secrecy the same as deceit? Each caveat becomes a prayer, ritual, invocation, dream, or confession, requiring a blind faith that feels increasingly more impossible to sustain.
\n\nGood Want looks inward, at once both sincere and tongue-in-cheek, to confront the hum of class and intergenerational trauma. Playing with and deconstructing received notions of ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ and ‘god,’ these poems open up a series of further possibilities: empathy for difficult people, acceptance of our difficult selves, and joy in every difficult thing.
\n\n"These are lush, provocative poems that luxuriate in unexpected detail while examining how economic precarity shapes both shame and desire. Firmly rooted in the working class, Martinello explores the hunger we inherit from our ancestors, what it means to indulge from a position of bottomless want, and to 'Waste not your wanting.' With impressive range, a sense of humor, and entrancing musicality, Good Want is a celebration of the gluttony of girlhood, the paradoxes of faith, and everyday pleasures of a “small, specific life.” – Cassidy McFadzean, author of Crying Dress
\n\n"Good Want is a baroque painting of Dutch aristocracy, but all the subjects’ garments are secretly from Walmart. I mean this in the best way. Each poem cracks me open and out shines a never-before-seen shade of light." – Shy Watson, author of Cheap Yellow
\n\n"Sometimes the confessor reckons with the confessional. In Good Want, it's a wracking and lucky sometimes, full of piss and vinegar, and one that finds Domenica Martinello performing the wonderment, the depth and push and pull, between what there is to reveal and what each revelation ruptures or binds. Happily, sadly, the poet scours a life lived and unearths inheritances, burdens, and selves destined for and not for the telling. And tells them brilliantly as she pleases." – D.M. Bradford, author of Bottom Rail on Top
","summary":"Domenica Martinello holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Deena Davidson Friedman Prize for Poetry. She currently lives in Montreal.","date_published":"2024-05-24T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/b8beb2a6-965a-4478-9d50-08abaa26af82.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49401284,"duration_in_seconds":3087}]},{"id":"22047d6d-b72c-4383-97aa-b8c8032d0627","title":"Episode 86: Weird Era feat. Walter Scott","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/86","content_text":"About Walter Scott:\n\nWalter Scott is an interdisciplinary artist working in comics, drawing, video, performance, and sculpture. His graphic novel series Wendy chronicles the continuing misadventures of a young artist in a satirical imagining of the contemporary art world. Scott's eponymous party girl has previously been featured in three graphic novels Wendy; Wendy's Revenge and Wendy: Master of Art as well as in Canadian Art; Art in America; The New Yorker; The New York Times and MoMA Magazine. Scott has been nominated or longlisted for the Ignatz Awards, Canada Reads, the Believer Book Award, and the Doug Wright Award, and finally, the Sobey Art Award—considered to be the preeminent fine art award in Canada.\n\nAbout The Wendy Award:\n\nEverybody’s favorite party girl Wendy is so back\n\nWhen Wendy is nominated for the coveted National FoodHut Contemporary Art Prize alongside her friend Winona, all of her millennial dreams seem to be coming true. She lives a post-pandemic, polyamorous fine artist’s lifestyle in the big city and basks in the glory of national attention with the success of her popular comic strip, “Wanda.\"\n\nBut not even achieving bona fide art star fame can hide the truth: a never-ending struggle with imposter syndrome. After she cracks in an online interview and gets dragged in the comments section, she heads straight to a local watering hole to drown her sorrows. Several lines of coke, too many drinks, and one all night rager with fans later, Wendy is ready to curse Gen Z and confront her addictions. All the while, she and Winona drift apart as a younger Indigenous artist wedges herself between them. Will Wendy’s commitment to change wind up short-lived?\n\nThe Wendy Award incisively skewers the art world with its corporate overlords, performative activism, generational wealth, and weaponized therapy speak. A showcase of Walter Scott’s deft wit and social commentary, The Wendy Award asks the hard questions, like Do they still give awards to men? Should we be grateful for the exposure? And what exactly is Big Auntie Energy?","content_html":"About Walter Scott:
\n\nWalter Scott is an interdisciplinary artist working in comics, drawing, video, performance, and sculpture. His graphic novel series Wendy chronicles the continuing misadventures of a young artist in a satirical imagining of the contemporary art world. Scott's eponymous party girl has previously been featured in three graphic novels Wendy; Wendy's Revenge and Wendy: Master of Art as well as in Canadian Art; Art in America; The New Yorker; The New York Times and MoMA Magazine. Scott has been nominated or longlisted for the Ignatz Awards, Canada Reads, the Believer Book Award, and the Doug Wright Award, and finally, the Sobey Art Award—considered to be the preeminent fine art award in Canada.
\n\nAbout The Wendy Award:
\n\nEverybody’s favorite party girl Wendy is so back
\n\nWhen Wendy is nominated for the coveted National FoodHut Contemporary Art Prize alongside her friend Winona, all of her millennial dreams seem to be coming true. She lives a post-pandemic, polyamorous fine artist’s lifestyle in the big city and basks in the glory of national attention with the success of her popular comic strip, “Wanda."
\n\nBut not even achieving bona fide art star fame can hide the truth: a never-ending struggle with imposter syndrome. After she cracks in an online interview and gets dragged in the comments section, she heads straight to a local watering hole to drown her sorrows. Several lines of coke, too many drinks, and one all night rager with fans later, Wendy is ready to curse Gen Z and confront her addictions. All the while, she and Winona drift apart as a younger Indigenous artist wedges herself between them. Will Wendy’s commitment to change wind up short-lived?
\n\nThe Wendy Award incisively skewers the art world with its corporate overlords, performative activism, generational wealth, and weaponized therapy speak. A showcase of Walter Scott’s deft wit and social commentary, The Wendy Award asks the hard questions, like Do they still give awards to men? Should we be grateful for the exposure? And what exactly is Big Auntie Energy?
","summary":"Sruti talks to Walter Scott and discusses Big Auntie Energy, weaponized therapy speak, and why, \"this world is blessed with the privilege to misunderstand you.\" ","date_published":"2024-05-17T10:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/22047d6d-b72c-4383-97aa-b8c8032d0627.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":37728620,"duration_in_seconds":2358}]},{"id":"3324b251-a1f5-4834-97f3-2a8610aaa083","title":"Episode 85: Werd Era feat. Billy-Ray Belcourt","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/85","content_text":"About Billy-Ray Belcourt:\nBILLY-RAY BELCOURT (he/him) is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His debut novel, A Minor Chorus, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. His bestselling memoir, A History of My Brief Body, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.\n\nAbout Coexistence:\n\nA collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from one of contemporary literature’s most boundless minds.\n\nAcross the prairies and Canada’s west coast, on reserves and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They’re learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment.\n\nAn aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school—a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal.\n\nBearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt’s mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers.","content_html":"About Billy-Ray Belcourt:
\nBILLY-RAY BELCOURT (he/him) is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His debut novel, A Minor Chorus, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. His bestselling memoir, A History of My Brief Body, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.
About Coexistence:
\n\nA collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from one of contemporary literature’s most boundless minds.
\n\nAcross the prairies and Canada’s west coast, on reserves and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They’re learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment.
\n\nAn aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school—a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal.
\n\nBearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt’s mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers.
","summary":"This week, Alex is joined by Billy Ray Belcourt to discuss his short story collection, Coexistence, familial histories, writing love and sex, the self-helpification of literature, and what it means to be at the height of one’s powers. ","date_published":"2024-05-10T10:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/3324b251-a1f5-4834-97f3-2a8610aaa083.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":37259495,"duration_in_seconds":2328}]},{"id":"12d7cd20-3b4d-4082-9297-006b1a95df43","title":"Episode 84: Weird Era feat. Myriam Lacroix","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/84","content_text":"This week, Alex talks to Myriam Lacroix about her novel, How It Works Out, queer fiction, the Canadian literary landscape, love as hunger, and parallel worlds.\n\nAbout Myriam Lacroix:\n\nMYRIAM LACROIX was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.\n\nAbout How it Works Out:\n\n“What an audacious, breathtaking, and inspiring debut. The power of this formally innovative and deeply funny book is that everything exists to serve the compassionate heart at its core. Myriam Lacroix’s work is a cause for celebration.” —GEORGE SAUNDERS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Liberation Day\n\nSurreal, darkly comic and achingly tender, Myriam Lacroix's exuberant debut sees a queer love story play out in many alternate realities.\n\nWhat if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out?\n\nWhen Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker—or sexier—would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils.\n\nEqual parts sexy and profane, unsentimental, and gut-wrenching, How It Works Out is a genre-bending, arresting, uncanny exploration of queerness, love, and our drive for connection, in any and all possible worlds.","content_html":"This week, Alex talks to Myriam Lacroix about her novel, How It Works Out, queer fiction, the Canadian literary landscape, love as hunger, and parallel worlds.
\n\nAbout Myriam Lacroix:
\n\nMYRIAM LACROIX was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.
\n\nAbout How it Works Out:
\n\n“What an audacious, breathtaking, and inspiring debut. The power of this formally innovative and deeply funny book is that everything exists to serve the compassionate heart at its core. Myriam Lacroix’s work is a cause for celebration.” —GEORGE SAUNDERS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Liberation Day
\n\nSurreal, darkly comic and achingly tender, Myriam Lacroix's exuberant debut sees a queer love story play out in many alternate realities.
\n\nWhat if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out?
\n\nWhen Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker—or sexier—would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils.
\n\nEqual parts sexy and profane, unsentimental, and gut-wrenching, How It Works Out is a genre-bending, arresting, uncanny exploration of queerness, love, and our drive for connection, in any and all possible worlds.
","summary":"This week, Alex talks to Myriam Lacroix about her novel, How It Works Out, queer fiction, the Canadian literary landscape, love as hunger, and parallel worlds.","date_published":"2024-04-26T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/12d7cd20-3b4d-4082-9297-006b1a95df43.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":33350954,"duration_in_seconds":2084}]},{"id":"5605eea4-bff8-49c2-85df-5e862e08d744","title":"Episode 83: Weird Era feat. Lauren Oyler","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/83","content_text":"About Lauren Oyler:\n\nLauren Oyler's essays on books and culture appear regularly in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, Harper's, and other publications. Her debut novel, Fake Accounts, was published in 2021. She lives in Berlin. \n\nAbout No Judgement:\n\nFrom the national bestselling novelist and essayist, a groundbreaking collection of brand-new pieces about the role of cultural criticism in our ever-changing world.\n\nIn her writing for Harper’s, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Lauren Oyler has emerged as one of the most trenchant and influential critics of her generation, a talent whose judgments on works of literature—whether celebratory or scarily harsh—have become notorious. But what is the significance of being a critic and consumer of media in today’s fraught environment? How do we understand ourselves, and each other, as space between the individual and the world seems to get smaller and smaller, and our opinions on books and movies seem to represent something essential about our souls? And to put it bluntly, why should you care what she—or anyone—thinks?\n\nIn this, her first collection of essays, Oyler writes with about topics like the role of gossip in our exponentially communicative society, the rise and proliferation of autofiction, why we’re all so “vulnerable” these days, and her own anxiety. In her singular prose—sharp yet addictive, expansive yet personal—she encapsulates the world we live and think in with precision and care, delivering a work of cultural criticism as only she can.\n\nBringing to mind the works of such iconic writers as Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, and Terry Castle, No Judgment is a testament to Lauren Oyler’s inimitable wit and her quest to understand how we shape the world through culture. It is a sparkling nonfiction debut from one of today’s most inventive thinkers.","content_html":"About Lauren Oyler:
\n\nLauren Oyler's essays on books and culture appear regularly in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, Harper's, and other publications. Her debut novel, Fake Accounts, was published in 2021. She lives in Berlin.
\n\nAbout No Judgement:
\n\nFrom the national bestselling novelist and essayist, a groundbreaking collection of brand-new pieces about the role of cultural criticism in our ever-changing world.
\n\nIn her writing for Harper’s, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Lauren Oyler has emerged as one of the most trenchant and influential critics of her generation, a talent whose judgments on works of literature—whether celebratory or scarily harsh—have become notorious. But what is the significance of being a critic and consumer of media in today’s fraught environment? How do we understand ourselves, and each other, as space between the individual and the world seems to get smaller and smaller, and our opinions on books and movies seem to represent something essential about our souls? And to put it bluntly, why should you care what she—or anyone—thinks?
\n\nIn this, her first collection of essays, Oyler writes with about topics like the role of gossip in our exponentially communicative society, the rise and proliferation of autofiction, why we’re all so “vulnerable” these days, and her own anxiety. In her singular prose—sharp yet addictive, expansive yet personal—she encapsulates the world we live and think in with precision and care, delivering a work of cultural criticism as only she can.
\n\nBringing to mind the works of such iconic writers as Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, and Terry Castle, No Judgment is a testament to Lauren Oyler’s inimitable wit and her quest to understand how we shape the world through culture. It is a sparkling nonfiction debut from one of today’s most inventive thinkers.
","summary":"Lauren Oyler returns to the pod! She talks to Sruti about drugs, caring what your friends think, why affairs are still exciting, and so much more in this sprawling episode. Tune in now.","date_published":"2024-04-19T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/5605eea4-bff8-49c2-85df-5e862e08d744.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":65844570,"duration_in_seconds":4115}]},{"id":"0fa3050a-a5ad-4cc4-8b1f-f3995c0a9fc2","title":"Episode 82: Weird Era feat. Cameron Russell","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/82","content_text":"About Cameron Russell:\n\nCameron Russell has spent the last twenty years working as a model for clients including Prada, Calvin Klein, Victoria’s Secret, H&M, Vogue, and Elle. With over forty million views, her TED talk on the power of image is one of the most popular of all time. She is the co-founder of Model Mafia, a collective of hundreds of fashion models striving for a more equitable, just, and sustainable industry. She continues to organize, consult, and speak to transform extractive supply chains and center climate justice. She lives in New York with her family.\n\nAbout How To Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone:\n\nScouted by a modeling agent when she was just sixteen years old, Cameron Russell first approached her job with some reservations: She was a serious student with her sights set on college, not the runway. But modeling was a job that seemed to offer young women like herself unprecedented access to wealth, fame, and influence. Besides, as she was often reminded, “there are a million girls in line” who would eagerly replace her. \n\nIn her fierce and innovative memoir, Russell chronicles how she learned to navigate the dizzying space between physical appearance and interiority and making money in an often-exploitative system. Being “agreeable,” she found, led to more success: more bookings and more opportunities to work with the world’s top photographers and biggest brands.\n\nBut as her prominence grew, Russell found that achievement under these conditions was deeply isolating and ultimately unsatisfying. Instead of freedom, she was often required to perform the role of compliant femme fatale, so she began organizing with her peers, helping to coordinate movements for labor rights, climate and racial justice, and bringing MeToo to the fashion industry. \n\nIntimate and illuminating, How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone is a nuanced, deeply felt memoir about beauty, complicity, and the fight for a better world.","content_html":"About Cameron Russell:
\n\nCameron Russell has spent the last twenty years working as a model for clients including Prada, Calvin Klein, Victoria’s Secret, H&M, Vogue, and Elle. With over forty million views, her TED talk on the power of image is one of the most popular of all time. She is the co-founder of Model Mafia, a collective of hundreds of fashion models striving for a more equitable, just, and sustainable industry. She continues to organize, consult, and speak to transform extractive supply chains and center climate justice. She lives in New York with her family.
\n\nAbout How To Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone:
\n\nScouted by a modeling agent when she was just sixteen years old, Cameron Russell first approached her job with some reservations: She was a serious student with her sights set on college, not the runway. But modeling was a job that seemed to offer young women like herself unprecedented access to wealth, fame, and influence. Besides, as she was often reminded, “there are a million girls in line” who would eagerly replace her.
\n\nIn her fierce and innovative memoir, Russell chronicles how she learned to navigate the dizzying space between physical appearance and interiority and making money in an often-exploitative system. Being “agreeable,” she found, led to more success: more bookings and more opportunities to work with the world’s top photographers and biggest brands.
\n\nBut as her prominence grew, Russell found that achievement under these conditions was deeply isolating and ultimately unsatisfying. Instead of freedom, she was often required to perform the role of compliant femme fatale, so she began organizing with her peers, helping to coordinate movements for labor rights, climate and racial justice, and bringing MeToo to the fashion industry.
\n\nIntimate and illuminating, How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone is a nuanced, deeply felt memoir about beauty, complicity, and the fight for a better world.
","summary":"This week, Alex talks with renowned supermodel Cameron Russell about her book, How To Make Herself Agreeable To Everyone, dismantling capitalism, eclipses, New York VS Montreal, and so much more.","date_published":"2024-04-12T10:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/0fa3050a-a5ad-4cc4-8b1f-f3995c0a9fc2.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":37272135,"duration_in_seconds":2329}]},{"id":"ea5b6e04-c688-4aab-9c27-52cbec930f70","title":"Episode 81: Weird Era feat. Alexander Sammartino","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/81","content_text":"About Alexander Sammartino:\n\nAlexander Sammartino lives in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Syracuse University. Last Acts is his first novel.\n\nAbout Last Acts:\n\nFollowing a near-death experience, an entrepreneurial father-and-son duo wreak havoc and fend off bankruptcy in this unflinching portrayal of the absurdities of American life.\n\n“Hilarious, exceptional.” —Dan Chaon, The New York Times Book Review • “Honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards.” —George Saunders\n\nEven though his firearms store is failing, things are looking up for David Rizzo. His son, Nick, has just recovered after a near-fatal overdose, which means one thing: Rizzo can use Nick’s resurrection to create the most compelling television commercial for a gun emporium that the world has ever seen. After all, this is America, Rizzo tells himself. Surely anything is possible. But the relationship between father and son is fragile, mired in mutual disappointment. And when the pair embarks on their scheme to avoid bankruptcy, a high stakes crash of hijinks, hope, and disaster ensues.\n\nFeaturing a cast of unforgettable characters, this razor-sharp social satire lays bare both the gun and opioid crises. Fans of Don DeLillo and Stephen Markley will be thrilled by this smart, inventive debut.","content_html":"About Alexander Sammartino:
\n\nAlexander Sammartino lives in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Syracuse University. Last Acts is his first novel.
\n\nAbout Last Acts:
\n\nFollowing a near-death experience, an entrepreneurial father-and-son duo wreak havoc and fend off bankruptcy in this unflinching portrayal of the absurdities of American life.
\n\n“Hilarious, exceptional.” —Dan Chaon, The New York Times Book Review • “Honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards.” —George Saunders
\n\nEven though his firearms store is failing, things are looking up for David Rizzo. His son, Nick, has just recovered after a near-fatal overdose, which means one thing: Rizzo can use Nick’s resurrection to create the most compelling television commercial for a gun emporium that the world has ever seen. After all, this is America, Rizzo tells himself. Surely anything is possible. But the relationship between father and son is fragile, mired in mutual disappointment. And when the pair embarks on their scheme to avoid bankruptcy, a high stakes crash of hijinks, hope, and disaster ensues.
\n\nFeaturing a cast of unforgettable characters, this razor-sharp social satire lays bare both the gun and opioid crises. Fans of Don DeLillo and Stephen Markley will be thrilled by this smart, inventive debut.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Alex about his debut novel Last Acts, if there is such a thing as a, \"last act\" in our lives, the American dream, commercialism, gun control and the opioid crisis, and somehow, it turns into one of the most uplifting conversations Sruti has had the privilege of sitting through, yet. ","date_published":"2024-04-05T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/ea5b6e04-c688-4aab-9c27-52cbec930f70.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":48024485,"duration_in_seconds":3001}]},{"id":"eea4cde1-95fb-4774-9f4f-edeac72544d1","title":"Episode 80: Weird Era feat. Brontez Purnell","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/80","content_text":"About Brontez Purnell:\n\nBrontez Purnell is the author of several books, most recently 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, was longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Book Review. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers and a renowned dancer, performance artist, and zine-maker. Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for two decades.\n\nAbout Ten Bridges I've Burnt:\n\nIn Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”\n\nThe thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.\n\nWith the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.","content_html":"About Brontez Purnell:
\n\nBrontez Purnell is the author of several books, most recently 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, was longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Book Review. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers and a renowned dancer, performance artist, and zine-maker. Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for two decades.
\n\nAbout Ten Bridges I've Burnt:
\n\nIn Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”
\n\nThe thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.
\n\nWith the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.
","summary":"This week, Alex talks with returning Weird Era guest Brontez Purnell about his memoir in verse, Ten Bridges I've Burnt, twink death, Cowboy Carter, OnlyFans, how Black dialect has always been THE North American dialect, and so much more.","date_published":"2024-03-29T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/eea4cde1-95fb-4774-9f4f-edeac72544d1.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":39719508,"duration_in_seconds":2482}]},{"id":"e5e2777a-de4f-4008-b3cb-fb99e604ab33","title":"Episode 79: Weird Era feat. Eliza Barry Callahan","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/79","content_text":"About Eliza Barry Callahan:\n\nEliza Barry Callahan is a writer and artist from New York, New York. Shortly after receiving her BA from Columbia, where she studied visual art, art history, and poetry, she returned to the university where she received her MFA in writing (2022). Her writing has been published in frieze, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB. She also writes, performs, and releases music via Los Angeles-based label, ANTI- Records with a record forthcoming in 2023.\n\nAbout The Hearing Test:\n\nA young woman reorients her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness in this mesmerizing debut novel for readers of Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and Fleur Jaeggy\n\nWhen the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned—while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.\n\nThrough a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters—with neighbors, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers—making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival. \n\nAt once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.","content_html":"About Eliza Barry Callahan:
\n\nEliza Barry Callahan is a writer and artist from New York, New York. Shortly after receiving her BA from Columbia, where she studied visual art, art history, and poetry, she returned to the university where she received her MFA in writing (2022). Her writing has been published in frieze, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB. She also writes, performs, and releases music via Los Angeles-based label, ANTI- Records with a record forthcoming in 2023.
\n\nAbout The Hearing Test:
\n\nA young woman reorients her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness in this mesmerizing debut novel for readers of Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and Fleur Jaeggy
\n\nWhen the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned—while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.
\n\nThrough a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters—with neighbors, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers—making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival.
\n\nAt once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.
","summary":"Alex talks with Eliza Barry Callahan about her literary novel, The Hearing Test, writing autofiction, the language of \"internet novels\", and what dictates composure in the face of adversity.","date_published":"2024-03-15T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/e5e2777a-de4f-4008-b3cb-fb99e604ab33.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":45757256,"duration_in_seconds":2859}]},{"id":"dc64fd6a-7ce5-4edf-9f30-6699e059eca9","title":"Episode 78: Weird Era feat. Mariah Stovall","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/78","content_text":"About Mariah Stovall:\n\nMariah Stovall has written fiction for the anthology Black Punk Now, and for Ninth Letter, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Hobart, the Minola Review, and Joyland; and nonfiction for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Full Stop, Hanif Abdurraqib’s 68to05, The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, and LitHub. I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is her first novel and 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is her favorite Jawbreaker album. She lives in New Jersey.\n\nAbout I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both:\n\nSet in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who’s perennially trying to disappear into something: a codependent friendship, an ill-advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply, the ether. These days it’s a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment. Then, after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best friend. Fiona’s throwing a party for her newly adopted daughter and wants Khaki to join the celebration.\n\nKhaki is equal parts terrified and tempted to reconnect. Their platonic love was confusing, all-consuming, and encouraged their worst impulses. While stalling her RSVP, Khaki starts crafting the perfect mixtape—revisiting memories of formative shows, failed romances, and the ups and downs of desire and denial—while weighing the risks and rewards of saying yes to Fiona again.\n\nOne song at a time, from 1980s hardcore to 2010s emo, the shared and separate contours of each woman’s mind come into focus. Will listening to the same old songs on repeat doom Khaki to a lonely life of arrested development? Or will hindsight help her regain her sense of self and pave a healthy path for the future, with or without Fiona?","content_html":"About Mariah Stovall:
\n\nMariah Stovall has written fiction for the anthology Black Punk Now, and for Ninth Letter, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Hobart, the Minola Review, and Joyland; and nonfiction for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Full Stop, Hanif Abdurraqib’s 68to05, The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, and LitHub. I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is her first novel and 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is her favorite Jawbreaker album. She lives in New Jersey.
