Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

Ursula K. Le Guin titled her introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing “Fear and Loathing in the Interview,” and in it she said: “The good interview is like a good badminton rally: you know right away that the two of you can keep that birdie in the air, and all you have to do is watch it fly. Facing each other for the first time in one of KBOO’s lovable, terminally funky...

Layli Long Soldier returns to the show to discuss her latest remarkable poetry collection We (and/or Wé). We talk about these two connotations of we/wé, the questions of address, audience, identity and kinship implicit in them both. We explore the many visual art installations documented within We and how they intersect with both poetry and community. We explore what it means to treat a poem, not...

Today’s unforgettable archival conversation with Elvia Wilk was recorded in-person in 2019 on the occasion of the release of her debut novel Oval. Wilk takes questions of self and other, nature and culture, human and non-human into the dystopic near-future and into the realm of both philosophy and narrative. We discuss her writings outside of the novel about weird fiction, the literary movement...

Today’s archival episode with Marlon James was recorded in 2019 at the studios of KBOO community radio. Marlon’s latest book The Disappearers has garnered the most talked about book review of this year, from the New York Times book critic Dwight Garner (who isn’t known to gush). Not only did he say it should be talked about alongside Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and...

China Miéville’s much-anticipated new book The Rouse is twenty-one years in the making. He was writing it when he wrote The City & The City and Embassytown. He was writing it when he wrote October: The Story of the Russian Revolution and A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto. He was writing it when he wrote children’s books, comics and his latest collaborative novel with Keanu...

Today’s conversation between Thalia Field and David Naimon, moderated by Anne de Marcken, was recorded in February as part of the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Visual Arts low residency MFA program. Thalia and David discuss and explore their pieces within the anthology Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation, where each writer was given a scientific study to...

Today’s guest, poet Hajjar Baban, discusses her truly remarkable debut collection of poetry Low Flying Planes. Together we explore Kurdish poetics, the role of silence, refusal and isolation in her work, the Kurdish Poets Collective, writing lineages, and much more. Selected for the 2025 National Poetry Series by past guest of the show, poet Jake Skeets, Jake says of Low Flying Planes: “…if...

Today’s conversation with poet Morgan Parker was recorded in-person in 2019 and was Morgan’s second appearance on the show. Both conversations with Morgan