\n\nAbout I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both:
\n\nSet in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who’s perennially trying to disappear into something: a codependent friendship, an ill-advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply, the ether. These days it’s a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment. Then, after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best friend. Fiona’s throwing a party for her newly adopted daughter and wants Khaki to join the celebration.
\n\nKhaki is equal parts terrified and tempted to reconnect. Their platonic love was confusing, all-consuming, and encouraged their worst impulses. While stalling her RSVP, Khaki starts crafting the perfect mixtape—revisiting memories of formative shows, failed romances, and the ups and downs of desire and denial—while weighing the risks and rewards of saying yes to Fiona again.
\n\nOne song at a time, from 1980s hardcore to 2010s emo, the shared and separate contours of each woman’s mind come into focus. Will listening to the same old songs on repeat doom Khaki to a lonely life of arrested development? Or will hindsight help her regain her sense of self and pave a healthy path for the future, with or without Fiona?
","summary":"Sruti talks to Mariah Stovall about her favourite Jawbreaker album, how music wants you, and how some of us can get love so wrong, even when intended with purity.","date_published":"2024-03-07T09:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/dc64fd6a-7ce5-4edf-9f30-6699e059eca9.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":59380003,"duration_in_seconds":3579}]},{"id":"739b74d5-9834-49b8-92d9-83163b9f3f98","title":"Episode 77: Weird Era feat. Alexandra Tanner","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/77","content_text":"About Alexandra Tanner:\n\nAlexandra Tanner is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She is a graduate of the MFA program at The New School and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and The Center for Fiction. Her writing appears in The New York Times Book Review, Gawker, and Jewish Currents, among other outlets. Worry is her first novel.\n\nAbout Worry:\n\nNamed a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Nylon, The Millions, and Debutiful!\n\nFrances Ha meets No One Is Talking About This in a debut that follows two siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood.\n\nIt’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.\n\nThen the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls’ mother, a newly devout Messianic Jew, starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. Jules, halfheartedly struggling to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly comes to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. And Amy Klobuchar might have rabies. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, a disastrous trip home to Florida forces Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, constant fixtures in each other’s lives—to ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.\n\nDeadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.","content_html":"About Alexandra Tanner:
\n\nAlexandra Tanner is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She is a graduate of the MFA program at The New School and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and The Center for Fiction. Her writing appears in The New York Times Book Review, Gawker, and Jewish Currents, among other outlets. Worry is her first novel.
\n\nAbout Worry:
\n\nNamed a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Nylon, The Millions, and Debutiful!
\n\nFrances Ha meets No One Is Talking About This in a debut that follows two siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood.
\n\nIt’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.
\n\nThen the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls’ mother, a newly devout Messianic Jew, starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. Jules, halfheartedly struggling to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly comes to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. And Amy Klobuchar might have rabies. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, a disastrous trip home to Florida forces Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, constant fixtures in each other’s lives—to ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.
\n\nDeadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.
","summary":"Sruti and Alexandra talk about her debut novel Worry, all about sisters (rivals? best friends? BOTH), what if we only communicated intended love, what a non-job is and how it's uniquely millennial, and much more.","date_published":"2024-03-01T09:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/739b74d5-9834-49b8-92d9-83163b9f3f98.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":43213969,"duration_in_seconds":2700}]},{"id":"888daefc-891f-4620-beaf-019a2ac0855e","title":"Episode 76: Weird Era feat. Sarah Mintz","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/76","content_text":"About Sarah Mintz:\n\nSarah Mintz is a graduate of the English MA program at the University of Regina. Her work has been published with Book*Hug Press, JackPine Press, Radiant Press, Apocalypse Confidential, The Sea & Cedar Literary Magazine, and Agnes and True . Find out more at https://smintz.carrd.co/.\n\nAbout Norma:\n\nWidowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.\n\nIt’s a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.\n\nNorma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she’s free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It’s all of humanity—grim, funny, and desperate—wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.\n\nNORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.","content_html":"About Sarah Mintz:
\n\nSarah Mintz is a graduate of the English MA program at the University of Regina. Her work has been published with Book*Hug Press, JackPine Press, Radiant Press, Apocalypse Confidential, The Sea & Cedar Literary Magazine, and Agnes and True . Find out more at https://smintz.carrd.co/.
\n\nAbout Norma:
\n\nWidowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.
\n\nIt’s a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.
\n\nNorma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she’s free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It’s all of humanity—grim, funny, and desperate—wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.
\n\nNORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Sarah Mintz about, \"terrible freedoms,\" if we can old without getting wiser, the definition of parasocial, and why watching someone watch tv is so embarrassing.","date_published":"2024-02-23T09:15:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/888daefc-891f-4620-beaf-019a2ac0855e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49625559,"duration_in_seconds":2969}]},{"id":"dc207418-b0cd-48e8-b38b-3ad41b65a122","title":"Episode 75: Weird Era feat. Rebecca May Johnson","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/75","content_text":"About Rebecca May Johnson:\n\nRebecca May Johnson has published essays, reviews and nonfiction with Granta, Times Literary Supplement and Daunt Books Publishing, among others, and is an editor at the trailblazing food publication Vittles. Small Fires is her first book.\n\nAbout Small Fires:\n\nWhy do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on?\n\nIn Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking -- that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books -- as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control.\n\nSmall Fires shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere.\n\nThe paperback edition includes a new afterword and recipes for Ten-Minute Tomatoes and Cream Pasta, Meatballs with Tomato and Tarragon Cream Sauce, plus other ideas for tomato and cream combinations and platings inspired by a visit to the archive of groundbreaking English food writer Elizabeth David.","content_html":"About Rebecca May Johnson:
\n\nRebecca May Johnson has published essays, reviews and nonfiction with Granta, Times Literary Supplement and Daunt Books Publishing, among others, and is an editor at the trailblazing food publication Vittles. Small Fires is her first book.
\n\nAbout Small Fires:
\n\nWhy do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on?
\n\nIn Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking -- that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books -- as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control.
\n\nSmall Fires shows us the radical potential of the thing we do every day: the power of small fires burning everywhere.
\n\nThe paperback edition includes a new afterword and recipes for Ten-Minute Tomatoes and Cream Pasta, Meatballs with Tomato and Tarragon Cream Sauce, plus other ideas for tomato and cream combinations and platings inspired by a visit to the archive of groundbreaking English food writer Elizabeth David.
","summary":"Sruti and Rebecca discuss how sit down meals serve as the root of discourse, how cooking is gendered, how pleasure and a delight in living is revolutionary, and much more.","date_published":"2024-02-16T09:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/dc207418-b0cd-48e8-b38b-3ad41b65a122.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":49783807,"duration_in_seconds":3111}]},{"id":"59709a1d-27f3-48ef-bd6a-43a7b870538d","title":"Episode 74: Weird Era feat. Katya Apekina","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/74","content_text":"About Katya Apekin:\n\nKatya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter, and translator. Her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Lithub, and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German, and Italian. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize, and a Third Year Fiction Fellowship from Washignton University in St. Louis, where she did her MFA. She has done residences at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing, and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she moved to the US when she was three years old and currently lives in Los Angeles. Mother Doll is her second nove\n\nAbout Mother Doll:\n\nZhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast. She’s deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia’s great-grandmother Irina, a Russian Revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia.\n\nAs Irina begins her confession with the help of a purgatorial chorus of grieving Russian ghosts, Zhenia awakens to aspects of herself she hadn’t been willing to confront. But does either woman have what the other needs to understand their predicament? Or will Irina be stuck in limbo, with Zhenia plagued by ancestral trauma, and her children after her?\n\nFerociously funny and deeply moving, Mother Doll forces us to look at how painful secrets stamp themselves from one generation to the next. Katya Apekina’s second novel is a family epic and a meditation on motherhood, immigration, identity, and war.","content_html":"About Katya Apekin:
\n\nKatya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter, and translator. Her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Lithub, and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German, and Italian. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize, and a Third Year Fiction Fellowship from Washignton University in St. Louis, where she did her MFA. She has done residences at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing, and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she moved to the US when she was three years old and currently lives in Los Angeles. Mother Doll is her second nove
\n\nAbout Mother Doll:
\n\nZhenia is adrift in Los Angeles, pregnant with a baby her husband doesn’t want, while her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world is dying on the opposite coast. She’s deeply disconnected from herself and her desires when she gets a strange call from Paul, a psychic medium who usually specializes in channeling dead pets, with a message from the other side. Zhenia’s great-grandmother Irina, a Russian Revolutionary, has approached him from a cloud of ancestral grief, desperate to tell her story and receive absolution from Zhenia.
\n\nAs Irina begins her confession with the help of a purgatorial chorus of grieving Russian ghosts, Zhenia awakens to aspects of herself she hadn’t been willing to confront. But does either woman have what the other needs to understand their predicament? Or will Irina be stuck in limbo, with Zhenia plagued by ancestral trauma, and her children after her?
\n\nFerociously funny and deeply moving, Mother Doll forces us to look at how painful secrets stamp themselves from one generation to the next. Katya Apekina’s second novel is a family epic and a meditation on motherhood, immigration, identity, and war.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Katya Apekina about mean ethnic humour, if exclusively, \"wanting\" is the definition of purity, living as different versions of yourself in one lifetime, and the underrated joys of motherhood.","date_published":"2024-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/59709a1d-27f3-48ef-bd6a-43a7b870538d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":47231750,"duration_in_seconds":2788}]},{"id":"0fbae48c-0e94-481e-995f-3f4f2fe4914e","title":"Episode 73: Weird Era feat. Marie-Helene Bertino","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/73","content_text":"About Marie-Helene Bertino:\n\nMarie-Helene Bertino is the author of Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing at New York University and Yale University and lives in Brooklyn.\n\nAbout Beautyland:\n\nFrom the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.\n\nAt the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.\n\nFor years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?\n\nMarie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.","content_html":"About Marie-Helene Bertino:
\n\nMarie-Helene Bertino is the author of Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing at New York University and Yale University and lives in Brooklyn.
\n\nAbout Beautyland:
\n\nFrom the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.
\n\nAt the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.
\n\nFor years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?
\n\nMarie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.
","summary":"Alex returns for season six of the pod with Marie-Helene Bertino in an episode about her novel Beautyland, where Alex asks big questions about the meaning of life, Marie recites an Edna St-Vincent Millay poem on the spot from memory, and both laugh about crying at the end of books. ","date_published":"2024-02-02T07:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/0fbae48c-0e94-481e-995f-3f4f2fe4914e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42043871,"duration_in_seconds":2627}]},{"id":"a5a3fee1-50fd-4221-9ee1-c61ba79b8e2d","title":"Episode 72: Weird Era feat. Lexi Freiman","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/72","content_text":"About Lexi Freiman:\n\nLEXI FREIMAN is an Australian writer and editor who graduated from Columbia's MFA program in 2012. Her first novel, Inappropriation, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. She also writes for television.\n\nAbout The Book of Ayn:\n\nAn original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death\n\nAfter writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand’s theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse. \n\nThings look better in Hollywood—until the money starts running out, and with it Anna’s faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother’s house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna’s odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom – communal love, communal toilets – and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself. \n\n\"A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times\" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world.","content_html":"About Lexi Freiman:
\n\nLEXI FREIMAN is an Australian writer and editor who graduated from Columbia's MFA program in 2012. Her first novel, Inappropriation, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. She also writes for television.
\n\nAbout The Book of Ayn:
\n\nAn original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death
\n\nAfter writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand’s theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse.
\n\nThings look better in Hollywood—until the money starts running out, and with it Anna’s faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother’s house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna’s odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom – communal love, communal toilets – and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself.
\n\n"A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world.
","summary":"Tune in to our episode and hear us consider why more people should be embarrassed to be the same, what an unflushed turd is in contemporary social discourse, and why Rand was an intellectual top and a sexual bottom.","date_published":"2023-10-27T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/a5a3fee1-50fd-4221-9ee1-c61ba79b8e2d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":52299144,"duration_in_seconds":3268}]},{"id":"539b0c93-78be-4f3a-abfc-9e61fe63fa7e","title":"Episode 71: Weird Era feat. Anna Biller","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/71","content_text":"About Anna Biller:\n\nAnna Biller is a filmmaker and a writer known for her feminist point of view, and for her meticulously crafted visual design. The New York Times called her cult film The Love Witch “a hothouse filled with deadly and seductive blooms,” and Indiewire called her debut feature Viva “a pitch perfect resurrection of the Valley of the Dolls days of cinema.” She is currently in development for a ghost movie set in medieval England.\n\nAbout Bluebeard's Castle:\n\nBluebeard gets a feminist Gothic makeover in this subversive take on the famous French fairy tale — from the acclaimed director of The Love Witch, and for fans of Jane Eyre\n\nWhen the successful British mystery writer Judith Moore meets Gavin, a handsome and charming baron, at a birthday party on the Cornish coast, his love transforms her from a bitter, lonely young woman into a romance heroine overnight. After a whirlwind honeymoon in Paris, he whisks her away to a secluded Gothic castle. But soon she finds herself trapped in a nightmare, as her husband’s mysterious nature and his alternation between charm and violence become increasingly frightening. \n\nAs Judith battles both internal and external demons, including sexual ambivalence, psychological self-torture, gaslighting, family neglect, alcoholism, and domestic abuse, she becomes increasingly addicted to her wild beast of a husband. Why do women stay in abusive relationships? The answer can be found in the tortured mind of the protagonist, whose richly layered fantasy life parallels that of the female Gothic romance reader. Filled with dark humor and evocative imagery, Bluebeard’s Castle is a subversive take on modern romance and Gothic erotica.","content_html":"About Anna Biller:
\n\nAnna Biller is a filmmaker and a writer known for her feminist point of view, and for her meticulously crafted visual design. The New York Times called her cult film The Love Witch “a hothouse filled with deadly and seductive blooms,” and Indiewire called her debut feature Viva “a pitch perfect resurrection of the Valley of the Dolls days of cinema.” She is currently in development for a ghost movie set in medieval England.
\n\nAbout Bluebeard's Castle:
\n\nBluebeard gets a feminist Gothic makeover in this subversive take on the famous French fairy tale — from the acclaimed director of The Love Witch, and for fans of Jane Eyre
\n\nWhen the successful British mystery writer Judith Moore meets Gavin, a handsome and charming baron, at a birthday party on the Cornish coast, his love transforms her from a bitter, lonely young woman into a romance heroine overnight. After a whirlwind honeymoon in Paris, he whisks her away to a secluded Gothic castle. But soon she finds herself trapped in a nightmare, as her husband’s mysterious nature and his alternation between charm and violence become increasingly frightening.
\n\nAs Judith battles both internal and external demons, including sexual ambivalence, psychological self-torture, gaslighting, family neglect, alcoholism, and domestic abuse, she becomes increasingly addicted to her wild beast of a husband. Why do women stay in abusive relationships? The answer can be found in the tortured mind of the protagonist, whose richly layered fantasy life parallels that of the female Gothic romance reader. Filled with dark humor and evocative imagery, Bluebeard’s Castle is a subversive take on modern romance and Gothic erotica.
","summary":"Sruti talks to the director of The Love Witch, about her debut novel, Bluebeard's Castle. They consider glamour, romance novels, Sruti's \"little girl theory,\" why women often seek singularity, and how the adventure of sex that can sometimes trump the actual experience of sex.","date_published":"2023-10-19T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/539b0c93-78be-4f3a-abfc-9e61fe63fa7e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35630402,"duration_in_seconds":2226}]},{"id":"db05d4b5-3ccc-41e8-8351-5f5cb3ae1c65","title":"Episode 70: Weird Era feat. Melissa Broder","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/70","content_text":"About Melissa Broder:\n\nMelissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed, The Pisces, and Death Valley, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom. She has written for The New York Times, Elle, and New York magazine’s The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @SoSadToday and @MelissaBroder and Instagram @RealMelissaBroder.\n\nAbout Death Valley:\n\nThe most profound book yet from the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief that becomes a desert survival story.\n\nIn Melissa Broder’s astounding new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike.\n\nOut on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.\n\nThis is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest. This is Death Valley.","content_html":"About Melissa Broder:
\n\nMelissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed, The Pisces, and Death Valley, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom. She has written for The New York Times, Elle, and New York magazine’s The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @SoSadToday and @MelissaBroder and Instagram @RealMelissaBroder.
\n\nAbout Death Valley:
\n\nThe most profound book yet from the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief that becomes a desert survival story.
\n\nIn Melissa Broder’s astounding new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike.
\n\nOut on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.
\n\nThis is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest. This is Death Valley.
","summary":"This week, Alex chats with Melissa Broder about her latest novel, Death Valley, finding humour in grief, subverting the typical hero’s journey, love for Best Western hotel chains, and forfeiting control. ","date_published":"2023-10-12T16:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/db05d4b5-3ccc-41e8-8351-5f5cb3ae1c65.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35825532,"duration_in_seconds":2109}]},{"id":"4d1874bd-aba6-4b3c-bb6c-96a67741c042","title":"Episode 69: Weir Era feat. Chris Oliveros","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/69","content_text":"About Chris Oliveros:\nChris Oliveros was born in 1966 in Montreal and grew up in the nearby suburb of Chomedey, Laval. He founded Drawn & Quarterly in 1989 and was the publisher for the following twenty-five years. Oliveros stepped down from D+Q in 2015 to work on Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?\n\nAbout Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?\nA deep dive into a contentious and dramatic period in Canadian history—the rise of a militant separatist group whose effects still reverberate today.\n\nIt started in 1963, when a dozen mailboxes in a wealthy Montreal neighborhood were blown to bits by handmade bombs. By the following year, a guerrilla army camp was set up deep in the woods, with would-be soldiers training for armed revolt. Then, in 1966, two high-school students dropped off bombs at factories, causing fatalities. What was behind these concerted, often bungled acts of terrorism, and how did they last for nearly eight years?\n\nIn Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?, Quebec-born cartoonist Chris Oliveros sets out to dispel common misconceptions about the birth and early years of a movement that, while now defunct, still holds a tight grip on the hearts and minds of Quebec citizenry and Canadian politics. There are no initials more volatile in Quebec history than FLQ—the Front de libération du Québec (or, in English, the Quebec Liberation Front). The original goal of this socialist movement was to fight for workers' rights of the French majority who found their rights trampled on by English bosses. The goal became ridding the province of its English oppression by means of violent revolution.\n\nUsing dozens of obscure and long-forgotten sources, Oliveros skillfully weaves a comics oral history where the activists, employers, politicians, and secretaries piece together the sequence of events. At times humorous, other times dramatic, and always informative, Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? shines a light on just how little it takes to organize dissent and who people trust to overthrow the government.","content_html":"About Chris Oliveros:
\nChris Oliveros was born in 1966 in Montreal and grew up in the nearby suburb of Chomedey, Laval. He founded Drawn & Quarterly in 1989 and was the publisher for the following twenty-five years. Oliveros stepped down from D+Q in 2015 to work on Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?
About Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?
\nA deep dive into a contentious and dramatic period in Canadian history—the rise of a militant separatist group whose effects still reverberate today.
It started in 1963, when a dozen mailboxes in a wealthy Montreal neighborhood were blown to bits by handmade bombs. By the following year, a guerrilla army camp was set up deep in the woods, with would-be soldiers training for armed revolt. Then, in 1966, two high-school students dropped off bombs at factories, causing fatalities. What was behind these concerted, often bungled acts of terrorism, and how did they last for nearly eight years?
\n\nIn Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?, Quebec-born cartoonist Chris Oliveros sets out to dispel common misconceptions about the birth and early years of a movement that, while now defunct, still holds a tight grip on the hearts and minds of Quebec citizenry and Canadian politics. There are no initials more volatile in Quebec history than FLQ—the Front de libération du Québec (or, in English, the Quebec Liberation Front). The original goal of this socialist movement was to fight for workers' rights of the French majority who found their rights trampled on by English bosses. The goal became ridding the province of its English oppression by means of violent revolution.
\n\nUsing dozens of obscure and long-forgotten sources, Oliveros skillfully weaves a comics oral history where the activists, employers, politicians, and secretaries piece together the sequence of events. At times humorous, other times dramatic, and always informative, Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? shines a light on just how little it takes to organize dissent and who people trust to overthrow the government.
","summary":"","date_published":"2023-10-06T15:45:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/4d1874bd-aba6-4b3c-bb6c-96a67741c042.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":40861670,"duration_in_seconds":2553}]},{"id":"e8b3ce8e-7914-4437-85f1-73a6eab15365","title":"Episode 68: Weird Era feat. Isle McElroy","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/68","content_text":"About Isle McElroy:\n\nIsle McElroy (they/them) is a non-binary author based in New York. Their writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, The Cut, GQ, The Guardian, Vogue, Bon Appétit, and other publications. They have received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and they were named one of The Strand's 30 Writers to Watch. In May 2021, Isle founded Debuts & Redos, a reading series for authors who published books during the pandemic. Their first novel, The Atmospherians, was named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times and a book of the year by Esquire, Electric Literature, Debutiful, and many other outlets.\n\nAbout People Collide: \n\nFrom the acclaimed author of The Atmospherians—“a Fight Club for the Millennial Generation” (Mat Johnson)—a gender-bending, body-switching novel that explores marriage, identity, and sex, and raises profound questions about the nature of true partnership.\n\nWhen Eli leaves the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with Elizabeth, his more organized and successful wife, he discovers that he now inhabits her body. Not only have he and his wife traded bodies but Elizabeth, living as Eli, has disappeared without a trace. What follows is Eli’s search across Europe to America for his missing wife—and a roving, no-holds-barred exploration of gender and embodied experience. \n\nAs Eli comes closer to finding Elizabeth—while learning to exist in her body—he begins to wonder what effect this metamorphosis will have on their relationship and how long he can maintain the illusion of living as someone he isn’t. Will their new marriage wither completely in each other's bodies? Or is this transformation the very thing Eli and Elizabeth need for their marriage to thrive? \n\nA rich, rewarding exploration of ambition and sacrifice, desire and loss, People Collide is a portrait of shared lives that shines a refreshing light on everything we thought we knew about love, sexuality, and the truth of who we are.","content_html":"About Isle McElroy:
\n\nIsle McElroy (they/them) is a non-binary author based in New York. Their writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, The Cut, GQ, The Guardian, Vogue, Bon Appétit, and other publications. They have received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and they were named one of The Strand's 30 Writers to Watch. In May 2021, Isle founded Debuts & Redos, a reading series for authors who published books during the pandemic. Their first novel, The Atmospherians, was named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times and a book of the year by Esquire, Electric Literature, Debutiful, and many other outlets.
\n\nAbout People Collide:
\n\nFrom the acclaimed author of The Atmospherians—“a Fight Club for the Millennial Generation” (Mat Johnson)—a gender-bending, body-switching novel that explores marriage, identity, and sex, and raises profound questions about the nature of true partnership.
\n\nWhen Eli leaves the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with Elizabeth, his more organized and successful wife, he discovers that he now inhabits her body. Not only have he and his wife traded bodies but Elizabeth, living as Eli, has disappeared without a trace. What follows is Eli’s search across Europe to America for his missing wife—and a roving, no-holds-barred exploration of gender and embodied experience.
\n\nAs Eli comes closer to finding Elizabeth—while learning to exist in her body—he begins to wonder what effect this metamorphosis will have on their relationship and how long he can maintain the illusion of living as someone he isn’t. Will their new marriage wither completely in each other's bodies? Or is this transformation the very thing Eli and Elizabeth need for their marriage to thrive?
\n\nA rich, rewarding exploration of ambition and sacrifice, desire and loss, People Collide is a portrait of shared lives that shines a refreshing light on everything we thought we knew about love, sexuality, and the truth of who we are.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Isle for the second time on the Weird Era podcast about their second novel People Collide, if a body is anything but limits, how we can own our sexuality with the knowledge gender is fluid, mothers, never truly knowing anyone masculine and female emotional capacities, and if anyone marries for love. ","date_published":"2023-09-27T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/e8b3ce8e-7914-4437-85f1-73a6eab15365.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":50320062,"duration_in_seconds":3144}]},{"id":"d97d2182-af77-4b2d-906d-033c83657cdd","title":"Episode 67: Weird Era feat. Paola Ferrante ","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/67","content_text":"About Paolo Ferrante:\n\nPaola Ferrante is a writer living with depression. Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (2019), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize. She has won Grain Magazine's Short Grain Contest for Poetry, The New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, Room Magazine's Fiction Contest, and was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize for the story “When Foxes Die Electric.” Her work appears in After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st Century (2022), Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (2021), North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She was born, and still resides in, Toronto.\n\nAbout Her Body Among Animals:\n\nIn this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.\n\nA sentient sex robot goes against her programming; a grad student living with depression is weighed down by an ever-present albatross; an unhappy wife turns into a spider; a boy with a dark secret is haunted by dolls; a couple bound for a colony on Mars take a road trip through Texas; a girl fights to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail like their absent mother.\n\nMagical yet human, haunted and haunting, these stories act as a surreal documentation of the mistakes in systems of the past that remain very much in the present. Ferrante investigates toxic masculinity and the devastation it enacts upon women and our planet, delving into the universal undercurrent of ecological anxiety in the face of such toxicity, and the personal experience of being a new mother concerned about the future her child will face.\n\nThrough these confrontations of the complexity of living in a woman’s body, Her Body Among Animals moves us from hopelessness to a future of resilience and possibility.","content_html":"About Paolo Ferrante:
\n\nPaola Ferrante is a writer living with depression. Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (2019), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize. She has won Grain Magazine's Short Grain Contest for Poetry, The New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, Room Magazine's Fiction Contest, and was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize for the story “When Foxes Die Electric.” Her work appears in After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st Century (2022), Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (2021), North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She was born, and still resides in, Toronto.
\n\nAbout Her Body Among Animals:
\n\nIn this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.
\n\nA sentient sex robot goes against her programming; a grad student living with depression is weighed down by an ever-present albatross; an unhappy wife turns into a spider; a boy with a dark secret is haunted by dolls; a couple bound for a colony on Mars take a road trip through Texas; a girl fights to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail like their absent mother.
\n\nMagical yet human, haunted and haunting, these stories act as a surreal documentation of the mistakes in systems of the past that remain very much in the present. Ferrante investigates toxic masculinity and the devastation it enacts upon women and our planet, delving into the universal undercurrent of ecological anxiety in the face of such toxicity, and the personal experience of being a new mother concerned about the future her child will face.
\n\nThrough these confrontations of the complexity of living in a woman’s body, Her Body Among Animals moves us from hopelessness to a future of resilience and possibility.
","summary":"This week on the pod, Alex sits down with Paola Ferrante to discuss her short story collection Her Body Among Animals, how motherhood affects artists, toxic masculinity, animal behaviour, and writing short fiction vs writing novels.","date_published":"2023-09-21T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/d97d2182-af77-4b2d-906d-033c83657cdd.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":45554978,"duration_in_seconds":2717}]},{"id":"5b68cf5b-26a2-468f-8363-9a103cf0cad5","title":"Episode 66: Weird Era feat. Sean Michaels","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/66","content_text":"About Sean Michaels:\nSEAN MICHAELS is the author of the novels Us Conductors and The Wagers, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Pitchfork and The New Yorker. He is a recipient of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize and the Prix Nouvelles Écritures, and he founded the pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone in 2003. Born in Stirling, Scotland, Sean lives in Montreal.\n\nAbout Do You Remember Being Born?\nAt 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem.\n\nMarian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them.\n\nOver the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know (\"Do you remember being born?\" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves—and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set—she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.","content_html":"About Sean Michaels:
\nSEAN MICHAELS is the author of the novels Us Conductors and The Wagers, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Pitchfork and The New Yorker. He is a recipient of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize and the Prix Nouvelles Écritures, and he founded the pioneering music blog Said the Gramophone in 2003. Born in Stirling, Scotland, Sean lives in Montreal.
About Do You Remember Being Born?
\nAt 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem.
Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them.
\n\nOver the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves—and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set—she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Sean Michaels about tech novels, what having kids does to the passing of time, what happens to art when commodified, and the nap ministry.","date_published":"2023-09-14T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/5b68cf5b-26a2-468f-8363-9a103cf0cad5.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":47139604,"duration_in_seconds":2946}]},{"id":"de9ac429-3938-4c84-9cad-e4979dd61a3b","title":"Episode 65: Weird Era feat. Jessica Campbell","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/65","content_text":"About Jessica Campbell:\nJessica Campbell is a Canadian artist originally from Victoria, British Columbia. Her fine art has been exhibited across North America, and in 2019 she had a solo exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. An educator of comics art and history, Campbell has taught at a variety of institutions, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of the graphic novels Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists and XTC69.\n\nAbout Rave:\nIt’s the early 2000s. Lauren is fifteen, soft-spoken, and ashamed of her body. She’s a devout member of an evangelical church, but when her Bible-thumping parents forbid Lauren to bring evolution textbooks home, she opts to study at her schoolmate Mariah’s house. Mariah has dial-up internet, an absentee mom, and a Wiccan altar—the perfect setting for a study session and sleepover to remember. That evening, Mariah gives Lauren a makeover and the two melt into each other, in what becomes Lauren’s first queer encounter. Afterward, a potent blend of Christian guilt and internalized homophobia causes Lauren to question the experience.\n\nAuthor Jessica Campbell (XTC69) uses frankness and dark humor to articulate Lauren's burgeoning crisis of faith and sexuality. She captures teenage antics and banter with astute comedic style, simultaneously skewering bullies, a culture of slut-shaming, and the devastating impact of religious zealotry. Rave is an instant classic, a coming-of-age story about the secret spaces young women create and the wider social structures that fail them.","content_html":"About Jessica Campbell:
\nJessica Campbell is a Canadian artist originally from Victoria, British Columbia. Her fine art has been exhibited across North America, and in 2019 she had a solo exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. An educator of comics art and history, Campbell has taught at a variety of institutions, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of the graphic novels Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists and XTC69.
About Rave:
\nIt’s the early 2000s. Lauren is fifteen, soft-spoken, and ashamed of her body. She’s a devout member of an evangelical church, but when her Bible-thumping parents forbid Lauren to bring evolution textbooks home, she opts to study at her schoolmate Mariah’s house. Mariah has dial-up internet, an absentee mom, and a Wiccan altar—the perfect setting for a study session and sleepover to remember. That evening, Mariah gives Lauren a makeover and the two melt into each other, in what becomes Lauren’s first queer encounter. Afterward, a potent blend of Christian guilt and internalized homophobia causes Lauren to question the experience.
Author Jessica Campbell (XTC69) uses frankness and dark humor to articulate Lauren's burgeoning crisis of faith and sexuality. She captures teenage antics and banter with astute comedic style, simultaneously skewering bullies, a culture of slut-shaming, and the devastating impact of religious zealotry. Rave is an instant classic, a coming-of-age story about the secret spaces young women create and the wider social structures that fail them.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Jessica Campbell about Christian Raves, shame, what to do with a unibrow, and what is so often misunderstood about the graphic novel form.","date_published":"2023-09-08T14:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/de9ac429-3938-4c84-9cad-e4979dd61a3b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":43379935,"duration_in_seconds":2711}]},{"id":"3bd7e6de-2eb8-4ac3-9ae0-d507fb0c651f","title":"Episode 64: Weird Era feat. Mona Awad","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/64","content_text":"About Mona Awad:\n\nMona Awad is the author of the novels All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. Bunny was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award and the New England Book Award. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. All’s Well was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Awad’s forthcoming novel Rouge, is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. This spring, Margaret Atwood named Awad her ‘literary heir’ in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston.\n\nAbout Rouge:\n\nFrom the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?\n\nFor as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.\n\nSnow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.","content_html":"About Mona Awad:
\n\nMona Awad is the author of the novels All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. Bunny was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award and the New England Book Award. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. All’s Well was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Awad’s forthcoming novel Rouge, is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. This spring, Margaret Atwood named Awad her ‘literary heir’ in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston.
\n\nAbout Rouge:
\n\nFrom the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?
\n\nFor as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.
\n\nSnow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.
","summary":"This week, Alex talks with Mona Awad about her latest novel Rouge, immortal jellyfish, Tom Cruise, fairytales, and what the ultimate lie of the beauty industry is.","date_published":"2023-08-31T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/3bd7e6de-2eb8-4ac3-9ae0-d507fb0c651f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":37215000,"duration_in_seconds":2325}]},{"id":"24ba7f78-1410-483e-aca5-b68d2463319d","title":"Episode 63: Weird Era feat. Emerson Whitney","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/63","content_text":"About Emerson Whitney:\n\nEmerson Whitney is a writer and a professor. Their book Heaven, McSweeney’s 2020, was named a ‘best book’ by the AV Club, PAPER, Literary Hub, Refinery29, Ms. Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, the Observer, and the Seattle Times. Heaven was also awarded a Kirkus star and was written about by nonfiction editor at Kirkus, Eric Liebetrau, in a piece called “Queer Memoir Old and New” as a profile of Emerson and Heaven is compared to Alice B. Toklas’ by Gertrude Stein. Heaven also won a silver medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and continues to garner praise. Emerson was named a 2020 Now List awardee in literature alongside Ocean Vuong and Danez Smith by Them magazine. Emerson’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Paris Review and elsewhere.\n\nAbout Daddy Boy:\n\nIn 2017, Emerson Whitney was divorcing the woman they’d been with for ten years—a dominatrix they called Daddy. Living in a tent in the backyard of their marital home, Emerson was startled to realize they didn’t know what it meant to be an adult. “We often look to our gender roles as a sort of map for aging,” they write. “I wanted to know what the process looked like without that: not man-ness, not-woman-ness.” Dizzied by this realization, they turned to an activity steeped in stereotypical masculinity: storm chasing.\n\nDaddy Boy follows Emerson as they pack into a van with a rag-tag group of storm chasers and drive up and down tornado ally—from Texas to North Dakota—staying in motels and eating at gas stations and hunting down storms like so many white whales.\n\nIn heading with them to Texas, we return, too, to the only site of adulthood Emerson has ever known: their childhood. Interspersed throughout this trip are memories of dad—both Emerson’s stepdad, Hank, present and unflinching and extremely Texan; and their biological dad, who they hardly knew. With his cowboy hats and random girlfriends, he always seemed so sweet and lost.\n\nThrough these childhood vignettes, coupled with queer theory and weeks spent reading the clouds like oracles, wanting nothing more than to drive straight into the eye of a storm, Emerson frames these probing questions of manhood against the dusty, loaded background of the American West.","content_html":"About Emerson Whitney:
\n\nEmerson Whitney is a writer and a professor. Their book Heaven, McSweeney’s 2020, was named a ‘best book’ by the AV Club, PAPER, Literary Hub, Refinery29, Ms. Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, the Observer, and the Seattle Times. Heaven was also awarded a Kirkus star and was written about by nonfiction editor at Kirkus, Eric Liebetrau, in a piece called “Queer Memoir Old and New” as a profile of Emerson and Heaven is compared to Alice B. Toklas’ by Gertrude Stein. Heaven also won a silver medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and continues to garner praise. Emerson was named a 2020 Now List awardee in literature alongside Ocean Vuong and Danez Smith by Them magazine. Emerson’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Paris Review and elsewhere.
\n\nAbout Daddy Boy:
\n\nIn 2017, Emerson Whitney was divorcing the woman they’d been with for ten years—a dominatrix they called Daddy. Living in a tent in the backyard of their marital home, Emerson was startled to realize they didn’t know what it meant to be an adult. “We often look to our gender roles as a sort of map for aging,” they write. “I wanted to know what the process looked like without that: not man-ness, not-woman-ness.” Dizzied by this realization, they turned to an activity steeped in stereotypical masculinity: storm chasing.
\n\nDaddy Boy follows Emerson as they pack into a van with a rag-tag group of storm chasers and drive up and down tornado ally—from Texas to North Dakota—staying in motels and eating at gas stations and hunting down storms like so many white whales.
\n\nIn heading with them to Texas, we return, too, to the only site of adulthood Emerson has ever known: their childhood. Interspersed throughout this trip are memories of dad—both Emerson’s stepdad, Hank, present and unflinching and extremely Texan; and their biological dad, who they hardly knew. With his cowboy hats and random girlfriends, he always seemed so sweet and lost.
\n\nThrough these childhood vignettes, coupled with queer theory and weeks spent reading the clouds like oracles, wanting nothing more than to drive straight into the eye of a storm, Emerson frames these probing questions of manhood against the dusty, loaded background of the American West.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with Emerson Whitney to discuss Daddy Boy, how elders are a map, the appeal of masculinity and the simultaneous disdain for toxic masculinity, storm chasing, and how to foster independence without it resulting in isolation.","date_published":"2023-08-24T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/24ba7f78-1410-483e-aca5-b68d2463319d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":37064469,"duration_in_seconds":2316}]},{"id":"887910f8-77ad-4cd2-a7cc-b9e48106c929","title":"Episode 62: Weird Era feat. Hilary Leichter","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/62","content_text":"About Hilary Leichter:\n\nHilary Leichter is the author of Temporary, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.\n\nAbout Terrasse Story:\n\nAnnie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn’t there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller’s dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.\n\nTerrace Story follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it’s looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?\n\nBased on the National Magazine Award–winning story, Hilary Leichter’s profound second novel asks how we nurture love when death looms over every moment. From one of our most innovative and daring writers, Terrace Story is an astounding meditation on loss, a reverie about extinction, and a map for where to go next.","content_html":"About Hilary Leichter:
\n\nHilary Leichter is the author of Temporary, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
\n\nAbout Terrasse Story:
\n\nAnnie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn’t there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller’s dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.
\n\nTerrace Story follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it’s looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?
\n\nBased on the National Magazine Award–winning story, Hilary Leichter’s profound second novel asks how we nurture love when death looms over every moment. From one of our most innovative and daring writers, Terrace Story is an astounding meditation on loss, a reverie about extinction, and a map for where to go next.
","summary":"This week, Alex talks to Hilary Leichter (in her sophomore Weird Era interview!) about her latest novel Terrace Story, how time and space can be manipulated in writing, what constitutes magical realism, creating space vs taking up space, and so much more. ","date_published":"2023-08-18T12:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/887910f8-77ad-4cd2-a7cc-b9e48106c929.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":37593226,"duration_in_seconds":2349}]},{"id":"fdec20e8-f018-4697-875b-2ff987ed6dee","title":"Episode 61: Weird Era feat. Kyle Dillon Hertz","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/61","content_text":"About Kyle Dillon Hertz:\n\nKyle Dillon Hertz received an MFA in fiction at NYU, where he was the Writer in Public Schools Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn.\n\nAbout The Lookback Window:\n\nGrowing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later—long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against him have run out—the long shadow of Dylan’s trauma still looms over the fragile life in the city he’s managed to build with his fiancé, Moans, who knows little of Dylan’s past. His continued existence depends upon an all-important mantra: To survive, you live through it, but never look back.\n\nThen a groundbreaking new law—the Child Victims Act—opens a new way foreword: a one-year window during which Dylan can sue his abusers. But for someone who was trafficked as a child, does money represent justice—does his pain have a price? As Dylan is forced to look back at what happened to him and try to make sense of his past, he begins to explore a drug and sex-fueled world of bathhouses, clubs, and strangers’ apartments, only to emerge, barely alive, with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms.\n\nBy turns harrowing, lyrical, and beautiful, Hertz’s debut offers a startling glimpse at the unraveling of trauma—and the light that peeks, faintly, and often in surprising ways, from the other side of the window.","content_html":"About Kyle Dillon Hertz:
\n\nKyle Dillon Hertz received an MFA in fiction at NYU, where he was the Writer in Public Schools Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn.
\n\nAbout The Lookback Window:
\n\nGrowing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later—long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against him have run out—the long shadow of Dylan’s trauma still looms over the fragile life in the city he’s managed to build with his fiancé, Moans, who knows little of Dylan’s past. His continued existence depends upon an all-important mantra: To survive, you live through it, but never look back.
\n\nThen a groundbreaking new law—the Child Victims Act—opens a new way foreword: a one-year window during which Dylan can sue his abusers. But for someone who was trafficked as a child, does money represent justice—does his pain have a price? As Dylan is forced to look back at what happened to him and try to make sense of his past, he begins to explore a drug and sex-fueled world of bathhouses, clubs, and strangers’ apartments, only to emerge, barely alive, with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms.
\n\nBy turns harrowing, lyrical, and beautiful, Hertz’s debut offers a startling glimpse at the unraveling of trauma—and the light that peeks, faintly, and often in surprising ways, from the other side of the window.
","summary":"Alex sits down with Kyle Dillon Hertz to discuss his debut novel, The Lookback Window, trauma narratives, bad MFA writing, and why it’s so easy to focus on the past and ignore the present. ","date_published":"2023-08-11T15:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/fdec20e8-f018-4697-875b-2ff987ed6dee.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44163062,"duration_in_seconds":2760}]},{"id":"9a476f6d-9951-48aa-aa2f-93fde6b35e2f","title":"Episode 60: Weird Era feat. Deborah Willis","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/60","content_text":"About Deborah Willis:\nDEBORAH WILLIS’s last short story collection, The Dark and Other Love Stories, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her first book, Vanishing and Other Stories, was named one of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2009, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for fiction. Her work has also appeared in The Walrus, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Lucky Peach, and Zoetrope. She has worked as a bookseller at Munro’s Books in Victoria, BC, as a technical writer, and as a writer-in-residence at Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, MacEwan University, and the University of Calgary. Deborah currently works as an editor at Freehand Books and lives in Calgary with her partner and daughter.\n\nAbout Girlfriend on Mars:\nAmber Kivinen is moving to Mars. Or at least, she will be if she wins a chance to join MarsNow. She and twenty-three reality TV contestants from around the world—including a handsome Israeli, an endearing fellow Canadian, and an assortment of science nerds and wannabe influencers—are competing for two seats on the first human-led mission to Mars, sponsored by billionaire Geoff Task. Meanwhile Kevin, Amber’s boyfriend of fourteen years, was content going nowhere until Amber left him—and their hydroponic weed business—behind. As he tends to the plants growing in their absurdly overpriced Vancouver basement apartment, Kevin tunes in to find out why the love of his life is so determined to leave the planet with somebody else.\n\nAn audaciously original debut from an “immensely talented writer” (Emily St. John Mandel), Girlfriend on Mars is at once a satirical indictment of our pursuit of fame and wealth amidst environmental crisis, and an exploration of humanity’s deepest longing, greatest quest, and most enduring cliché: love.","content_html":"About Deborah Willis:
\nDEBORAH WILLIS’s last short story collection, The Dark and Other Love Stories, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her first book, Vanishing and Other Stories, was named one of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2009, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for fiction. Her work has also appeared in The Walrus, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Lucky Peach, and Zoetrope. She has worked as a bookseller at Munro’s Books in Victoria, BC, as a technical writer, and as a writer-in-residence at Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, MacEwan University, and the University of Calgary. Deborah currently works as an editor at Freehand Books and lives in Calgary with her partner and daughter.
About Girlfriend on Mars:
\nAmber Kivinen is moving to Mars. Or at least, she will be if she wins a chance to join MarsNow. She and twenty-three reality TV contestants from around the world—including a handsome Israeli, an endearing fellow Canadian, and an assortment of science nerds and wannabe influencers—are competing for two seats on the first human-led mission to Mars, sponsored by billionaire Geoff Task. Meanwhile Kevin, Amber’s boyfriend of fourteen years, was content going nowhere until Amber left him—and their hydroponic weed business—behind. As he tends to the plants growing in their absurdly overpriced Vancouver basement apartment, Kevin tunes in to find out why the love of his life is so determined to leave the planet with somebody else.
An audaciously original debut from an “immensely talented writer” (Emily St. John Mandel), Girlfriend on Mars is at once a satirical indictment of our pursuit of fame and wealth amidst environmental crisis, and an exploration of humanity’s deepest longing, greatest quest, and most enduring cliché: love.
","summary":"Sruti talks to author Deborah Willis about monogamy, megalomaniac CEOS, how, \"a human being is a mystery, as dark and expanding as the universe,\" and why on earthlings themselves love reality TV so much.","date_published":"2023-08-03T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/9a476f6d-9951-48aa-aa2f-93fde6b35e2f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35151669,"duration_in_seconds":2067}]},{"id":"104129a7-c671-4ce9-a700-432d85010837","title":"Episode 59: Weird Era feat. Ottessa Moshfegh","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/59","content_text":"About Ottessa Moshfegh:\nOttessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.\n\nAbout Lapvona:\nIn a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet\n\nLittle Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, believes his mother died giving birth to him. One of Marek’s few consolations is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby. For some people, Ina’s ability to receive transmissions of sacred knowledge from the natural world is a godsend. For others, Ina’s home in the woods is a godless place.\n\nThe people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by their depraved lord and governor, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces arise to upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, and the natural world and the spirit world will prove to be very thin indeed.","content_html":"About Ottessa Moshfegh:
\nOttessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.
About Lapvona:
\nIn a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, believes his mother died giving birth to him. One of Marek’s few consolations is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby. For some people, Ina’s ability to receive transmissions of sacred knowledge from the natural world is a godsend. For others, Ina’s home in the woods is a godless place.
\n\nThe people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by their depraved lord and governor, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces arise to upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, and the natural world and the spirit world will prove to be very thin indeed.
","summary":"Alex sits down with the legend herself, Ottessa Moshfegh, to talk about Lapvona, whether or not her novels exist in one shared literary universe, what makes her stories so appealing to different types of readers, and what she thinks about happy endings. ","date_published":"2023-06-29T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/104129a7-c671-4ce9-a700-432d85010837.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":44947449,"duration_in_seconds":2809}]},{"id":"993d288f-2ae4-4939-aef1-1e0e58a012f5","title":"Episode 57: Weird Era feat. Sarah Blakley-Cartwright","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/57","content_text":"About Sarah Blakley-Cartwright:\n\nSarah Blakley-Cartwright is the author of Red Riding Hood, a #1 New York Times bestseller published worldwide in thirty-eight editions and fifteen languages. She is the editor of Hauser & Wirth’s The Artist's Library for Ursula magazine. She is publishing director of the Chicago Review of Books, and associate editor of A Public Space.\n\nAbout Alice Sadie Celine:\n\nIt’s opening night, but Alice’s performance in the local Bay Area production of The Winter’s Tale is far from glamorous. She doesn’t have dreams of stardom, but the basement theater in a wildfire-choked town isn’t exactly what she envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming.\n\nPragmatic, serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school—really one another’s only friends—but now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend’s support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine.\n\nA professor of women’s and gender studies at UC Berkeley, Celine’s landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she’s struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminist world. So, when Sadie begs her to attend Alice’s play, she relents, if only to escape writer’s block. But in a turn of perplexing events, Celine becomes entranced by Alice’s performance and realizes that her daughter’s once lanky, slightly annoying best friend is now an irresistible young woman.\n\nSet over the course of decades—from Alice and Sadie’s early friendship days and Celine’s decision to leave her husband to the radical movements of 1990s Berkeley and navigating contemporary Hollywood—Alice and Celine’s affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs of power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s debut adult novel is a mesmerizing portrait of the inner lives of three very different women.","content_html":"About Sarah Blakley-Cartwright:
\n\nSarah Blakley-Cartwright is the author of Red Riding Hood, a #1 New York Times bestseller published worldwide in thirty-eight editions and fifteen languages. She is the editor of Hauser & Wirth’s The Artist's Library for Ursula magazine. She is publishing director of the Chicago Review of Books, and associate editor of A Public Space.
\n\nAbout Alice Sadie Celine:
\n\nIt’s opening night, but Alice’s performance in the local Bay Area production of The Winter’s Tale is far from glamorous. She doesn’t have dreams of stardom, but the basement theater in a wildfire-choked town isn’t exactly what she envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming.
\n\nPragmatic, serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school—really one another’s only friends—but now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend’s support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine.
\n\nA professor of women’s and gender studies at UC Berkeley, Celine’s landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she’s struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminist world. So, when Sadie begs her to attend Alice’s play, she relents, if only to escape writer’s block. But in a turn of perplexing events, Celine becomes entranced by Alice’s performance and realizes that her daughter’s once lanky, slightly annoying best friend is now an irresistible young woman.
\n\nSet over the course of decades—from Alice and Sadie’s early friendship days and Celine’s decision to leave her husband to the radical movements of 1990s Berkeley and navigating contemporary Hollywood—Alice and Celine’s affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs of power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s debut adult novel is a mesmerizing portrait of the inner lives of three very different women.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Sarah Blakley-Cartwright about her novel Alice Sadie Celine, how mid-life crises can come for older lesbians, the cons of being overeducated, and what about goodness threatens eroticism. ","date_published":"2023-06-28T11:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/993d288f-2ae4-4939-aef1-1e0e58a012f5.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":20165154,"duration_in_seconds":1260}]},{"id":"5151be8b-2a67-4f7c-a052-3bf5d39f7c3c","title":"Episode 56: Weird Era feat. Andrew Sullivan","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/56","content_text":"ABOUT ANDREW SULLIVAN:\nAndrew F. Sullivan is the author of novels The Marigold; The Handyman Method (co-written with Nick Cutter); Waste, a Globe and Mail Best Book; and the story collection All We Want Is Everything, a Globe and Mail Best Book and finalist for the Relit Award. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.\n\nABOUT THE MARIGOLD:\nIn a near-future Toronto buffeted by environmental chaos and unfettered development, an unsettling new lifeform begins to grow beneath the surface, feeding off the past.\n\nThe Marigold, a gleaming Toronto condo tower, sits a half-empty promise: a stack of scuffed rental suites and undelivered amenities that crumbles around its residents as a mysterious sludge spreads slowly through it. Public health inspector Cathy Jin investigates this toxic mold as it infests the city’s infrastructure, rotting it from within, while Sam “Soda” Dalipagic stumbles on a dangerous cache of data while cruising the streets in his Camry, waiting for his next rideshare alert. On the outskirts of downtown, 13-year-old Henrietta Brakes chases a friend deep underground after he’s snatched into a sinkhole by a creature from below.\n\nAll the while, construction of the city’s newest luxury tower, Marigold II, has stalled. Stanley Marigold, the struggling son of the legendary developer behind this project, decides he must tap into a hidden reserve of old power to make his dream a reality — one with a human cost.\n\nWeaving together disparate storylines and tapping into the realms of body horror, urban dystopia, and ecofiction, The Marigold explores the precarity of community and the fragile designs that bind us together.","content_html":"ABOUT ANDREW SULLIVAN:
\nAndrew F. Sullivan is the author of novels The Marigold; The Handyman Method (co-written with Nick Cutter); Waste, a Globe and Mail Best Book; and the story collection All We Want Is Everything, a Globe and Mail Best Book and finalist for the Relit Award. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
ABOUT THE MARIGOLD:
\nIn a near-future Toronto buffeted by environmental chaos and unfettered development, an unsettling new lifeform begins to grow beneath the surface, feeding off the past.
The Marigold, a gleaming Toronto condo tower, sits a half-empty promise: a stack of scuffed rental suites and undelivered amenities that crumbles around its residents as a mysterious sludge spreads slowly through it. Public health inspector Cathy Jin investigates this toxic mold as it infests the city’s infrastructure, rotting it from within, while Sam “Soda” Dalipagic stumbles on a dangerous cache of data while cruising the streets in his Camry, waiting for his next rideshare alert. On the outskirts of downtown, 13-year-old Henrietta Brakes chases a friend deep underground after he’s snatched into a sinkhole by a creature from below.
\n\nAll the while, construction of the city’s newest luxury tower, Marigold II, has stalled. Stanley Marigold, the struggling son of the legendary developer behind this project, decides he must tap into a hidden reserve of old power to make his dream a reality — one with a human cost.
\n\nWeaving together disparate storylines and tapping into the realms of body horror, urban dystopia, and ecofiction, The Marigold explores the precarity of community and the fragile designs that bind us together.
","summary":"Alex talks to Andrew about his latest novel, The Marigold, the illusion of choice when it comes to ordering takeout, body horror, conspiracy theorists, and finding optimism about the future.","date_published":"2023-06-15T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/5151be8b-2a67-4f7c-a052-3bf5d39f7c3c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":32093693,"duration_in_seconds":2640}]},{"id":"d5425207-aa68-4bbe-9a25-6a80ce6d70fc","title":"Episode 55: Weird Era feat. Marta Balcewicz","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/55","content_text":"ABOUT MARTA BALCEWICZ:\nMarta Balcewicz spent her early childhood in Pomerania and Madrid, and now lives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Tin House online, Vol. 1. Brooklyn, Washington Square Review, The Rumpus, and Passages North, amongst other publications. Her fiction was anthologized in Tiny Crimes(Catapult, 2018). She received a fellowship from Tin House Workshops in 2022. Big Shadow is her first novel.\n\nABOUT BIG SHADOW:\n\nIn an unnamed town in the summer of 1998, Judy is an isolated and inexperienced teenager on the cusp of adulthood struggling to craft an identity for herself—especially as the artist she wants to be.\n\nThere is little help around her. Her only friends are increasingly obsessed with a cultish belief in a coming \"Big Shadow.\" Her mother is afraid of life and finds solace in TV shows. At her lowest point, Judy meets Maurice Blunt, a visiting summer poetry class professor who is a \"has-been\" fixture of the 1970s NYC punk music scene. Judy believes Maurice—a man more than twice her age desperately seeking lost adoration—is the ticket out of her current life. Soon, she begins taking secret weekend trips to visit him.\n\nJudy's visits to his apartment in New York bring hopes of belonging to the city's cultural world and making a living as a video artist. With each trip and frustrated promise, however, she feels the creeping realization that there is a price to pay for her golden ticket entry into this insular and moribund scene. Judy must navigate the shifting power dynamics with her aging gatekeeper and the possibility of building an early adult identity alone.\n\nAn affecting novel of psychological nuance and dark humour, Big Shadow explores the costs of self-deceit, fandom, and tenuous ambitions, exposing the lies we’ll tell ourselves and the promises we'll make to edge closer to what we want… or what we think we want.","content_html":"ABOUT MARTA BALCEWICZ:
\nMarta Balcewicz spent her early childhood in Pomerania and Madrid, and now lives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Tin House online, Vol. 1. Brooklyn, Washington Square Review, The Rumpus, and Passages North, amongst other publications. Her fiction was anthologized in Tiny Crimes(Catapult, 2018). She received a fellowship from Tin House Workshops in 2022. Big Shadow is her first novel.
ABOUT BIG SHADOW:
\n\nIn an unnamed town in the summer of 1998, Judy is an isolated and inexperienced teenager on the cusp of adulthood struggling to craft an identity for herself—especially as the artist she wants to be.
\n\nThere is little help around her. Her only friends are increasingly obsessed with a cultish belief in a coming "Big Shadow." Her mother is afraid of life and finds solace in TV shows. At her lowest point, Judy meets Maurice Blunt, a visiting summer poetry class professor who is a "has-been" fixture of the 1970s NYC punk music scene. Judy believes Maurice—a man more than twice her age desperately seeking lost adoration—is the ticket out of her current life. Soon, she begins taking secret weekend trips to visit him.
\n\nJudy's visits to his apartment in New York bring hopes of belonging to the city's cultural world and making a living as a video artist. With each trip and frustrated promise, however, she feels the creeping realization that there is a price to pay for her golden ticket entry into this insular and moribund scene. Judy must navigate the shifting power dynamics with her aging gatekeeper and the possibility of building an early adult identity alone.
\n\nAn affecting novel of psychological nuance and dark humour, Big Shadow explores the costs of self-deceit, fandom, and tenuous ambitions, exposing the lies we’ll tell ourselves and the promises we'll make to edge closer to what we want… or what we think we want.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Marta Balcewicz about her debut novel Big Shadow, how intimacy can tether us to things (and people) we don't actually like, Sarah Schulman novels, why young women seek to feel singular, and much more. ","date_published":"2023-06-09T12:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/d5425207-aa68-4bbe-9a25-6a80ce6d70fc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":32431653,"duration_in_seconds":2489}]},{"id":"6c406029-e14f-49ab-85d4-a92f7f3e4a62","title":"Episode 54: Weird Era feat. Dizz Tate","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/54","content_text":"About Dizz Tate:\nDIZZ TATE grew up in Florida and lives in London, U.K. She has had short stories published in Granta, The Stinging Fly, Dazed, No Tokens Journal, Five Dials, 3:AM Magazine, among other publications. She was long-listed for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2020 and won the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2019. Brutes is her first novel.\n\nAbout Brutes:\nIn Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers—something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they see will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.\n\nThrough a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the \"we\" of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.","content_html":"About Dizz Tate:
\nDIZZ TATE grew up in Florida and lives in London, U.K. She has had short stories published in Granta, The Stinging Fly, Dazed, No Tokens Journal, Five Dials, 3:AM Magazine, among other publications. She was long-listed for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2020 and won the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2019. Brutes is her first novel.
About Brutes:
\nIn Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers—something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they see will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the "we" of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Dizz Tate about her debut novel Brutes, how girlhood is a religion itself, how humiliating a woman is the only way some men know how to love, and the thread that laces female friendship with both adoration and jealousy. ","date_published":"2023-06-01T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/6c406029-e14f-49ab-85d4-a92f7f3e4a62.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":29837641,"duration_in_seconds":2118}]},{"id":"5f8dc918-916d-48b6-bb0e-58c2ef11133f","title":"Episode 53: Weird Era feat. Henry Hoke","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/53","content_text":"About Henry Hoke:\nHenry Hoke is an editor at The Offing and a writer whose work has appeared in No Tokens, Triangle House, Electric Literature, and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes. He co-created the performance series Enter>text in Los Angeles, and has taught at CalArts and the UVA Young Writers Workshop. He lives in New York City.\n\nAbout Open Throat:\nA lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.\n\nA queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience.\n\nWhen a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.” As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?\n\nHenry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.","content_html":"About Henry Hoke:
\nHenry Hoke is an editor at The Offing and a writer whose work has appeared in No Tokens, Triangle House, Electric Literature, and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes. He co-created the performance series Enter>text in Los Angeles, and has taught at CalArts and the UVA Young Writers Workshop. He lives in New York City.
About Open Throat:
\nA lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.
A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience.
\n\nWhen a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.” As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?
\n\nHenry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.
","summary":"Alex sits down with Henry Hoke to discuss Open Throat, fight or flight mentalities, existentialism as a tool, and the labels we impose on queer characters. ","date_published":"2023-05-26T11:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/5f8dc918-916d-48b6-bb0e-58c2ef11133f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":29830682,"duration_in_seconds":2419}]},{"id":"5c986591-0bdb-42db-bf55-7d420a448270","title":"Episode 52: Weird Era feat. Stephanie LaCava","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/52","content_text":"About Stephanie LaCava:\nStephanie LaCava is a writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Harper's, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Vogue, and Interview. Her debut novel, The Superrationals, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2020.\n\nAbout I Fear My Pain Interests You:\nMargot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York and heads to to the Pacific Northwest. She’s seeking to escape both the eyes of the world and the echoing voice of that last bad man. But a chance encounter with a dubious doctor in a graveyard, and the discovery of a dozen old film reels, opens the door to a study of both the peculiarities of her body and the absurdities of her famous family.\n\nA literary take on cinema du corps, Stephanie LaCava’s new novel is an audaciously sexy and moving ex","content_html":"About Stephanie LaCava:
\nStephanie LaCava is a writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Harper's, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Vogue, and Interview. Her debut novel, The Superrationals, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2020.
About I Fear My Pain Interests You:
\nMargot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York and heads to to the Pacific Northwest. She’s seeking to escape both the eyes of the world and the echoing voice of that last bad man. But a chance encounter with a dubious doctor in a graveyard, and the discovery of a dozen old film reels, opens the door to a study of both the peculiarities of her body and the absurdities of her famous family.
A literary take on cinema du corps, Stephanie LaCava’s new novel is an audaciously sexy and moving ex
","summary":"Sruti talks to Stephanie LaCava about the ways the , \"throb of prying eyes (is) harder to sit with than the pain of a bruised leg,\" daddy issues, if things can be real without conflict, and so much more.","date_published":"2023-05-18T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/5c986591-0bdb-42db-bf55-7d420a448270.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":24009213,"duration_in_seconds":1942}]},{"id":"37d62b3a-a452-46d0-944e-3e42b0a7d1c2","title":"Episode 51: Weird Era feat. Catherine Lacey","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/51","content_text":"About Catherine Lacey:\n\nCatherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere.\n\nAbout Biography of X:\n\nWhen X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification.\n\nA masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.\n\nPulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.","content_html":"About Catherine Lacey:
\n\nCatherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere.
\n\nAbout Biography of X:
\n\nWhen X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification.
\n\nA masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.
\n\nPulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with Catherine Lacey and talks about merging genres, how to spend a fictional biography describing a person who self-identifies as, \"personless,\" what is something worse that grief wants, the ways in which first wives can look to the partners who follow, and so much more. ","date_published":"2023-05-11T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/37d62b3a-a452-46d0-944e-3e42b0a7d1c2.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":33523893,"duration_in_seconds":2876}]},{"id":"8baae3cf-f76e-40ba-a55b-f3b509204841","title":"Episode 50: Weird Era feat. Lindsay Wong","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/50","content_text":"About Lindsay Wong:\nLINDSAY WONG is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019. She has written a YA novel entitled My Summer of Love and Misfortune. Wong holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. Follow her on Twitter @LindsayMWong, Instagram @Lindsaywong.M, or visit www.lindsaywongwriter.com.\n\nAbout Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality: \nLiving forever isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Hearts can still break, looks can still fade, and money still matters, even in eternity. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they’re ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants. Story-by-story, the line between ghost and human, life and death, becomes increasingly blurred.\n\nThere’s a courtesan from 17th century China who, try as she might, just can’t manage to die. Grandmama Wu, who returns from the dead to protect her grandchildren from bullies. Not to mention an Internet-order bride who inadvertently brings the apocalypse to Nebraska City.\n\nFrom Shanghai to Vancouver, the women in this collection haunt and are haunted—by first loves, troublesome family members, and traumatic memories. Intertwining horror, the supernatural, and mythology, Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality riotously critiques contemporary life and fearlessly illuminates the ways in which the past can devour us. A collection about transformation and what makes us human, it solidifies Lindsay Wong as one of the most vital and electrifying voices in Canadian literature today.","content_html":"About Lindsay Wong:
\nLINDSAY WONG is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019. She has written a YA novel entitled My Summer of Love and Misfortune. Wong holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. Follow her on Twitter @LindsayMWong, Instagram @Lindsaywong.M, or visit www.lindsaywongwriter.com.
About Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality:
\nLiving forever isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Hearts can still break, looks can still fade, and money still matters, even in eternity. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they’re ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants. Story-by-story, the line between ghost and human, life and death, becomes increasingly blurred.
There’s a courtesan from 17th century China who, try as she might, just can’t manage to die. Grandmama Wu, who returns from the dead to protect her grandchildren from bullies. Not to mention an Internet-order bride who inadvertently brings the apocalypse to Nebraska City.
\n\nFrom Shanghai to Vancouver, the women in this collection haunt and are haunted—by first loves, troublesome family members, and traumatic memories. Intertwining horror, the supernatural, and mythology, Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality riotously critiques contemporary life and fearlessly illuminates the ways in which the past can devour us. A collection about transformation and what makes us human, it solidifies Lindsay Wong as one of the most vital and electrifying voices in Canadian literature today.
","summary":"Alex sits down with Lindsay Wong to talk about family dynamics, the difference between Eastern and Western trauma narratives, possessing characters versus haunting them, and what constitutes genre literature. ","date_published":"2023-04-27T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/8baae3cf-f76e-40ba-a55b-f3b509204841.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":30349133,"duration_in_seconds":2175}]},{"id":"97310d38-9a06-4902-9b64-19c2391fb32b","title":"Episode 49: Weird Era feat. Michael DeForge","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/49","content_text":"About Michael DeForge:\n\nMichael DeForge is a cartoonist, an illustrator, and a community organizer who lives Toronto, Ontario.\n\nAbout Birds of Maine:\n\nBirds roam freely around the Moon complete with fruitful trees, sophisticated fungal networks, and an enviable socialist order. The universal worm feeds all, there are no weekends, and economics is as fantastical a study as unicorn psychology. No concept of money or wealth plagues the thoughts of these free-minded birds. Instead, there are angsty teens who form bands to show off their best bird song and other youngsters who yearn to become clothing designers even though clothes are only necessary during war. (The truly honourable professions for most birds are historian and/or librarian.) These birds are free to crush on hot pelicans and live their best lives until a crash-landed human from Earth threatens to change everything.\n\nMichael DeForge’s post-apocalyptic reality brings together the author’s quintessential deadpan humour, surrealist imagination, and undeniable socio-political insight. Appearing originally as a webcomic, Birds of Maine follows DeForge’s prolific trajectory of astounding graphic novels that reimagine and question the world as we know it. His latest comic captures the optimistic glow of utopian imagination with a late-capitalism sting of irony.","content_html":"About Michael DeForge:
\n\nMichael DeForge is a cartoonist, an illustrator, and a community organizer who lives Toronto, Ontario.
\n\nAbout Birds of Maine:
\n\nBirds roam freely around the Moon complete with fruitful trees, sophisticated fungal networks, and an enviable socialist order. The universal worm feeds all, there are no weekends, and economics is as fantastical a study as unicorn psychology. No concept of money or wealth plagues the thoughts of these free-minded birds. Instead, there are angsty teens who form bands to show off their best bird song and other youngsters who yearn to become clothing designers even though clothes are only necessary during war. (The truly honourable professions for most birds are historian and/or librarian.) These birds are free to crush on hot pelicans and live their best lives until a crash-landed human from Earth threatens to change everything.
\n\nMichael DeForge’s post-apocalyptic reality brings together the author’s quintessential deadpan humour, surrealist imagination, and undeniable socio-political insight. Appearing originally as a webcomic, Birds of Maine follows DeForge’s prolific trajectory of astounding graphic novels that reimagine and question the world as we know it. His latest comic captures the optimistic glow of utopian imagination with a late-capitalism sting of irony.
","summary":"Alex talks to Michael DeForge about Birds of Maine, as well as his general body of work, illustrating the cover of Weird Era Issue 2, how an email to Seripop started it all, and the appeal, though not promise, of building Utopian worlds.","date_published":"2023-04-18T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/97310d38-9a06-4902-9b64-19c2391fb32b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":25782517,"duration_in_seconds":2250}]},{"id":"a05f1bba-587a-422b-bbbe-1e42f47fd5c6","title":"Episode 48: Weird Era feat. Colin Winnette","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/48","content_text":"About Colin Winnette:\n\nCOLIN WINNETTE’s books include Coyote, Haints Stay, and The Job of the Wasp, which was an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Pick. Winnette’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and The Paris Review Daily. A former bookseller in Texas, Vermont, New York, and California, he is now a writer living in San Francisco.\n\nAbout Users:\n\nMiles, a lead creative at a midsize virtual reality company known for its “original experiences,” has engineered a new product called The Ghost Lover. Wildly popular from the outset, the “game” is simple: a user’s simulated life is almost identical to their reality, except they’re haunted by the ghost of an ex-lover.\n\nHowever, when a shift in the company's strategic vision puts The Ghost Lover at the center of a platform-wide controversy, Miles becomes the target of user outrage, and starts receiving a series of anonymous death threats. Typed notes sealed in envelopes with no postage or return address, these persistent threats push Miles into a paranoid panic, blurring his own sense of reality, catalyzing the collapse of his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his children.\n\nThe once-promising road to success becomes a narrow set of choices for Miles, who, in a last ditch effort to save his job, pitches his masterpiece, a revolutionary device code-named the Egg, which will transform the company. The consequences for Miles seal him inside the walls of his life as what was once anxiety explodes into devastating absoluteness.\n\nIn a world rife with the unchecked power and ambition of tech, Users investigates—with both humor and creeping dread—how interpersonal experiences and private decisions influence the hasty developments that have the power to permanently alter the landscape of human experience.","content_html":"About Colin Winnette:
\n\nCOLIN WINNETTE’s books include Coyote, Haints Stay, and The Job of the Wasp, which was an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Pick. Winnette’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and The Paris Review Daily. A former bookseller in Texas, Vermont, New York, and California, he is now a writer living in San Francisco.
\n\nAbout Users:
\n\nMiles, a lead creative at a midsize virtual reality company known for its “original experiences,” has engineered a new product called The Ghost Lover. Wildly popular from the outset, the “game” is simple: a user’s simulated life is almost identical to their reality, except they’re haunted by the ghost of an ex-lover.
\n\nHowever, when a shift in the company's strategic vision puts The Ghost Lover at the center of a platform-wide controversy, Miles becomes the target of user outrage, and starts receiving a series of anonymous death threats. Typed notes sealed in envelopes with no postage or return address, these persistent threats push Miles into a paranoid panic, blurring his own sense of reality, catalyzing the collapse of his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his children.
\n\nThe once-promising road to success becomes a narrow set of choices for Miles, who, in a last ditch effort to save his job, pitches his masterpiece, a revolutionary device code-named the Egg, which will transform the company. The consequences for Miles seal him inside the walls of his life as what was once anxiety explodes into devastating absoluteness.
\n\nIn a world rife with the unchecked power and ambition of tech, Users investigates—with both humor and creeping dread—how interpersonal experiences and private decisions influence the hasty developments that have the power to permanently alter the landscape of human experience.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with @colinwinnette to discuss his latest novel, Users. For a tech novel, they talk at great length about parenting, what an incandescent moment in literature is, and how the novel was inspired by the concept of guilt. ","date_published":"2023-04-12T14:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/a05f1bba-587a-422b-bbbe-1e42f47fd5c6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":33342553,"duration_in_seconds":2518}]},{"id":"09ea3af4-e7b1-4957-b93d-ef0e823cf005","title":"Episode 47: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Sean Thor Conroe","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/47","content_text":"About Sean Thor Conroe:\n\nSean Thor Conroe is a Japanese-American writer. He was born in Tokyo in 1991 and was raised in Scotland, upstate New York, and the greater Bay Area. He studied literature and philosophy at Swarthmore College, and attended the Columbia University School of the Arts. He has guest edited New York Tyrant Magazine and hosts the book podcast 1storypod.\n\nAbout Fuccboi:\n\nA fearless and savagely funny examination of masculinity under late capitalism from an electrifying new voice.\n\nSet in Philly one year into Trump’s presidency, Sean Thor Conroe’s audacious, freewheeling debut follows our eponymous fuccboi, Sean, as he attempts to live meaningfully in a world that doesn’t seem to need him. Reconciling past, failed selves—cross-country walker, SoundCloud rapper, weed farmer—he now finds himself back in his college city, trying to write, doing stimulant-fueled bike deliveries to eat. Unable to accept that his ex has dropped him, yet still engaged in all the same fuckery—being coy and spineless, dodging decisions, maintaining a rotation of baes—that led to her leaving in the first place. But now Sean has begun to wonder, how sustainable is this mode? How much fuckery is too much fuckery?\n\nWritten in a riotous, utterly original idiom, and slyly undercutting both the hypocrisy of our era and that of Sean himself, Fuccboi is an unvarnished, playful, and searching examination of what it means to be a man.","content_html":"About Sean Thor Conroe:
\n\nSean Thor Conroe is a Japanese-American writer. He was born in Tokyo in 1991 and was raised in Scotland, upstate New York, and the greater Bay Area. He studied literature and philosophy at Swarthmore College, and attended the Columbia University School of the Arts. He has guest edited New York Tyrant Magazine and hosts the book podcast 1storypod.
\n\nAbout Fuccboi:
\n\nA fearless and savagely funny examination of masculinity under late capitalism from an electrifying new voice.
\n\nSet in Philly one year into Trump’s presidency, Sean Thor Conroe’s audacious, freewheeling debut follows our eponymous fuccboi, Sean, as he attempts to live meaningfully in a world that doesn’t seem to need him. Reconciling past, failed selves—cross-country walker, SoundCloud rapper, weed farmer—he now finds himself back in his college city, trying to write, doing stimulant-fueled bike deliveries to eat. Unable to accept that his ex has dropped him, yet still engaged in all the same fuckery—being coy and spineless, dodging decisions, maintaining a rotation of baes—that led to her leaving in the first place. But now Sean has begun to wonder, how sustainable is this mode? How much fuckery is too much fuckery?
\n\nWritten in a riotous, utterly original idiom, and slyly undercutting both the hypocrisy of our era and that of Sean himself, Fuccboi is an unvarnished, playful, and searching examination of what it means to be a man.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Sean Thor Conroe about the line between mimicry and influence, white fuck boys vs ethnic fuck boys, and if fiction, like fuck boys, can manipulate.","date_published":"2022-09-08T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/09ea3af4-e7b1-4957-b93d-ef0e823cf005.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":34108364,"duration_in_seconds":2842}]},{"id":"5b4e3534-085d-46cf-80a7-d0a679c7ae8c","title":"Episode 46: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Justin Ling","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/46","content_text":"About Justin Ling:\n\nJUSTIN LING is an investigative journalist whose reporting has focused on stories and issues undercovered and misunderstood. His writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. In 2019 he hosted \"The Village,\" the award-winning third season of the CBC podcast Uncover, which examined cold cases from the 1970s that were reopened as a result of the McArthur investigation.\n\nAbout Missing From the Village:\n\nThe tragic and resonant story of the disappearance of eight men--the victims of serial killer Bruce McArthur--from Toronto's queer community.\n\nIn 2013, the Toronto Police Service announced that the disappearances of three men--Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, and Majeed Kayhan--from Toronto's gay village were, perhaps, linked. When the leads ran dry, the search was shut down, on paper classified as \"open but suspended.\" By 2015, investigative journalist Justin Ling had begun to retrace investigators' steps, convinced there was evidence of a serial killer. Meanwhile, more men would go missing, and police would continue to deny that there was a threat to the community. In early 2019, landscaper Bruce McArthur was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of eight men. There is so much more to the story than that.\n\nBased on more than five years of in-depth reporting, Missing from the Village recounts how a serial killer was allowed to stalk the city, how the community responded, and offers a window into the lives of these eight men and the friends and family left behind. Telling a story that goes well beyond Toronto, and back decades, Justin Ling draws on extensive interviews with those who experienced the investigation first-hand, including the detectives who eventually caught McArthur, and reveals how systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, and the structures of policing fail queer communities.","content_html":"About Justin Ling:
\n\nJUSTIN LING is an investigative journalist whose reporting has focused on stories and issues undercovered and misunderstood. His writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. In 2019 he hosted "The Village," the award-winning third season of the CBC podcast Uncover, which examined cold cases from the 1970s that were reopened as a result of the McArthur investigation.
\n\nAbout Missing From the Village:
\n\nThe tragic and resonant story of the disappearance of eight men--the victims of serial killer Bruce McArthur--from Toronto's queer community.
\n\nIn 2013, the Toronto Police Service announced that the disappearances of three men--Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, and Majeed Kayhan--from Toronto's gay village were, perhaps, linked. When the leads ran dry, the search was shut down, on paper classified as "open but suspended." By 2015, investigative journalist Justin Ling had begun to retrace investigators' steps, convinced there was evidence of a serial killer. Meanwhile, more men would go missing, and police would continue to deny that there was a threat to the community. In early 2019, landscaper Bruce McArthur was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of eight men. There is so much more to the story than that.
\n\nBased on more than five years of in-depth reporting, Missing from the Village recounts how a serial killer was allowed to stalk the city, how the community responded, and offers a window into the lives of these eight men and the friends and family left behind. Telling a story that goes well beyond Toronto, and back decades, Justin Ling draws on extensive interviews with those who experienced the investigation first-hand, including the detectives who eventually caught McArthur, and reveals how systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, and the structures of policing fail queer communities.
","summary":"Provide Daphnee with social media one liner","date_published":"2022-08-25T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/5b4e3534-085d-46cf-80a7-d0a679c7ae8c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":31555223,"duration_in_seconds":2629}]},{"id":"7c571678-8304-436d-84d7-c0d0f4f43a84","title":"Episode 45: Weird Era feat. Joshua Whitehead","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/45","content_text":"About Joshua Whitehead:\nJoshua Whitehead is an Oji-nêhiyaw, Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is author of the award-winning novel Jonny Appleseed and the poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer, and he is editor of Love after the End. He is assistant professor in the departments of English and international Indigenous studies at the University of Calgary.\n\nAbout Making Love with the Land:\nIn Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession.\n\nIn prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls “biostory”—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.\n\nIntellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly—even joyfully—maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.","content_html":"About Joshua Whitehead:
\nJoshua Whitehead is an Oji-nêhiyaw, Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is author of the award-winning novel Jonny Appleseed and the poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer, and he is editor of Love after the End. He is assistant professor in the departments of English and international Indigenous studies at the University of Calgary.
About Making Love with the Land:
\nIn Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession.
In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls “biostory”—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.
\n\nIntellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly—even joyfully—maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.
","summary":"This week, Alex sits down with Joshua Whitehead to discuss his new essay collection, Making Love With The Land, the pits and pearls of academia, what it means to reject categorization, and Brandi Carlile.","date_published":"2022-08-19T15:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/7c571678-8304-436d-84d7-c0d0f4f43a84.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":32402827,"duration_in_seconds":2700}]},{"id":"678e3b69-8a14-476f-b94b-ad79ae49c2c6","title":"Episode 44: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Elif Batuman","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/44","content_text":"About Elif Batuman:\nElif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.\n\nFrom the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin’s quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood\n\nAbout Either/Or\nSelin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it’s sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin’s elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan’s weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, it feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel—a life worthy of becoming a novel—without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?\n\nGuided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice—no matter what the cost. Next on the list: international travel.\n\nUnfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.","content_html":"About Elif Batuman:
\nElif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.
From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin’s quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood
\n\nAbout Either/Or
\nSelin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it’s sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin’s elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan’s weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, it feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel—a life worthy of becoming a novel—without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?
Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice—no matter what the cost. Next on the list: international travel.
\n\nUnfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with Elif Batuman to talk about what it means to ~feel~ intelligent, to over-intellectualize a crush, the normalized expectations of heterosexuality, how it feels to forefront Immigrant stories in North American canon, and what she thinks about The Idiot developing into film.","date_published":"2022-07-28T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/678e3b69-8a14-476f-b94b-ad79ae49c2c6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":29919485,"duration_in_seconds":2493}]},{"id":"a6eb893b-4ab9-4bfb-b71e-c114bb593d41","title":"Episode 43: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Jackson Howard","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/43","content_text":"Jackson Howard is an editor and writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn. \n\nHe’s an Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and its imprint MCD, where he acquires and edits a broad range of fiction and nonfiction. Writers he publishes include Judith Butler, Brontez Purnell, Sarah Schulman, Catherine Lacey, Fernando A. Flores, Susan Straight, Venita Blackburn, Imogen Binnie, Thomas Grattan, Missouri Williams, Jonathan Escoffery, Kaitlyn Tiffany, and many others. \n\nAs a writer, his reviews, profiles, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, The Cut, Rolling Stone, The Ringer, them., W., ELLE, i-D, office, Document, and elsewhere. \n\nHe regularly visits undergrad and MFA programs for workshops and talks, and judges for fellowships; he’s also spoken on panels for the Miami Book Fair, One Story, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he’s read at Housing Works and MOMA PS1. He is also part of the team behind the FSG Writer’s Fellowship, and is passionate about efforts to increase transparency and access within publishing at large. \n\nHe graduated from the University of Michigan in 2016 and is very much a Taurus. ","content_html":"Jackson Howard is an editor and writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn.
\n\nHe’s an Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and its imprint MCD, where he acquires and edits a broad range of fiction and nonfiction. Writers he publishes include Judith Butler, Brontez Purnell, Sarah Schulman, Catherine Lacey, Fernando A. Flores, Susan Straight, Venita Blackburn, Imogen Binnie, Thomas Grattan, Missouri Williams, Jonathan Escoffery, Kaitlyn Tiffany, and many others.
\n\nAs a writer, his reviews, profiles, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, The Cut, Rolling Stone, The Ringer, them., W., ELLE, i-D, office, Document, and elsewhere.
\n\nHe regularly visits undergrad and MFA programs for workshops and talks, and judges for fellowships; he’s also spoken on panels for the Miami Book Fair, One Story, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he’s read at Housing Works and MOMA PS1. He is also part of the team behind the FSG Writer’s Fellowship, and is passionate about efforts to increase transparency and access within publishing at large.
\n\nHe graduated from the University of Michigan in 2016 and is very much a Taurus.
","summary":"Alex sits down with Jackson Howard, an editor at the forefront of queer literature, to discuss the current state of the publishing industry, bad reading habits, Brontez Purnell's tattoos, and the Pitchfork rating system.","date_published":"2022-07-14T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/a6eb893b-4ab9-4bfb-b71e-c114bb593d41.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35443181,"duration_in_seconds":2907}]},{"id":"0d0ee039-7674-4039-9315-e9585b3decf9","title":"Episode 42: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Lillian Fishman","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/42","content_text":"About Lillian Fishman:\nLillian Fishman was born in 1994 and lives in New York. She received her MFA from NYU, where she was a Jill Davis Fellow. Acts of Service is her first novel.\n\nAbout Acts of Service:\nA “bold and unflinchingly sexy” (Vogue) debut novel about a young woman who follows her desires into a world of pleasure, decadence, and privilege, unraveling everything she thought she knew about sex . . . and herself.\n\n“One of the most entertaining books about sex I’ve ever read . . . The perfect read for fans of Raven Leilani and Ottessa Moshfegh, this is a book that will have people talking.”—BuzzFeed\n\n“Anytime I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life.”—Eve Babitz\n\nEve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she’s wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia the charismatic Nathan. Despite her better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship—one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her. \n\nAs each act of their complicated, three-way affair unfolds across a cold and glittering New York, Eve is forced to confront the questions that most consume her: What do we bring to sex? What does it reveal of ourselves, and one another? And how do we reconcile what we want with what we think we should want? \n\nIn the way only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, Lillian Fishman’s riveting debut is bold, unabashed, and required reading of the most pleasurable sort.","content_html":"About Lillian Fishman:
\nLillian Fishman was born in 1994 and lives in New York. She received her MFA from NYU, where she was a Jill Davis Fellow. Acts of Service is her first novel.
About Acts of Service:
\nA “bold and unflinchingly sexy” (Vogue) debut novel about a young woman who follows her desires into a world of pleasure, decadence, and privilege, unraveling everything she thought she knew about sex . . . and herself.
“One of the most entertaining books about sex I’ve ever read . . . The perfect read for fans of Raven Leilani and Ottessa Moshfegh, this is a book that will have people talking.”—BuzzFeed
\n\n“Anytime I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life.”—Eve Babitz
\n\nEve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she’s wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia the charismatic Nathan. Despite her better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship—one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her.
\n\nAs each act of their complicated, three-way affair unfolds across a cold and glittering New York, Eve is forced to confront the questions that most consume her: What do we bring to sex? What does it reveal of ourselves, and one another? And how do we reconcile what we want with what we think we should want?
\n\nIn the way only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, Lillian Fishman’s riveting debut is bold, unabashed, and required reading of the most pleasurable sort.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Lillian Fishman about her favourite book of 2022 (Acts of Service), and how a conversation on Queerness led her to an investigation of Heterosexuality, why desire conflates with our personal politics, and if freedom necessitates radicalism. ","date_published":"2022-07-07T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/0d0ee039-7674-4039-9315-e9585b3decf9.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":33993607,"duration_in_seconds":2695}]},{"id":"6c0250ca-0d3f-4ef2-9004-51f5763c423f","title":"Episode 41: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Naben Ruthnum","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/41","content_text":"ABOUT NABEN RUTHNUM:\nNaben Ruthnum lives in Toronto, and is the author of Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race. As Nathan Ripley, he is the author of two thrillers, Find You In the Dark and Your Life is Mine. He also writes for film and television.\n\nABOUT A HERO OF OUR TIME\nA wry comic novel with an acerbic wit, A Hero of Our Time is a vicious takedown of superficial diversity initiatives and tech culture, with a beating heart of broken sincerity.\n\nOsman Shah is a pitstop on his white colleague Olivia Robinson’s quest for corporate domination at AAP, an edutech startup determined to automate higher education.\nOsman, obsessed by Olivia’s ability to successfully disguise ambition and self-interest as collectivist diversity politics, is bent on exposing her. Aided by his colleague turned comrade-in-arms Nena, who loathes and tolerates him in equal measure, Osman delves into Olivia's twisted past. But at every turn, he's stymied by his unfailing gift for cruel observation, which he turns with most ferocity on himself, without ever noticing what it is that stops him from connecting to anyone in his past or present. As Osman loses his grip on his family, Nena, and everything he thought was essential to his identity, he confronts an enemy who may simply be too good at her job to be defeated.\n\nA Hero of Our Time cracks the veneer of well-intentioned race conversations in the West, dismantles cheery narratives of progress through tech and “streamlined” education, and exposes the venomous self-congratulation and devouring lust for wealth, power, and property that lurks beneath.","content_html":"ABOUT NABEN RUTHNUM:
\nNaben Ruthnum lives in Toronto, and is the author of Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race. As Nathan Ripley, he is the author of two thrillers, Find You In the Dark and Your Life is Mine. He also writes for film and television.
ABOUT A HERO OF OUR TIME
\nA wry comic novel with an acerbic wit, A Hero of Our Time is a vicious takedown of superficial diversity initiatives and tech culture, with a beating heart of broken sincerity.
Osman Shah is a pitstop on his white colleague Olivia Robinson’s quest for corporate domination at AAP, an edutech startup determined to automate higher education.
\nOsman, obsessed by Olivia’s ability to successfully disguise ambition and self-interest as collectivist diversity politics, is bent on exposing her. Aided by his colleague turned comrade-in-arms Nena, who loathes and tolerates him in equal measure, Osman delves into Olivia's twisted past. But at every turn, he's stymied by his unfailing gift for cruel observation, which he turns with most ferocity on himself, without ever noticing what it is that stops him from connecting to anyone in his past or present. As Osman loses his grip on his family, Nena, and everything he thought was essential to his identity, he confronts an enemy who may simply be too good at her job to be defeated.
A Hero of Our Time cracks the veneer of well-intentioned race conversations in the West, dismantles cheery narratives of progress through tech and “streamlined” education, and exposes the venomous self-congratulation and devouring lust for wealth, power, and property that lurks beneath.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Naben Ruthnum about heterosexual male desire, South East Asian narratives in fiction, and how a kind of self-deprecation can ironically involve a heightened ego.","date_published":"2022-06-30T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/6c0250ca-0d3f-4ef2-9004-51f5763c423f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35117806,"duration_in_seconds":2362}]},{"id":"6d7e170a-d721-4962-ad8f-a97cc2424bbf","title":"Episode 40: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Heather O'Neill","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/40","content_text":"About Heather O'Neill\nHEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent bestselling novel, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads. Her previous work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there with her daughter.\n\nAbout When We Lost Our Heads\n\n1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER\n\nBelletrist Book Club selection * Readers' Digest Book Club selection * Cityline Book Club selection\n\nFrom the bestselling author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel, a spellbinding story about two young women whose friendship is so intense it not only threatens to destroy them, it changes the course of history\n\nMarie Antoine is the charismatic, spoiled daughter of a sugar baron. At age twelve, with her pile of blond curls and unparalleled sense of whimsy, she’s the leader of all the children in the Golden Mile, the affluent strip of nineteenth-century Montreal where powerful families live. Until one day in 1873, when Sadie Arnett, dark-haired, sly and brilliant, moves to the neighbourhood.\n\nMarie and Sadie are immediately inseparable. United by their passion and intensity, they attract and repel each other in ways that set them both on fire. Marie, with her bubbly charm, sees all the pleasure of the world, whereas Sadie’s obsession with darkness is all-consuming. Soon, their childlike games take on the thrill of danger and then become deadly.\n\nForced to separate, the girls spend their teenage years engaging in acts of alternating innocence and depravity, until a singular event unites them once more, with devastating effects. After Marie inherits her father’s sugar empire and Sadie disappears into the city’s gritty underworld, the working class begins to foment a revolution. Each woman will play an unexpected role in the events that upend their city—the only question is whether they will find each other once more.\n\nFrom the beloved Giller Prize-shortlisted author who writes “like a sort of demented angel with an uncanny knack for metaphor” (Toronto Star), When We Lost Our Heads is a page-turning novel that explores gender and power, sex and desire, class and status, and the terrifying strength of the human heart when it can’t let someone go. ","content_html":"About Heather O'Neill
\nHEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent bestselling novel, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads. Her previous work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there with her daughter.
About When We Lost Our Heads
\n\nBelletrist Book Club selection * Readers' Digest Book Club selection * Cityline Book Club selection
\n\nFrom the bestselling author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel, a spellbinding story about two young women whose friendship is so intense it not only threatens to destroy them, it changes the course of history
\n\nMarie Antoine is the charismatic, spoiled daughter of a sugar baron. At age twelve, with her pile of blond curls and unparalleled sense of whimsy, she’s the leader of all the children in the Golden Mile, the affluent strip of nineteenth-century Montreal where powerful families live. Until one day in 1873, when Sadie Arnett, dark-haired, sly and brilliant, moves to the neighbourhood.
\n\nMarie and Sadie are immediately inseparable. United by their passion and intensity, they attract and repel each other in ways that set them both on fire. Marie, with her bubbly charm, sees all the pleasure of the world, whereas Sadie’s obsession with darkness is all-consuming. Soon, their childlike games take on the thrill of danger and then become deadly.
\n\nForced to separate, the girls spend their teenage years engaging in acts of alternating innocence and depravity, until a singular event unites them once more, with devastating effects. After Marie inherits her father’s sugar empire and Sadie disappears into the city’s gritty underworld, the working class begins to foment a revolution. Each woman will play an unexpected role in the events that upend their city—the only question is whether they will find each other once more.
\n\nFrom the beloved Giller Prize-shortlisted author who writes “like a sort of demented angel with an uncanny knack for metaphor” (Toronto Star), When We Lost Our Heads is a page-turning novel that explores gender and power, sex and desire, class and status, and the terrifying strength of the human heart when it can’t let someone go.
","summary":"Alex talks with Montreal legend Heather O'Neill about her newest novel, When We Lost Our Heads. They talk about adult fairy tales, gritty underworlds, literary erotica, and what it means to get revenge.","date_published":"2022-06-23T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/6d7e170a-d721-4962-ad8f-a97cc2424bbf.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":27043954,"duration_in_seconds":2253}]},{"id":"b2174065-8fae-4f0e-8181-b9f6245dfd0e","title":"Episode 39: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Rollie Pemberton aka Cadence Weapon","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/39","content_text":"ABOUT ROLLIE PEMBERTON:\nHe is a writer, rapper, producer, poet and activist who performs under the name Cadence Weapon. He won the 2021 Polaris Music Prize for his album Parallel World. His writing has been published in Pitchfork, The Guardian, Wired and Hazlitt. Currently based in Toronto, Pemberton was a former Poet Laureate in his hometown of Edmonton.\n\nABOUT Bedroom Rapper: Cadence Weapon on Hip-Hop, Resistance and Surviving the Music Industry:\nTracing his roots from recording beats in his mom's attic in Edmonton to performing with some of the most recognizable names in rap and electronic music—De La Soul, Public Enemy, Mos Def, Questlove, Diplo, and more—Polaris Prize winner Rollie Pemberton, a.k.a Cadence Weapon, captures the joy in finding yourself, and how a sense of place and purpose entwines inextricably with a music scene in his debut memoir: Bedroom Rapper.\n\nFrom competitive basement family karaoke to touring Europe, from fights with an exploitative label to finding his creative voice, from protesting against gentrification to using his music to centre political change, Rollie charts his own development alongside a shifting musical landscape. As Rollie finds his feet, the bottom falls out of the industry, and he captures the way so many artists were able to make a nimble name for themselves while labels floundered. \n\nBedroom Rapper offers us a wide-ranging and crucial history of hip-hop. With an international perspective that's often missing from rap music journalism, he integrates the gestation of American hip hop with UK grime and niche scenes from the Canadian prairies, bringing his obsessive knowledge of hip-hop to bear on his subject. Rollie takes us into New York in the ’70s, Edmonton in the ’90s, the legendary Montreal DIY loft scene of the 2000s, and traces the ups and downs of trusting your gut and following your passion, obsessively.","content_html":"ABOUT ROLLIE PEMBERTON:
\nHe is a writer, rapper, producer, poet and activist who performs under the name Cadence Weapon. He won the 2021 Polaris Music Prize for his album Parallel World. His writing has been published in Pitchfork, The Guardian, Wired and Hazlitt. Currently based in Toronto, Pemberton was a former Poet Laureate in his hometown of Edmonton.
ABOUT Bedroom Rapper: Cadence Weapon on Hip-Hop, Resistance and Surviving the Music Industry:
\nTracing his roots from recording beats in his mom's attic in Edmonton to performing with some of the most recognizable names in rap and electronic music—De La Soul, Public Enemy, Mos Def, Questlove, Diplo, and more—Polaris Prize winner Rollie Pemberton, a.k.a Cadence Weapon, captures the joy in finding yourself, and how a sense of place and purpose entwines inextricably with a music scene in his debut memoir: Bedroom Rapper.
From competitive basement family karaoke to touring Europe, from fights with an exploitative label to finding his creative voice, from protesting against gentrification to using his music to centre political change, Rollie charts his own development alongside a shifting musical landscape. As Rollie finds his feet, the bottom falls out of the industry, and he captures the way so many artists were able to make a nimble name for themselves while labels floundered.
\n\nBedroom Rapper offers us a wide-ranging and crucial history of hip-hop. With an international perspective that's often missing from rap music journalism, he integrates the gestation of American hip hop with UK grime and niche scenes from the Canadian prairies, bringing his obsessive knowledge of hip-hop to bear on his subject. Rollie takes us into New York in the ’70s, Edmonton in the ’90s, the legendary Montreal DIY loft scene of the 2000s, and traces the ups and downs of trusting your gut and following your passion, obsessively.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Rollie Pemberton about his debut memoir Bedroom Rapper, the 2000s Montreal DIY scene, conscious rap vs gangster rap, what it means when an album is just trash tho, and navigating a Canadian Black identity throughout his career.","date_published":"2022-06-16T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/b2174065-8fae-4f0e-8181-b9f6245dfd0e.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":28973912,"duration_in_seconds":2414}]},{"id":"51d70a7d-e2b3-428a-b255-a5bf9465991d","title":"Episode 38: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Bud Smith","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/38","content_text":"ABOUT BUD SMITH:\nBud Smith works heavy construction in New Jersey. His story \"Violets\" appeared in The Paris Review. He released his debut novel this year, titled: Teenager.\n\nABOUT TEENAGER:\nKody Rawlee Green is stuck in juvie. Tella “Teal Cartwheels” Carticelli is packing her bags for Rome--on the orders of her parents, who want her as far from Kody as possible. But teenage love is too strong a force for the obstacles of reality. And the highway beckons.\n\nLeaving their abusive pasts behind them in Jersey, Kody and Teal set off on a cross-country road trip equal parts self-destruction and self-discovery, making their way, one stolen car at a time, toward bigger, wider, bluer skies. Along the road, of course, there’s time to stop at Graceland, classic diners, a fairgrounds that smells of “pony shit and kettle corn,\" and time for run-ins with outsize personalities like the reincarnated Grand Canyon tour guide Dead Bob and the spurious Montana rancher Bill Gold. On their heels, all the while, is Teal’s brother, Neil Carticelli, who’s abandoned his post in the navy to rescue the sister he left behind. But does she really need saving?\n\nThese all too American tropes find new expression in Bud Smith’s own freewheeling prose—and in Rae Buleri’s original illustrations—filling Teenager with humor, poetry, and a joy that’s palpable in every unforgettable sentence.","content_html":"ABOUT BUD SMITH:
\nBud Smith works heavy construction in New Jersey. His story "Violets" appeared in The Paris Review. He released his debut novel this year, titled: Teenager.
ABOUT TEENAGER:
\nKody Rawlee Green is stuck in juvie. Tella “Teal Cartwheels” Carticelli is packing her bags for Rome--on the orders of her parents, who want her as far from Kody as possible. But teenage love is too strong a force for the obstacles of reality. And the highway beckons.
Leaving their abusive pasts behind them in Jersey, Kody and Teal set off on a cross-country road trip equal parts self-destruction and self-discovery, making their way, one stolen car at a time, toward bigger, wider, bluer skies. Along the road, of course, there’s time to stop at Graceland, classic diners, a fairgrounds that smells of “pony shit and kettle corn," and time for run-ins with outsize personalities like the reincarnated Grand Canyon tour guide Dead Bob and the spurious Montana rancher Bill Gold. On their heels, all the while, is Teal’s brother, Neil Carticelli, who’s abandoned his post in the navy to rescue the sister he left behind. But does she really need saving?
\n\nThese all too American tropes find new expression in Bud Smith’s own freewheeling prose—and in Rae Buleri’s original illustrations—filling Teenager with humor, poetry, and a joy that’s palpable in every unforgettable sentence.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Bud Smith about his debut novel Teenager, contemporary manifestations of patriarchy, the difference between America and Americans, and why it's embarrassing to be alive.","date_published":"2022-06-09T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/51d70a7d-e2b3-428a-b255-a5bf9465991d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":38115179,"duration_in_seconds":2382}]},{"id":"c464d100-5730-4aa9-a7f6-dedfe5b7505d","title":"Episode 37: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Mayukh Sen","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/37","content_text":"Mayukh Sen is a James Beard and IACP Award–winning writer based in Brooklyn. His work has been anthologized in two editions of The Best American Food Writing. He teaches food journalism at New York University.\n\nAbout Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America\n\nWho’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes.\n\nIn imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time, but not in ours, and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration, and gender, Taste Makers will challenge the way readers look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.","content_html":"Mayukh Sen is a James Beard and IACP Award–winning writer based in Brooklyn. His work has been anthologized in two editions of The Best American Food Writing. He teaches food journalism at New York University.
\n\nAbout Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America
\n\nWho’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes.
\n\nIn imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time, but not in ours, and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration, and gender, Taste Makers will challenge the way readers look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Mayukh Sen about Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, how our own relationship to immigrant mothers inform an interest in this text, \"the food establishment/media\", and culinary lexicon—curry is a real word! ","date_published":"2021-12-03T11:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/c464d100-5730-4aa9-a7f6-dedfe5b7505d.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":31319534,"duration_in_seconds":2609}]},{"id":"55967777-4f9f-4506-8fbf-2ae139b2668b","title":"Episode 36: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Jo Hamya","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/36","content_text":"JO HAMYA was born in London in 1997. After living in Miami for a few years, she completed an English degree at King’s College London and a MSt in contemporary literature and culture at Oxford University. There, she divided her research between updating twentieth-century cultural theory into twenty-first-century digital contexts, and the impact of social media on form and questions of identity in contemporary women’s writing. Since leaving Oxford, she has worked as a copyeditor for Tatler and edited manuscripts subsequently published by Edinburgh University Press and Doubleday UK. She has also written for the Financial Times.Three Rooms is her first novel. She lives in London.\n\nA piercing howl of a novel about one young woman’s endless quest for an apartment of her own and the aspirations and challenges faced by the millennial generation as it finds its footing in the world, from a shockingly talented debut author\n\n“A woman must have money and a room of her own.” So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of One’s Own, but in this scrupulously observed, gorgeously wrought, debut novel, Jo Hamya pushes that adage powerfully into the twenty-first century, to a generation of people living in rented rooms. What a woman needs now is an apartment of her own, the ultimate mark of financial stability, unattainable for many.\n\nSet over the course of one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she moves from a rented room at Oxford, where she’s working as a research assistant; to a stranger’s sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she’s been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach. As politics shift to nationalism, the streets fill with protestors, and news drip-feeds into her phone, she struggles to live a meaningful life on her own terms, unsure if she’ll ever be able to afford to do so.","content_html":"JO HAMYA was born in London in 1997. After living in Miami for a few years, she completed an English degree at King’s College London and a MSt in contemporary literature and culture at Oxford University. There, she divided her research between updating twentieth-century cultural theory into twenty-first-century digital contexts, and the impact of social media on form and questions of identity in contemporary women’s writing. Since leaving Oxford, she has worked as a copyeditor for Tatler and edited manuscripts subsequently published by Edinburgh University Press and Doubleday UK. She has also written for the Financial Times.Three Rooms is her first novel. She lives in London.
\n\nA piercing howl of a novel about one young woman’s endless quest for an apartment of her own and the aspirations and challenges faced by the millennial generation as it finds its footing in the world, from a shockingly talented debut author
\n\n“A woman must have money and a room of her own.” So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of One’s Own, but in this scrupulously observed, gorgeously wrought, debut novel, Jo Hamya pushes that adage powerfully into the twenty-first century, to a generation of people living in rented rooms. What a woman needs now is an apartment of her own, the ultimate mark of financial stability, unattainable for many.
\n\nSet over the course of one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she moves from a rented room at Oxford, where she’s working as a research assistant; to a stranger’s sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she’s been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach. As politics shift to nationalism, the streets fill with protestors, and news drip-feeds into her phone, she struggles to live a meaningful life on her own terms, unsure if she’ll ever be able to afford to do so.
","summary":"Sruti talks with Jo Hamya about her debut novel Three Rooms, how to know when a chapter is done, what the American literary domestic is vs the UK’s notion of home, and what Woolf might think about the idea of a 9-5 just to stay alive.","date_published":"2021-11-25T21:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/55967777-4f9f-4506-8fbf-2ae139b2668b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":27840852,"duration_in_seconds":2320}]},{"id":"5d57b7b9-16c0-4946-adba-7693f6ce1f2c","title":"Episode 35: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Claire Vaye Watkins","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/35","content_text":"Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of the short story collection Battleborn and the novel Gold Fame Citrus. She has received the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Watkins is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Twentynine Palms, California.\n\nAbout I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness\n\n9780593330xxx\n304 pages | 6.27\" x 9.29\"\n\nNamed a Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021 by The New York Times, USA Today, Vulture, The Week, and more!\n\n“There’s some kind of genius sorcery in this novel. It’s startlingly original, hilarious and harrowing by turns, finally transcendent. Watkins writes like an avenging angel. It's thrilling and terrifying to stand in her wake.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather\n\nA darkly funny, soul-rending novel of love in an epoch of collapse—one woman’s furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.\n\nSince my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all. Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump and a spiraling case of postpartum depression. Her temporary escape from domestic duties and an opportunity to reconnect with old friends mutates into an extended romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood, and a seemingly bottomless descent into the past. Deep in the Mojave Desert where she grew up, she meets her ghosts at every turn: the first love whose self-destruction still haunts her; her father, a member of the most famous cult in American history; her mother, whose native spark gutters with every passing year. She can’t go back in time to make any of it right, but what exactly is her way forward? Alone in the wilderness, at last she begins to make herself at home in the world.\n\nBold, tender, and often hilarious, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness reaffirms Watkins as one of the signal writers of our time.","content_html":"Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of the short story collection Battleborn and the novel Gold Fame Citrus. She has received the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Watkins is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Twentynine Palms, California.
\n\nAbout I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
\n\n9780593330xxx
\n304 pages | 6.27" x 9.29"
Named a Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021 by The New York Times, USA Today, Vulture, The Week, and more!
\n\n“There’s some kind of genius sorcery in this novel. It’s startlingly original, hilarious and harrowing by turns, finally transcendent. Watkins writes like an avenging angel. It's thrilling and terrifying to stand in her wake.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
\n\nA darkly funny, soul-rending novel of love in an epoch of collapse—one woman’s furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.
\n\nSince my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all. Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump and a spiraling case of postpartum depression. Her temporary escape from domestic duties and an opportunity to reconnect with old friends mutates into an extended romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood, and a seemingly bottomless descent into the past. Deep in the Mojave Desert where she grew up, she meets her ghosts at every turn: the first love whose self-destruction still haunts her; her father, a member of the most famous cult in American history; her mother, whose native spark gutters with every passing year. She can’t go back in time to make any of it right, but what exactly is her way forward? Alone in the wilderness, at last she begins to make herself at home in the world.
\n\nBold, tender, and often hilarious, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness reaffirms Watkins as one of the signal writers of our time.
","summary":"Sruti talks with Claire Vaye Watkins about why normal might be overrated (given her family's history with the Manson family), the relationship between pleasure and peace—in fact, lots about pleasure seeking, and the independent lives parents occupy before their children come to exist. ","date_published":"2021-11-18T21:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/5d57b7b9-16c0-4946-adba-7693f6ce1f2c.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":33215375,"duration_in_seconds":2767}]},{"id":"4533cee8-07d7-4573-ad85-88d8c051af97","title":"Episode 34: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Todd Babiak","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/34","content_text":"TODD BABIAK's most recent novels are The Empress of Idaho, Son of France, and Come Barbarians, which was a Globe and Mail Book of the Year and a number one bestseller. His earlier work includes The Garneau Block, which was a national bestseller, a longlisted title for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the winner of the City of Edmonton Book Prize; The Book of Stanley; and Toby: A Man, which was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal and won the Alberta Book Award for Best Novel. Todd Babiak is the co-founder of Story Engine and CEO of Brand Tasmania. He currently lives with his family in Hobart. \n\nAbout The Spirit's Up\nBenedict is an inventor whose life’s work is a clean energy machine. It has just made him an overnight sensation and his family is suddenly wealthy. Benedict’s wife, Karen, and his teenage daughters, Charlotte and Poppy, are proud of him. But there are problems Benedict is too busy to see: Karen is deeply unhappy in the marriage and contemplating an affair, Charlotte, who is dealing with a chronic illness, is growing more and more distant, and Poppy is cracking under the pressures of her social circle. And there’s another problem. Benedict holds a rather terrible secret about his clean energy machine.\n\nThen, on Halloween night, an accident threatens to make everything far worse for the family. The accident kicks off a series of hauntings in their beautiful, historic home in affluent Belgravia, and the ghosts make it clear that they want something from them. Karen has to save her daughters — and herself. Meanwhile, Benedict is consumed by the knowledge that he has to achieve the impossible by Christmas. As time ticks ever closer to the revelation of his secret, he spirals further into despair . . .\n\nThe Spirits Up is the story of a family haunted by the charmlessness of middle age and the cruelties of modern teenage life. Part social satire and part contemporary ghost story (with a hint of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol), it is an exploration of a timeless question: what happens when there’s nothing to believe? ","content_html":"TODD BABIAK's most recent novels are The Empress of Idaho, Son of France, and Come Barbarians, which was a Globe and Mail Book of the Year and a number one bestseller. His earlier work includes The Garneau Block, which was a national bestseller, a longlisted title for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the winner of the City of Edmonton Book Prize; The Book of Stanley; and Toby: A Man, which was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal and won the Alberta Book Award for Best Novel. Todd Babiak is the co-founder of Story Engine and CEO of Brand Tasmania. He currently lives with his family in Hobart.
\n\nAbout The Spirit's Up
\nBenedict is an inventor whose life’s work is a clean energy machine. It has just made him an overnight sensation and his family is suddenly wealthy. Benedict’s wife, Karen, and his teenage daughters, Charlotte and Poppy, are proud of him. But there are problems Benedict is too busy to see: Karen is deeply unhappy in the marriage and contemplating an affair, Charlotte, who is dealing with a chronic illness, is growing more and more distant, and Poppy is cracking under the pressures of her social circle. And there’s another problem. Benedict holds a rather terrible secret about his clean energy machine.
Then, on Halloween night, an accident threatens to make everything far worse for the family. The accident kicks off a series of hauntings in their beautiful, historic home in affluent Belgravia, and the ghosts make it clear that they want something from them. Karen has to save her daughters — and herself. Meanwhile, Benedict is consumed by the knowledge that he has to achieve the impossible by Christmas. As time ticks ever closer to the revelation of his secret, he spirals further into despair . . .
\n\nThe Spirits Up is the story of a family haunted by the charmlessness of middle age and the cruelties of modern teenage life. Part social satire and part contemporary ghost story (with a hint of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol), it is an exploration of a timeless question: what happens when there’s nothing to believe?
","summary":"Alex sits down with Todd to discuss his new novel, The Spirits Up, Charles Dickens, pandemic writing, financial malfeasance, and whether or not babies and animals can ACTUALLY see ghosts.","date_published":"2021-11-11T21:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/4533cee8-07d7-4573-ad85-88d8c051af97.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":33749353,"duration_in_seconds":2812}]},{"id":"e173fce0-b314-4c6a-b159-328659569eae","title":"Episode 33: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Eli Tareq el Bechelany Lynch","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/33","content_text":"Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio'tia:ke, unceded Kanien'kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They participated in the Banff Centre's \"Centering Ourselves\" BIPOC residency, and they were longlisted for the CBC poetry prize in 2019. You can find their book reviews on instagram @elitareqreads.\n\nAbout The Good Arabs\nSwinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen. The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.","content_html":"Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio'tia:ke, unceded Kanien'kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They participated in the Banff Centre's "Centering Ourselves" BIPOC residency, and they were longlisted for the CBC poetry prize in 2019. You can find their book reviews on instagram @elitareqreads.
\n\nAbout The Good Arabs
\nSwinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen. The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.
Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen works of fiction. He has received three O. Henry Prizes for his fiction. His most recent book, Song for the Unraveling of the World, won a World Fantasy Award and a Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction and the Balcones Fiction Prize. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.
\n\nAbout The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell
\nA sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men—of all the terrors that populateThe Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson’s award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.
Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.
\n\nAbout Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch:
\nThe startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances.
The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch.
\n\nKatharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business.
\n\nSo when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.
\n\nDrawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.
","summary":"Alex and Rivka sit down to talk about her latest book, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is A Witch, philosophy, life and judicial systems in 17th century Germany, and what moody septuagenarians and millennials have in common.","date_published":"2021-10-21T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/d8cbabc2-8603-4486-ad1d-945d99622cc6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":31712349,"duration_in_seconds":2642}]},{"id":"bf75ba44-e45f-4028-a173-c16da8e07eab","title":"Episode 30: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Helen Chau Bradley","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/30","content_text":"Helen Chau Bradley is a writer and musician living in Tio'tia:ke / Montreal. They are the author of Automatic Object Lessons (House House Press, 2020). Their stories and essays have appeared in carte blanche, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy Magazine, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books, and elsewhere.\n\nAbout Personal Attention Roleplay:\nA young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships--with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band's summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.\n\nThe stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected--in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley's precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.","content_html":"Helen Chau Bradley is a writer and musician living in Tio'tia:ke / Montreal. They are the author of Automatic Object Lessons (House House Press, 2020). Their stories and essays have appeared in carte blanche, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy Magazine, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books, and elsewhere.
\n\nAbout Personal Attention Roleplay:
\nA young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships--with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band's summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.
The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected--in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley's precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.
","summary":"Sruti chats with Helen Chau Bradley about their latest collection of short stories, Queer morality, what makes for a poised short story ending, and the Montreal arts scene.","date_published":"2021-10-08T10:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/bf75ba44-e45f-4028-a173-c16da8e07eab.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":31022184,"duration_in_seconds":2585}]},{"id":"34463e91-dd23-48f8-b17b-31c724b3f024","title":"Episode 29: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Sruti Islam","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/29","content_text":"","content_html":"","summary":"Alex sits down with Sruti to discuss how the Weird Era Literary Arts journal came to be. Fun!","date_published":"2021-10-01T13:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/34463e91-dd23-48f8-b17b-31c724b3f024.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35170686,"duration_in_seconds":2930}]},{"id":"b429f11d-bbd4-42d4-8588-57ec4416892b","title":"Episode 28: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Natasha Brown","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/28","content_text":"Natasha Brown has spent a decade working in financial services, after studying Maths at Cambridge University. She developed Assembly after receiving a 2019 London Writers Award in the literary fiction category.\n\nAbout Assembly\nOne woman. One day. One decision. A blistering, fearless, and unforgettable literary debut from \"a stunning new writer.\" (Bernardine Evaristo)\n\nCome of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Go to college, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy an apartment. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going.\n\nThe narrator of Assembly is a black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can’t escape the question: is it time to take it all apart?\n\nAssembly is a story about the stories we live within – those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers.And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life. With a steely, unfaltering gaze, Natasha Brown dismantles the mythology of whiteness, lining up the debris in a neat row and walking away.\n\n\"A modern Mrs. Dalloway.\"—The Guardian\n\n\"Mind-bending and utterly original.\"—Brandon Taylor\n\n“Slim in the hand, but its impact is massive.”—Ali Smith","content_html":"Natasha Brown has spent a decade working in financial services, after studying Maths at Cambridge University. She developed Assembly after receiving a 2019 London Writers Award in the literary fiction category.
\n\nAbout Assembly
\nOne woman. One day. One decision. A blistering, fearless, and unforgettable literary debut from "a stunning new writer." (Bernardine Evaristo)
Come of age in the credit crunch. Be civil in a hostile environment. Go to college, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things. Buy an apartment. Buy art. Buy a sort of happiness. But above all, keep your head down. Keep quiet. And keep going.
\n\nThe narrator of Assembly is a black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can’t escape the question: is it time to take it all apart?
\n\nAssembly is a story about the stories we live within – those of race and class, safety and freedom, winners and losers.And it is about one woman daring to take control of her own story, even at the cost of her life. With a steely, unfaltering gaze, Natasha Brown dismantles the mythology of whiteness, lining up the debris in a neat row and walking away.
\n\n"A modern Mrs. Dalloway."—The Guardian
\n\n"Mind-bending and utterly original."—Brandon Taylor
\n\n“Slim in the hand, but its impact is massive.”—Ali Smith
","summary":"Sruti talks to Natasha Brown about her debut: Assembly. They think through generational persistence, how to interrogate a reader's presuppositions, and what the weathering hypothesis means to the Black female experience. ","date_published":"2021-09-23T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/b429f11d-bbd4-42d4-8588-57ec4416892b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":24314281,"duration_in_seconds":2026}]},{"id":"2fdbd7ab-ef81-434f-bb32-f612bb5c585b","title":"Episode 27: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Alexandra Kleeman","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/27","content_text":"Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among other publications, and her other writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is the winner of the Berlin Prize and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was a Rome Prize Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Staten Island and teaches at the New School.\n\nAbout Something New Under the Sun:\nNEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A novelist discovers the dark side of Hollywood and reckons with ambition, corruption, and connectedness in the age of environmental collapse and ecological awakening—a darkly unsettling near-future novel for readers of Don DeLillo and Ottessa Moshfegh\n\nONE OF SUMMER’S BEST BOOKS: The Wall Street Journal • Time • Vulture • Parade • LitHub • Vanity Fair • Vogue • Refinery29 • Esquire\n\n“A darkly satirical reflection of ecological reality.”—Time\n“Genius.”—Los Angeles Times\n“Wildly entertaining and beautifully written.”—LitHub\n\nEast Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy—after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks—and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second.\n\nIn this often-witty and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. Something New Under the Sun is a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, responsibility to truth.","content_html":"Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among other publications, and her other writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is the winner of the Berlin Prize and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was a Rome Prize Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Staten Island and teaches at the New School.
\n\nAbout Something New Under the Sun:
\nNEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A novelist discovers the dark side of Hollywood and reckons with ambition, corruption, and connectedness in the age of environmental collapse and ecological awakening—a darkly unsettling near-future novel for readers of Don DeLillo and Ottessa Moshfegh
ONE OF SUMMER’S BEST BOOKS: The Wall Street Journal • Time • Vulture • Parade • LitHub • Vanity Fair • Vogue • Refinery29 • Esquire
\n\n“A darkly satirical reflection of ecological reality.”—Time
\n“Genius.”—Los Angeles Times
\n“Wildly entertaining and beautifully written.”—LitHub
East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy—after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks—and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second.
\n\nIn this often-witty and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. Something New Under the Sun is a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, responsibility to truth.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with Alexandra Kleeman to discuss her new book Something New Under the Sun, paying homage to classic California Gold Rush Fiction, cinematic prose, the ways in which climate change is exciting (yes), and if perhaps, we are predisposed to kindness.","date_published":"2021-09-16T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/2fdbd7ab-ef81-434f-bb32-f612bb5c585b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":36118450,"duration_in_seconds":3009}]},{"id":"cb5189c6-e17b-444f-8a53-d6856202f50f","title":"Episode 26: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Michael LaPointe","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/26","content_text":"Michael LaPointe's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Times Literary Supplement. He writes the \"Dice Roll\" column for The Paris Review. His fiction has appeared in The Walrus and Hazlitt. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Awards, the Journey Prize, and the Digital Publishing Awards, and his fiction has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories. He lives in Toronto.\n\nAbout The Creep:\nA journalist with a history of bending the facts uncovers a story about a medical breakthrough so astonishing it needs no embellishment--but behind the game-changing science lies a gruesome secret.\n\nA respected byline in the culture pages of the venerable New York magazine The Bystander, journalist Whitney Chase grapples with a mysterious compulsion to enhance her coverage with intriguing untruths and undetectable white lies. She calls it \"the creep\"--an overpowering need to improve the story in the telling. And she has a particular genius for getting away with it.\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Whitney yearns to transition from profiling rock stars and novelists to covering the stories that \"really matter.\" When a chance encounter brings her face-to-face with a potentially massive story about a game-changing medical discovery, Whitney believes she's finally found a story that doesn't need any enhancement. The brilliant and charismatic doctor behind the breakthrough claims she's found \"the Holy Grail of medical science\": a synthetic blood substitute that, if viable, promises to save millions of lives, and make her corporate backers rich beyond measure. But when Whitney's investigation of this apparent medical miracle puts her on the trail of a string of grisly fatalities across the country, she becomes inexorably tied to a much darker and more nefarious story than even she could imagine.\n\nSet against the ramp-up to the US invasion of Iraq and the decline of print journalism, Michael LaPointe's panoramic, ingeniously plotted debut paints an affecting portrait of an increasingly unequal twenty-first century, exploring how deceitfulness, self-enhancement, and confidently delivered lies can be transfused into fact and constitute a broader violence against the social fabric and public trust.","content_html":"Michael LaPointe's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Times Literary Supplement. He writes the "Dice Roll" column for The Paris Review. His fiction has appeared in The Walrus and Hazlitt. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Awards, the Journey Prize, and the Digital Publishing Awards, and his fiction has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories. He lives in Toronto.
\n\nAbout The Creep:
\nA journalist with a history of bending the facts uncovers a story about a medical breakthrough so astonishing it needs no embellishment--but behind the game-changing science lies a gruesome secret.
A respected byline in the culture pages of the venerable New York magazine The Bystander, journalist Whitney Chase grapples with a mysterious compulsion to enhance her coverage with intriguing untruths and undetectable white lies. She calls it "the creep"--an overpowering need to improve the story in the telling. And she has a particular genius for getting away with it.
\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Whitney yearns to transition from profiling rock stars and novelists to covering the stories that "really matter." When a chance encounter brings her face-to-face with a potentially massive story about a game-changing medical discovery, Whitney believes she's finally found a story that doesn't need any enhancement. The brilliant and charismatic doctor behind the breakthrough claims she's found "the Holy Grail of medical science": a synthetic blood substitute that, if viable, promises to save millions of lives, and make her corporate backers rich beyond measure. But when Whitney's investigation of this apparent medical miracle puts her on the trail of a string of grisly fatalities across the country, she becomes inexorably tied to a much darker and more nefarious story than even she could imagine.
\n\nSet against the ramp-up to the US invasion of Iraq and the decline of print journalism, Michael LaPointe's panoramic, ingeniously plotted debut paints an affecting portrait of an increasingly unequal twenty-first century, exploring how deceitfulness, self-enhancement, and confidently delivered lies can be transfused into fact and constitute a broader violence against the social fabric and public trust.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with Michael LaPointe, author of The Creep, to discuss the horror genre, what it means to come to a text from a place of distrust, and the ambition of character construction. ","date_published":"2021-09-09T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/cb5189c6-e17b-444f-8a53-d6856202f50f.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":33220383,"duration_in_seconds":2768}]},{"id":"adee1d0c-aea2-4e38-ae4e-f8b284463ac7","title":"Episode 25: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Alex Manley and Daphné B","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/25","content_text":"Alex Manley is a Montreal/Tiohtia:ke writer and editor whose work has been published by Maisonneuve magazine, Hazlitt, The Walrus Grain, Vallum, and the Literary Review of Canada, among others. Their debut poetry collection, We Are All Just Animals & Plants, was published by Metatron Press in 2016. @alex_icon\n\nPoet and literary translator, Daphné B lives and works in Montreal. She published Bluetiful in 2015 (Les Editions de l'Ecrou), then Delete (L'Oie de Cravan) in 2017, in addition to writing in numerous magazines ( Nouveau Projet, Liberte, Vice, Spirale, Zinc, Estuaire, etc.). She co-founded the feminist platform Filles Missiles and is a regular contributor to the radio show Plus on est de fous, plus on lit, on Radio-Canada. @daphnebbbbb \n\nAbout Made-Up:\nA nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.\n\nAs Daphné B obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist politics. In a looks-obsessed, selfie-covered presentwhere influencers make the world go round, she brings us a breath of fresh air: an anti-capitalist look at a supremely capitalist industry, an intersectional feminist look at a practice many consider misogynist. Blending together the confessional, the poetic, and the essayistic, Made-Up is a lyric meditation on an industry in full bloom.\n\nMade-Up explores the complicated world of makeup, from how it’s made to how we wear it, talking about gender, identity, capitalism, and pop culture in the process. Makeup doesn’t get a lot of serious attention; it’s often derided as shallow. But Daphné B proves that it’s worth looking at a little more in-depth.\n\nThe original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley—like Daphné B, a Montreal poet and essayist—the book’s English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a bookon beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter.","content_html":"Alex Manley is a Montreal/Tiohtia:ke writer and editor whose work has been published by Maisonneuve magazine, Hazlitt, The Walrus Grain, Vallum, and the Literary Review of Canada, among others. Their debut poetry collection, We Are All Just Animals & Plants, was published by Metatron Press in 2016. @alex_icon
\n\nPoet and literary translator, Daphné B lives and works in Montreal. She published Bluetiful in 2015 (Les Editions de l'Ecrou), then Delete (L'Oie de Cravan) in 2017, in addition to writing in numerous magazines ( Nouveau Projet, Liberte, Vice, Spirale, Zinc, Estuaire, etc.). She co-founded the feminist platform Filles Missiles and is a regular contributor to the radio show Plus on est de fous, plus on lit, on Radio-Canada. @daphnebbbbb
\n\nAbout Made-Up:
\nA nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.
As Daphné B obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist politics. In a looks-obsessed, selfie-covered presentwhere influencers make the world go round, she brings us a breath of fresh air: an anti-capitalist look at a supremely capitalist industry, an intersectional feminist look at a practice many consider misogynist. Blending together the confessional, the poetic, and the essayistic, Made-Up is a lyric meditation on an industry in full bloom.
\n\nMade-Up explores the complicated world of makeup, from how it’s made to how we wear it, talking about gender, identity, capitalism, and pop culture in the process. Makeup doesn’t get a lot of serious attention; it’s often derided as shallow. But Daphné B proves that it’s worth looking at a little more in-depth.
\n\nThe original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley—like Daphné B, a Montreal poet and essayist—the book’s English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a bookon beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with Alex Manley and Daphné B, to discuss Manley's english translation of Daphné B's Maquillée: Made-Up. We unfold the dynamics of translation, the various gendered readings of the book, and their individual relationship to the text. ","date_published":"2021-09-02T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/adee1d0c-aea2-4e38-ae4e-f8b284463ac7.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":32888603,"duration_in_seconds":2740}]},{"id":"5339fbae-962e-4404-aad3-19abc6728f81","title":"Episode 24: LSHB's Weird Era feat. David Demchuk","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/24","content_text":"David Demchuk has been writing for print, stage, digital, and other media for nearly 40 years. His debut horror novel The Bone Mother, published in 2017, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Kobzar Book Award, and a Shirley Jackson Award in the Best Novel category. It won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in the Adult Fiction category. It was listed in the Globe and Mail's 100 best books of 2017, came in at #22 in the National Post's top 99 books of the year and became a #1 bestseller on Amazon.ca.\n\nAbout RED X:\nMen are disappearing from Toronto's gay village. They're the marginalized, the vulnerable. One by one, stalked and vanished, they leave behind small circles of baffled, frightened friends. Against the shifting backdrop of homophobia throughout the decades, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and riots against raids to gentrification and police brutality, the survivors face inaction from the law and disinterest from society at large. But as the missing grow in number, those left behind begin to realize that whoever or whatever is taking these men has been doing so for longer than is humanly possible.\n\nWoven into their stories is David Demchuk's own personal history, a life lived in fear and in thrall to horror, a passion that boils over into obsession. As he tries to make sense of the relationship between queerness and horror, what it means for gay men to disappear, and how the isolation of the LGBTQ+ community has left them profoundly exposed to monsters that move easily among them, fact and fiction collide and reality begins to unravel.\n\nA bold, terrifying new novel from the award-winning author of The Bone Mother.","content_html":"David Demchuk has been writing for print, stage, digital, and other media for nearly 40 years. His debut horror novel The Bone Mother, published in 2017, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Kobzar Book Award, and a Shirley Jackson Award in the Best Novel category. It won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in the Adult Fiction category. It was listed in the Globe and Mail's 100 best books of 2017, came in at #22 in the National Post's top 99 books of the year and became a #1 bestseller on Amazon.ca.
\n\nAbout RED X:
\nMen are disappearing from Toronto's gay village. They're the marginalized, the vulnerable. One by one, stalked and vanished, they leave behind small circles of baffled, frightened friends. Against the shifting backdrop of homophobia throughout the decades, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and riots against raids to gentrification and police brutality, the survivors face inaction from the law and disinterest from society at large. But as the missing grow in number, those left behind begin to realize that whoever or whatever is taking these men has been doing so for longer than is humanly possible.
Woven into their stories is David Demchuk's own personal history, a life lived in fear and in thrall to horror, a passion that boils over into obsession. As he tries to make sense of the relationship between queerness and horror, what it means for gay men to disappear, and how the isolation of the LGBTQ+ community has left them profoundly exposed to monsters that move easily among them, fact and fiction collide and reality begins to unravel.
\n\nA bold, terrifying new novel from the award-winning author of The Bone Mother.
","summary":"David Demchuk sits down with Alex to discuss Red X, the evolution and the future of queer horror, pop culture (this episode is rife with juicy horror references), and historically problematic queer pioneers. Spooky!","date_published":"2021-08-26T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/5339fbae-962e-4404-aad3-19abc6728f81.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":40682616,"duration_in_seconds":3390}]},{"id":"d3cc9cc9-3ee2-4561-95b9-bcdc7da3b204","title":"Episode 23: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Katie Kitamura","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/23","content_text":"Katie Kitamura's most recent novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. It was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications and translated into sixteen languages, and is being adapted for film. Her two previous novels, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, were both finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena Foundation, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.\n\nAbout Intimacies:\nA novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.\n\nAn interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.\n \nShe's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.\n \nA woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life. ","content_html":"Katie Kitamura's most recent novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. It was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications and translated into sixteen languages, and is being adapted for film. Her two previous novels, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, were both finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena Foundation, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
\n\nAbout Intimacies:
\nA novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.
An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.
\n
\nShe's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.
\n
\nA woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.
Sophie McCreesh is a fiction writer living in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart, Bad Nudes and elsewhere.
\n\nOnce More, With Feeling follows Jane, an artist navigating her closest relationships while fixating on her own perceived failures and self-imposed isolation. When Jane receives a student grant to attend a workshop in London, England, she sees the opportunity to leave her tedious life behind and start anew, bringing along her new friend Kitty, who Jane will not admit she has little in common with other than a shared appreciation for boxed wine and various other drugs.
\n\nIn London, Jane struggles to improve both her craft and her mindset while Kitty thrives, and a once exciting trip abroad transforms the already uneven dynamic of their friendship, leaving Jane feeling more withdrawn than ever. As her increasingly destructive behaviour gets in the way of her artistic ambitions, her most important relationships--those with Kitty, her absent lover Richard and a discredited therapist named Anna--begin to deteriorate as Jane starts to examine her growing dependence on substances.
\n\nDarkly funny, piercing and tender, Once More, With Feeling is a portrait of a detached young woman trapped in the perils of self-loathing and addiction, who is searching for originality in an age of profound social disconnection and anxiety.
","summary":"Sruti talks to Sophie McCreesh about her debut novel, Once More With Feeling, writing about depression, and how to find hope in the idea of promise.","date_published":"2021-08-12T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/8c0cfefc-547e-4e20-a88b-07bc0da49968.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":20597093,"duration_in_seconds":1716}]},{"id":"ef2e1e9c-3d25-4aa4-b371-e7be0dc272e3","title":"Episode 21: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Beth Morgan","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/21","content_text":"Beth Morgan grew up outside Sherman, Texas and studied writing as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently completing an MFA at Brooklyn College. Her work has been published in The Iowa Review and The Kenyon Review Online.\n\nAbout A Touch of Jen\nRemy and Alicia, a couple of insecure service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former co-worker of Remy’s who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewelry designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia's entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart.\n\nImagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beachside paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, we find ourselves tumbling with Remy and Alicia into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what “self-actualization” looks like?\n\nPart millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.","content_html":"Beth Morgan grew up outside Sherman, Texas and studied writing as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently completing an MFA at Brooklyn College. Her work has been published in The Iowa Review and The Kenyon Review Online.
\n\nAbout A Touch of Jen
\nRemy and Alicia, a couple of insecure service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former co-worker of Remy’s who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewelry designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia's entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart.
Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beachside paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, we find ourselves tumbling with Remy and Alicia into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what “self-actualization” looks like?
\n\nPart millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with Beth Morgan, author of A Touch of Jen, to discuss magical realism, the pleasure in reading “unlikeable” characters, the concept of judgement, social media, and manifesting.","date_published":"2021-08-05T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/ef2e1e9c-3d25-4aa4-b371-e7be0dc272e3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":27141610,"duration_in_seconds":2261}]},{"id":"85d39e29-d3e1-4e08-ad3e-a8b004be9b2b","title":"Episode 20: LSHB's Weird Era Season 1","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/20","content_text":"New to LSHB's Weird Era? Have a listen to this recap of Season 1.","content_html":"New to LSHB's Weird Era? Have a listen to this recap of Season 1.
","summary":"A look back at our first season.","date_published":"2021-07-10T10:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/85d39e29-d3e1-4e08-ad3e-a8b004be9b2b.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":6195774,"duration_in_seconds":476}]},{"id":"c2dca849-e006-479f-8621-8f40df4090e5","title":"Episode 19: LSHB's Weird Era avec. Daphné B.","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/19","content_text":"Poète et traductrice littéraire, Daphné B. vit et travaille à Montréal. Elle passe beaucoup de temps à lire, à écrire et à regarder des vidéos sur YouTube. Elle a publié Bluetiful en 2015 (Les Éditions de l’Écrou), puis Delete (L’Oie de Cravan) en 2017, en plus d’écrire dans de nombreuses revues (Nouveau Projet, Liberté, Vice, Spirale, Zinc, Estuaire, etc.). Elle a co-fondé la plateforme féministe Filles Missiles et collabore régulièrement à l’émission de radio Plus on est de fous, plus on lit, sur les ondes de RadioCanada.\n\nMaquillée est le fruit étonnant d’un nombre incalculable d’heures perdues, passées à enchaîner les tutoriels maquillage sur YouTube, ou encore à naviguer sur le site web de Sephora. Cet essai poétique tire profit d’une obsession personnelle, le maquillage, pour développer une réflexion singulière sur notre époque. Se situant au carrefour des discours sur le genre, l’identité, le capitalisme et la culture pop, le maquillage est un objet d’étude riche et complexe, plus que jamais pertinent. S’il est habituellement dédaigné des sphères intellectuelles, Daphné B. nous prouve hors de tout doute qu’il mérite notre attention. Dans un monde oculaire troué de selfies et bouleversé par une industrie de l’influence, Daphné B. propose une réflexion nuancée, féministe et personnelle sur l’univers de la beauté. Objet littéraire hybride, à cheval entre le récit de soi, le poème et l’essai, Maquillée est une méditation lyrique sur un secteur économique en pleine croissance.","content_html":"Poète et traductrice littéraire, Daphné B. vit et travaille à Montréal. Elle passe beaucoup de temps à lire, à écrire et à regarder des vidéos sur YouTube. Elle a publié Bluetiful en 2015 (Les Éditions de l’Écrou), puis Delete (L’Oie de Cravan) en 2017, en plus d’écrire dans de nombreuses revues (Nouveau Projet, Liberté, Vice, Spirale, Zinc, Estuaire, etc.). Elle a co-fondé la plateforme féministe Filles Missiles et collabore régulièrement à l’émission de radio Plus on est de fous, plus on lit, sur les ondes de RadioCanada.
\n\nMaquillée est le fruit étonnant d’un nombre incalculable d’heures perdues, passées à enchaîner les tutoriels maquillage sur YouTube, ou encore à naviguer sur le site web de Sephora. Cet essai poétique tire profit d’une obsession personnelle, le maquillage, pour développer une réflexion singulière sur notre époque. Se situant au carrefour des discours sur le genre, l’identité, le capitalisme et la culture pop, le maquillage est un objet d’étude riche et complexe, plus que jamais pertinent. S’il est habituellement dédaigné des sphères intellectuelles, Daphné B. nous prouve hors de tout doute qu’il mérite notre attention. Dans un monde oculaire troué de selfies et bouleversé par une industrie de l’influence, Daphné B. propose une réflexion nuancée, féministe et personnelle sur l’univers de la beauté. Objet littéraire hybride, à cheval entre le récit de soi, le poème et l’essai, Maquillée est une méditation lyrique sur un secteur économique en pleine croissance.
","summary":"Rencontre entre Daphnée (notre libraire) et Daphné B. pour jaser sur l’écriture de soi, les paradoxes de la féminité et #papaUQAM.","date_published":"2021-06-24T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/c2dca849-e006-479f-8621-8f40df4090e5.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":23902373,"duration_in_seconds":1991}]},{"id":"0e6975a5-fd14-4c8b-9284-d42c3b69711a","title":"Episode 18: LSHB's Weird Era feat. PJ Vernon","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/18","content_text":"P. J. VERNON was born in South Carolina. His first book, When You Find Me, was published in 2018. He lives in Calgary with his partner and two wily dogs.\n\n“Stylish, smart, and scary as hell.” Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times bestselling author \n\n\"A nightmarish white-knuckler.\" O, The Oprah Magazine\n\nOliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life.\n\nHe races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies.\n\nWhat follows is a classic runaway-train narrative, full of the exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon's Bath Haus is a scintillating thriller with an emotional punch, perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.","content_html":"P. J. VERNON was born in South Carolina. His first book, When You Find Me, was published in 2018. He lives in Calgary with his partner and two wily dogs.
\n\n“Stylish, smart, and scary as hell.” Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times bestselling author
\n\n"A nightmarish white-knuckler." O, The Oprah Magazine
\n\nOliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life.
\n\nHe races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies.
\n\nWhat follows is a classic runaway-train narrative, full of the exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon's Bath Haus is a scintillating thriller with an emotional punch, perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.
","summary":"PJ Vernon joins Alex to discuss his novel, Bath Haus, gay representation in mainstream literature, writing morally complex characters, trust issues, and how Grindr can be used for good.","date_published":"2021-06-17T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/0e6975a5-fd14-4c8b-9284-d42c3b69711a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":28410512,"duration_in_seconds":2367}]},{"id":"b16eea9f-aca7-496e-b89e-1f4446ea4e8a","title":"Episode 17: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Paul Mendez","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/17","content_text":"PAUL MENDEZ was born and raised in the Black Country. He now lives in London and is studying for an M.A. in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been a performing member of two theatre companies, and worked as a voice actor, appearing on audiobooks by Andrea Levy, Paul Theroux and Ben Okri, most recently recording Ian Wright's A Life in Football for Hachette Audio. As a writer, he has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and the Brixton Review of Books. Rainbow Milk is his debut novel.\n\nAbout Rainbow Milk\nAn essential and revelatory coming-of-age narrative from a thrilling new voice, Rainbow Milk follows nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah's Witness upbringing.\n\nIn the 1950s, ex-boxer Norman Alonso is a determined and humble Jamaican who has immigrated to Britain with his wife and children to secure a brighter future. Blighted with unexpected illness and racism, Norman and his family are resilient, but are all too aware that their family will need more than just hope to survive in their new country.\nAt the turn of the millennium, Jesse seeks a fresh start in London, escaping a broken immediate family, a repressive religious community and his depressed hometown in the industrial Black Country. But once he arrives he finds himself at a loss for a new center of gravity, and turns to sex work, music and art to create his own notions of love, masculinity and spirituality.\n\nA wholly original novel as tender as it is visceral, Rainbow Milk is a bold reckoning with race, class, sexuality, freedom and religion across generations, time and cultures.","content_html":"PAUL MENDEZ was born and raised in the Black Country. He now lives in London and is studying for an M.A. in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been a performing member of two theatre companies, and worked as a voice actor, appearing on audiobooks by Andrea Levy, Paul Theroux and Ben Okri, most recently recording Ian Wright's A Life in Football for Hachette Audio. As a writer, he has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and the Brixton Review of Books. Rainbow Milk is his debut novel.
\n\nAbout Rainbow Milk
\nAn essential and revelatory coming-of-age narrative from a thrilling new voice, Rainbow Milk follows nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah's Witness upbringing.
In the 1950s, ex-boxer Norman Alonso is a determined and humble Jamaican who has immigrated to Britain with his wife and children to secure a brighter future. Blighted with unexpected illness and racism, Norman and his family are resilient, but are all too aware that their family will need more than just hope to survive in their new country.
\nAt the turn of the millennium, Jesse seeks a fresh start in London, escaping a broken immediate family, a repressive religious community and his depressed hometown in the industrial Black Country. But once he arrives he finds himself at a loss for a new center of gravity, and turns to sex work, music and art to create his own notions of love, masculinity and spirituality.
A wholly original novel as tender as it is visceral, Rainbow Milk is a bold reckoning with race, class, sexuality, freedom and religion across generations, time and cultures.
","summary":"Alex and Paul sit down to discuss his acclaimed novel, Rainbow Milk, writing as a sensory experience, UK music charts in the early 2000s, and happy endings in queer literature","date_published":"2021-06-10T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/b16eea9f-aca7-496e-b89e-1f4446ea4e8a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35590732,"duration_in_seconds":2965}]},{"id":"11a3a624-c930-4460-97b9-da2851760594","title":"Episode 16: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Brontez Purnell","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/16","content_text":"Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade.\n\nAbout 100 Boyfriends:\nAn irrerverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero\n\nTransgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure—from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama—Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it—or perhaps because of it—they shine.\n\nArmed with a deadpan wit, Purnell finds humor in even the darkest of nadirs with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are an inimitable tour of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.","content_html":"Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade.
\n\nAbout 100 Boyfriends:
\nAn irrerverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero
Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure—from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama—Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it—or perhaps because of it—they shine.
\n\nArmed with a deadpan wit, Purnell finds humor in even the darkest of nadirs with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are an inimitable tour of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.
","summary":"Sruti chats with Brontez Purnell about gay and racial stereotypes, writing elegant prose out of bluntness, and the relationship between black gay men and sin.","date_published":"2021-06-03T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/11a3a624-c930-4460-97b9-da2851760594.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":29403974,"duration_in_seconds":2450}]},{"id":"9ad8ebb0-2f2f-4fe9-81df-d1a4a87147e6","title":"Episode 15: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Anakana Schofield","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/15","content_text":"Anakana Schofield is an award-winning Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Her previous novels are Malarky (2012) and Martin John (2015). The UK edition of Bina was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. Schofield lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.\n\nA provocative, feminist novel about a woman who persists in spite of the violence, injustice, and oppression that fills her world.\n\nBina is a woman who’s had enough and isn’t afraid to say so. “I’m here to warn you, not reassure you,” she announces at the book’s outset. In a series of taut, urgent missives she attempts to set the record of her life straight, and in doing so, to be useful to others. Yet being useful is what landed her in jail. Empathy is her Achilles’ heel. Her troubles seem to stem from an injured stranger named Eddie, and they multiply when her charity extends from delivering meals to the elderly to working with the dying. No good deed of hers goes unpunished and the costs of her capacity for care are legion, as one by one she is denied her livelihood, her health, and her freedom, but her voice continues resolutely, an act of friendship in itself. Bina is an unsettling, thought-provoking novel of formal inventiveness and moral and emotional complexity by a bold and talented writer.","content_html":"Anakana Schofield is an award-winning Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Her previous novels are Malarky (2012) and Martin John (2015). The UK edition of Bina was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. Schofield lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
\n\nA provocative, feminist novel about a woman who persists in spite of the violence, injustice, and oppression that fills her world.
\n\nBina is a woman who’s had enough and isn’t afraid to say so. “I’m here to warn you, not reassure you,” she announces at the book’s outset. In a series of taut, urgent missives she attempts to set the record of her life straight, and in doing so, to be useful to others. Yet being useful is what landed her in jail. Empathy is her Achilles’ heel. Her troubles seem to stem from an injured stranger named Eddie, and they multiply when her charity extends from delivering meals to the elderly to working with the dying. No good deed of hers goes unpunished and the costs of her capacity for care are legion, as one by one she is denied her livelihood, her health, and her freedom, but her voice continues resolutely, an act of friendship in itself. Bina is an unsettling, thought-provoking novel of formal inventiveness and moral and emotional complexity by a bold and talented writer.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with Anakana Schofield, author of Bina: A Novel in Warnings to discuss distrust in the establishment, female pain, and the question of self-euthanization in fiction. ","date_published":"2021-05-27T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/9ad8ebb0-2f2f-4fe9-81df-d1a4a87147e6.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":35275808,"duration_in_seconds":2939}]},{"id":"476ace3f-1a07-4bfb-befd-aa318d6f6cbf","title":"Episode 14: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Alice Sparkly Kat","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/14","content_text":"Alice Sparkly Kat is a queer, PoC astrologer. They use astrology to re-chart a history of the subconscious, redefine the body in world, and reimagine history as collective memory. Their astrological work has inhabited MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Hauser and Wirth Gallery. They're friendly, located in Brooklyn, and available for readings in person or by phone at www.alicesparklykat.com. Follow them on Instagram or Twitter at @alicesparklykat for astrology content and weird memes.\n\nTapping into the political power of magic and astrology for social, community, and personal transformation.\n\nIn a cross-cultural approach to understanding astrology as a magical language, Alice Sparkly Kat unmasks the political power of astrology, showing how it can be channeled as a force for collective healing and liberation.\n\nToo often, magic and astrology are divorced from their potency and cultural contexts: co-opted by neoliberalism, used as a force of oppression, or distilled beyond recognition into applications that belie their individual and collective power. By looking at the symbolic and etymological histories of the sun, moon, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, we can trace and understand the politics of magic--and challenge our own practices, interrogate our truths, and reshape our institutions to build better frameworks for communities of care.\n\nFearless, radical, and fresh, Sparkly Kat's Postcolonial Astrology ushers in a new wave of astrology revival, refusing to apologize for its magickism and connecting its power to the spirituality and politics we need now. Intersectional, inclusive, and geared towards queer and POC communities, it uses our historical and collective constructs of the planets, sun, and moon to re-chart our subconscious history, redefine the body in the world, and assert our politics of the personal, in astrology and all things.","content_html":"Alice Sparkly Kat is a queer, PoC astrologer. They use astrology to re-chart a history of the subconscious, redefine the body in world, and reimagine history as collective memory. Their astrological work has inhabited MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Hauser and Wirth Gallery. They're friendly, located in Brooklyn, and available for readings in person or by phone at www.alicesparklykat.com. Follow them on Instagram or Twitter at @alicesparklykat for astrology content and weird memes.
\n\nTapping into the political power of magic and astrology for social, community, and personal transformation.
\n\nIn a cross-cultural approach to understanding astrology as a magical language, Alice Sparkly Kat unmasks the political power of astrology, showing how it can be channeled as a force for collective healing and liberation.
\n\nToo often, magic and astrology are divorced from their potency and cultural contexts: co-opted by neoliberalism, used as a force of oppression, or distilled beyond recognition into applications that belie their individual and collective power. By looking at the symbolic and etymological histories of the sun, moon, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, we can trace and understand the politics of magic--and challenge our own practices, interrogate our truths, and reshape our institutions to build better frameworks for communities of care.
\n\nFearless, radical, and fresh, Sparkly Kat's Postcolonial Astrology ushers in a new wave of astrology revival, refusing to apologize for its magickism and connecting its power to the spirituality and politics we need now. Intersectional, inclusive, and geared towards queer and POC communities, it uses our historical and collective constructs of the planets, sun, and moon to re-chart our subconscious history, redefine the body in the world, and assert our politics of the personal, in astrology and all things.
","summary":"Sruti sits down with Alice Sparkly Kat to explore colonialism in the study of myth, the role of interpretation in Astrology, and the ways in which astrology functions as a language.","date_published":"2021-05-20T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/476ace3f-1a07-4bfb-befd-aa318d6f6cbf.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":19921326,"duration_in_seconds":1660}]},{"id":"8a8c7b6b-418d-47d5-8970-f28895a089b3","title":"Episode 13: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Isle McElroy","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/13","content_text":"Isle McElroy is a nonbinary writer based in Brooklyn. Their debut novel, THE ATMOSPHERIANS, was named a NY Times Editors' Choice. Their second novel, PEOPLE COLLIDE, is forthcoming from HarperVia. Other writing appears in The NY Times, NYT Magazine, The Guardian, The Cut, Vulture, GQ, Vogue, The Atlantic, Tin House, and elsewhere. \n\nAbout The Atmospherians:\nSasha Marcus was once the epitome of contemporary success: an internet sensation, social media darling, and a creator of a high profile wellness brand for women. But a confrontation with an abusive troll has taken a horrifying turn, and now she’s at rock bottom: canceled and doxxed online, fired from her waitress job and fortressed in her apartment while men’s rights protestors rage outside. All that once glittered now condemns.\n\nSasha confides in her oldest childhood friend, Dyson—a failed actor with a history of body issues—who hatches a plan for Sasha to restore her reputation by becoming the face of his new business venture, The Atmosphere: a rehabilitation community for men. Based in an abandoned summer camp and billed as a workshop for job training, it is actually a rigorous program designed to rid men of their toxic masculinity and heal them physically, emotionally, and socially. Sasha has little choice but to accept. But what horrors await her as the resident female leader of a crew of washed up, desperate men? And what exactly does Dyson want?\n\nExplosive and wickedly funny, this “Fight Club for the millennial generation” (Mat Johnson, author of Pym) peers straight into the dark heart of wellness and woke-ness, self-mythology and self-awareness, by asking what happens when we become addicted to the performance of ourselves.","content_html":"Isle McElroy is a nonbinary writer based in Brooklyn. Their debut novel, THE ATMOSPHERIANS, was named a NY Times Editors' Choice. Their second novel, PEOPLE COLLIDE, is forthcoming from HarperVia. Other writing appears in The NY Times, NYT Magazine, The Guardian, The Cut, Vulture, GQ, Vogue, The Atlantic, Tin House, and elsewhere.
\n\nAbout The Atmospherians:
\nSasha Marcus was once the epitome of contemporary success: an internet sensation, social media darling, and a creator of a high profile wellness brand for women. But a confrontation with an abusive troll has taken a horrifying turn, and now she’s at rock bottom: canceled and doxxed online, fired from her waitress job and fortressed in her apartment while men’s rights protestors rage outside. All that once glittered now condemns.
Sasha confides in her oldest childhood friend, Dyson—a failed actor with a history of body issues—who hatches a plan for Sasha to restore her reputation by becoming the face of his new business venture, The Atmosphere: a rehabilitation community for men. Based in an abandoned summer camp and billed as a workshop for job training, it is actually a rigorous program designed to rid men of their toxic masculinity and heal them physically, emotionally, and socially. Sasha has little choice but to accept. But what horrors await her as the resident female leader of a crew of washed up, desperate men? And what exactly does Dyson want?
\n\nExplosive and wickedly funny, this “Fight Club for the millennial generation” (Mat Johnson, author of Pym) peers straight into the dark heart of wellness and woke-ness, self-mythology and self-awareness, by asking what happens when we become addicted to the performance of ourselves.
","summary":"Isle McElroy talks about their debut novel The Atmospherians, the role of empathy in fiction, moral purity, and accountability vs cancel culture. ","date_published":"2021-05-13T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/8a8c7b6b-418d-47d5-8970-f28895a089b3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":36785942,"duration_in_seconds":2892}]},{"id":"dbb02191-aa1e-4d71-bf3f-04a1328d48e3","title":"Episode 12: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Larissa Pham","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/12","content_text":"Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. Born in Portland, Oregon, she studied painting and art history at Yale University. She has written essays and criticism for the Paris Review Daily, The Nation, Art in America, Guernica, and elsewhere. She was an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is also the author of Fantasian, a novella.\n\n--\n\nLike a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go.\n\nPop Song is a book about love and about falling in love--with a place, or a painting, or a person--and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss--from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde--Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself. \n\nPop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed.\n\nPop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness.","content_html":"Larissa Pham is an artist and writer in Brooklyn. Born in Portland, Oregon, she studied painting and art history at Yale University. She has written essays and criticism for the Paris Review Daily, The Nation, Art in America, Guernica, and elsewhere. She was an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is also the author of Fantasian, a novella.
\n\n--
\n\nLike a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go.
\n\nPop Song is a book about love and about falling in love--with a place, or a painting, or a person--and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss--from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde--Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.
\n\nPop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed.
\n\nPop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness.
","summary":"Alex sits down with Larissa Pham to talk about her new essay collection Pop Song, the joys of Tumblr in 2012, intimacy, and art writing vs art critique.","date_published":"2021-05-06T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/dbb02191-aa1e-4d71-bf3f-04a1328d48e3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":34534983,"duration_in_seconds":2877}]},{"id":"d206df60-2aab-4b06-b3ad-3e78e5793fdc","title":"Episode 11: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Alex and Sruti","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/11","content_text":"Librairie Saint-Henri Store Manager, and Weird Era Co-host and Weird Era Founder and Co-Host, Sruti, sit down and talk about the start of this project, the store's affinity for curation, and what we look for in literature.","content_html":"Librairie Saint-Henri Store Manager, and Weird Era Co-host and Weird Era Founder and Co-Host, Sruti, sit down and talk about the start of this project, the store's affinity for curation, and what we look for in literature.
","summary":"Librairie Saint-Henri Store Manager, and Weird Era Co-host and Weird Era Founder and Co-Host, Sruti, sit down and talk about the start of this project, the store's affinity for curation, and what we look for in literature.","date_published":"2021-04-22T09:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/d206df60-2aab-4b06-b3ad-3e78e5793fdc.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":33380326,"duration_in_seconds":2781}]},{"id":"d4949d9e-6ebd-4b37-8d39-79818110b8be","title":"Episode 10: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Syan Rose","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/10","content_text":"About Syan Rose:\nSyan Rose is an illustrator and comic artist whose work plays with both surrealist and representational imagery to approach topics of personal history, politics, accountability, and healing. She’s been published in Bitch, Slate, Gay Magazine, Truthout, and Autostraddle, and has self-produced many comics and zines. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer and performer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. Her most recent titles are the nonfiction book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) and the poetry book Tonguebreaker (2019). Her memoir Dirty River was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award (Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction). She is also author of the poetry books Bodymap and Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner) and Consensual Genocide, and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. She is the co-founder of Mangos With Chili, North America's touring queer and trans people of colour cabaret, and is a lead artist with the disability justice incubator Sins Invalid.\n\nAbout Our Work Is Everywhere: An Illustrated Oral History of Queer and Trans Resistance:\nA visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance.\n\nOver the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real, and imagined queer and trans communities.\n\nIn their own words, queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of queer and trans realities in America. The many themes include Black femme mental health, Pacific Islander authorship, fat queer performance art, disability and health care practice, sex worker activism, and much more. Accompanying the narratives are Rose's startling and sinuous images that brings these leaders' words to visual life.\n\nOur Work Is Everywhere is a graphic non-fiction book that underscores the brilliance and passion of queer and trans resistance.\n\nIncludes a foreword by Lambda Literary Award-winning author and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.\n\nFull-colour throughout.","content_html":"About Syan Rose:
\nSyan Rose is an illustrator and comic artist whose work plays with both surrealist and representational imagery to approach topics of personal history, politics, accountability, and healing. She’s been published in Bitch, Slate, Gay Magazine, Truthout, and Autostraddle, and has self-produced many comics and zines. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer and performer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. Her most recent titles are the nonfiction book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) and the poetry book Tonguebreaker (2019). Her memoir Dirty River was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award (Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction). She is also author of the poetry books Bodymap and Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner) and Consensual Genocide, and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. She is the co-founder of Mangos With Chili, North America's touring queer and trans people of colour cabaret, and is a lead artist with the disability justice incubator Sins Invalid.
About Our Work Is Everywhere: An Illustrated Oral History of Queer and Trans Resistance:
\nA visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance.
Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real, and imagined queer and trans communities.
\n\nIn their own words, queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of queer and trans realities in America. The many themes include Black femme mental health, Pacific Islander authorship, fat queer performance art, disability and health care practice, sex worker activism, and much more. Accompanying the narratives are Rose's startling and sinuous images that brings these leaders' words to visual life.
\n\nOur Work Is Everywhere is a graphic non-fiction book that underscores the brilliance and passion of queer and trans resistance.
\n\nIncludes a foreword by Lambda Literary Award-winning author and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.
\n\nFull-colour throughout.
","summary":"Syan Rose talks about different types of work, acupuncture, how to be a better ally, and the importance of amplifying marginalized voices.","date_published":"2021-04-15T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/d4949d9e-6ebd-4b37-8d39-79818110b8be.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":31414686,"duration_in_seconds":2617}]},{"id":"ba5f0eed-27cb-4dc9-bc91-d87e6384fd88","title":"Episode 9: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Marlowe Granados","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/9","content_text":"About Marlowe Granados:\nMarlowe Granados is a writer and filmmaker. She co-hosts The Mean Reds, a podcast dedicated to women-led films, and her advice column, \"Designs for Living,\" appears in The Baffler. Granados currently resides in Toronto. Happy Hour is her debut novel.\n\nAbout Happy Hour:\nRefreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicatingnovel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time.\n\nIn her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill.\n\nHappy Hour is a novel about getting by and looking great in a system that wants you to do neither.","content_html":"About Marlowe Granados:
\nMarlowe Granados is a writer and filmmaker. She co-hosts The Mean Reds, a podcast dedicated to women-led films, and her advice column, "Designs for Living," appears in The Baffler. Granados currently resides in Toronto. Happy Hour is her debut novel.
About Happy Hour:
\nRefreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicatingnovel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time.
In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill.
\n\nHappy Hour is a novel about getting by and looking great in a system that wants you to do neither.
","summary":"Marlowe Granados talks about her debut novel Happy Hour, that time she beckoned Greta Gerwig, female friendships, what style means in text and in clothes, and much more.","date_published":"2021-04-08T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/ba5f0eed-27cb-4dc9-bc91-d87e6384fd88.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":53757252,"duration_in_seconds":4479}]},{"id":"de70f848-3945-4392-9e20-59fc82c85670","title":"Episode 8: LSHB's Weird Era feat. andrea bennet","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/8","content_text":"About andrea bennet:\nandrea bennett is a National Magazine Award-winning writer and editor and the author of one book of poetry (Canoodlers, Nightwood Editions) and two travel guides (Montreal and Quebec City, Moon Guides). Like a Boy but Not a Boy is andrea's first book of essays.\n\nAbout Like A Boy but Not a Boy:\nInquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett's experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a body. The book's fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (apparently you can learn a lot about yourself through trueing a wheel).\n\nIn \"Tomboy,\" andrea articulates what it means to live in a gender in-between space, and why one might be necessary; \"37 Jobs 21 Houses\" interrogates the notion that the key to a better life is working hard and moving house. And interspersed throughout the book is \"Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive,\" sixteen stories about queer millennials who grew up and came of age in small Canadian communities.\n\nWith the same poignant spirit as Ivan Coyote's Tomboy Survival Guide, Like a Boy addresses the struggle to find acceptance, and to accept oneself; and how one can find one's place while learning to make space for others. The book also wonders what it means to be an atheist and search for faith that everything will be okay; what it means to learn how to love life even as you obsess over its brevity; and how to give birth, to bring new life, at what feels like the end of the world.\n\nWith thoughtfulness and acute observation, andrea bennett reveals intimate truths about the human experience, whether one is outside the gender binary or not.","content_html":"About andrea bennet:
\nandrea bennett is a National Magazine Award-winning writer and editor and the author of one book of poetry (Canoodlers, Nightwood Editions) and two travel guides (Montreal and Quebec City, Moon Guides). Like a Boy but Not a Boy is andrea's first book of essays.
About Like A Boy but Not a Boy:
\nInquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett's experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a body. The book's fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (apparently you can learn a lot about yourself through trueing a wheel).
In "Tomboy," andrea articulates what it means to live in a gender in-between space, and why one might be necessary; "37 Jobs 21 Houses" interrogates the notion that the key to a better life is working hard and moving house. And interspersed throughout the book is "Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive," sixteen stories about queer millennials who grew up and came of age in small Canadian communities.
\n\nWith the same poignant spirit as Ivan Coyote's Tomboy Survival Guide, Like a Boy addresses the struggle to find acceptance, and to accept oneself; and how one can find one's place while learning to make space for others. The book also wonders what it means to be an atheist and search for faith that everything will be okay; what it means to learn how to love life even as you obsess over its brevity; and how to give birth, to bring new life, at what feels like the end of the world.
\n\nWith thoughtfulness and acute observation, andrea bennett reveals intimate truths about the human experience, whether one is outside the gender binary or not.
","summary":"","date_published":"2021-04-01T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/de70f848-3945-4392-9e20-59fc82c85670.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":42225393,"duration_in_seconds":3518}]},{"id":"40524eb9-7d25-465b-aad3-cb04901f12c4","title":"Episode 7: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Hilary Leichter","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/7","content_text":"About Hilary Leichter:\nHilary Leichter's writing has appeared in n+1, the New Yorker, the Cut, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.\n\nAbout Temporary:\nIn Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.” \n\nThis riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.","content_html":"About Hilary Leichter:
\nHilary Leichter's writing has appeared in n+1, the New Yorker, the Cut, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About Temporary:
\nIn Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”
This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.
","summary":"Hilary Leichter discusses adventure novels, in childhood and adulthood, waiting for our lives to start, and how writers can be their own ideal readers.","date_published":"2021-03-25T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/40524eb9-7d25-465b-aad3-cb04901f12c4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":33128054,"duration_in_seconds":2720}]},{"id":"d4b3f508-6b16-40d2-8a2e-a722527d5a1a","title":"Episode 6: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Katherine Angel","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/6","content_text":"About Katherine Angel:\nKatherine Angel is the author of Unmastered, Most Difficult to Tell and Daddy Issues. She directs the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and has a PhD from the University of Cambridge.\n\nAbout Sex Will be Good Again Tomorrow:\nWomen are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women—and their bodies—want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to?\n\nIn this elegant, searching book—spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism—Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?\n\nIn today’s crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault’s teasing promise, in 1976, that “tomorrow sex will be good again.”","content_html":"About Katherine Angel:
\nKatherine Angel is the author of Unmastered, Most Difficult to Tell and Daddy Issues. She directs the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and has a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
About Sex Will be Good Again Tomorrow:
\nWomen are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women—and their bodies—want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to?
In this elegant, searching book—spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism—Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?
\n\nIn today’s crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault’s teasing promise, in 1976, that “tomorrow sex will be good again.”
","summary":"Katherine Angel discusses her latest book, Sex Will Be Good Again Tomorrow, consent, desire, and how to shift the #metoo movement to better benefit all members of society.","date_published":"2021-03-18T21:00:00.000-04:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/d4b3f508-6b16-40d2-8a2e-a722527d5a1a.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":38166096,"duration_in_seconds":3180}]},{"id":"06abdda9-e21d-4265-84dd-d8a185c0a078","title":"Episode 5: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Christine Smallwood","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/5","content_text":"About Christine Smallwood:\nChristine Smallwood’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, and Vice. Her reviews, essays, and cultural reporting have been published in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Bookforum, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She has also written the “New Books” column for Harper’s Magazine, where she is a contributing editor, and been an editor at The Nation. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, is a founding faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.\n\nAbout The Life of the Mind:\nAs an adjunct professor of English in New York City with no hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists—Dorothy has two of them. Nor can she bring herself to tell the other women in her life: her friends, her doctor, her mentor, her mother. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure?\n\nPiercingly intelligent and darkly funny, The Life of the Mind is a novel about endings: of youth, of professional aspiration, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet Dorothy’s mind is all she has to make sense of a world largely out of her control, one where disaster looms and is already here, where things happen but there is no plot. There is meaning, however, if Dorothy figures out where to look, and as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides, she finds it in the most unlikely places, from a Las Vegas poolside to a living room karaoke session. In literature—as Dorothy well knows—stories end. But life, as they say, goes on.","content_html":"About Christine Smallwood:
\nChristine Smallwood’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, and Vice. Her reviews, essays, and cultural reporting have been published in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Bookforum, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She has also written the “New Books” column for Harper’s Magazine, where she is a contributing editor, and been an editor at The Nation. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, is a founding faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
About The Life of the Mind:
\nAs an adjunct professor of English in New York City with no hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists—Dorothy has two of them. Nor can she bring herself to tell the other women in her life: her friends, her doctor, her mentor, her mother. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure?
Piercingly intelligent and darkly funny, The Life of the Mind is a novel about endings: of youth, of professional aspiration, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet Dorothy’s mind is all she has to make sense of a world largely out of her control, one where disaster looms and is already here, where things happen but there is no plot. There is meaning, however, if Dorothy figures out where to look, and as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides, she finds it in the most unlikely places, from a Las Vegas poolside to a living room karaoke session. In literature—as Dorothy well knows—stories end. But life, as they say, goes on.
","summary":"Author and Critic Christine Smallwood discusses her debut novel, The Life of the Mind: ambient doubleness, waste, and a critic's sense of humour.","date_published":"2021-03-11T21:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/06abdda9-e21d-4265-84dd-d8a185c0a078.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":32064787,"duration_in_seconds":2672}]},{"id":"c0f716fa-7788-4766-9924-2b07c7985b64","title":"Episode 4: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Francesca Ekwuyasi","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/4","content_text":"About Francesca Ekwuyasi:\nFrancesca Ekwuyasi is a writer, artist, and filmmaker born in Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness, and belonging. Her writing has been published in Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and GUTS magazine. Her story \"Orun is Heaven\" was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize. Butter Honey Pig Bread, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is her first novel.\n\nAbout Butter Honey Pig Bread:\nButter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.","content_html":"About Francesca Ekwuyasi:
\nFrancesca Ekwuyasi is a writer, artist, and filmmaker born in Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness, and belonging. Her writing has been published in Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and GUTS magazine. Her story "Orun is Heaven" was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize. Butter Honey Pig Bread, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is her first novel.
About Butter Honey Pig Bread:
\nButter Honey Pig Bread is a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.
About Joni Murphy:
\nJoni Murphy is from New Mexico and lives in New York. Her debut novel, Double Teenage, was published in 2016 and was named one of the Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of the year.
About Talking Animals:
\nA fable for our times, Joni Murphy's Talking Animals takes place in an all-animal world where creatures rather like us are forced to deal with an all-too-familiar landscape of soul-crushing jobs, polluted oceans, and a creeping sense of doom.It's New York City, nowish. Lemurs brew espresso. Birds tend bar. There are bears on Wall Street, and a billionaire racehorse is mayor. Sea creatures are viewed with fear and disgust and there's chatter about building a wall to keep them out.Alfonzo is a moody alpaca. His friend Mitchell is a sociable llama. They both work at City Hall, but their true passions are noise music and underground politics. Partly to meet girls, partly because the world might be ending, these lowly bureaucrats embark on an unlikely mission to expose the corrupt system that's destroying the city from within. Their project takes them from the city's bowels to its extremities, where they encounter the Sea Equality Revolutionary Front, who are either a group of dangerous radicals or an inspiring liberation movement.In this novel, at last, nature kvetches and grieves, while talking animals offer us a kind of solace in the guise of dumb jokes. This is mass extinction as told by BoJack Horseman. This is The Fantastic Mr. Fox journeying through Kafka's Amerika. This is dogs and cats, living together. Talking Animals is an urgent allegory about friendship, art, and the elemental struggle to change one's life under the low ceiling of capitalism.
About Lauren Oyler:
\nLauren Oyler's essays on books and culture have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, London Review of Books, The Guardian, New York magazine's The Cut, The New Republic, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now divides her time between New York and Berlin.
About Fake Accounts:
\nOn the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: he's an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she's relieved--he was always a little distant--and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.
Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can't trust anyone--shouldn't the feeling be mutual?
\n\nNarrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age.
","summary":"Lauren Oyler discusses her debut novel Fake Accounts: book criticism, relationship anarchy, and moral purity.","date_published":"2021-02-11T21:00:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/7c20f2ff-7ed4-4653-b584-52aa2606b1b4.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":99818442,"duration_in_seconds":2473}]},{"id":"d94176fc-8946-42c3-883f-87e457e0d6f3","title":"Episode 1: LSHB's Weird Era feat. Torrey Peters","url":"https://snowy-dew-6832.fireside.fm/1","content_text":"About Torrey Peters:\nTorrey Peters is the author of the novellas Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker, which are available for free on her website. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She grew up in Chicago and now lives in Brooklyn.\n\nAbout Detransition, Baby:\nReese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.\n\nAmes isn’t happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames’s boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she’s pregnant with his baby—and that she’s not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he’s been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?\n\nThis provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can’t reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.","content_html":"About Torrey Peters:
\nTorrey Peters is the author of the novellas Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker, which are available for free on her website. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She grew up in Chicago and now lives in Brooklyn.
About Detransition, Baby:
\nReese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.
Ames isn’t happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames’s boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she’s pregnant with his baby—and that she’s not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he’s been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?
\n\nThis provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can’t reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.
","summary":"Bookseller, Sruti Islam, sits down to discuss Detransition, Baby—a debut novel by Torrey Peters.","date_published":"2021-02-05T08:30:00.000-05:00","attachments":[{"url":"https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/aa758402-506c-4cb6-90e5-34ca75cb33d2/d94176fc-8946-42c3-883f-87e457e0d6f3.mp3","mime_type":"audio/mpeg","size_in_bytes":84035725,"duration_in_seconds":2081}]}]}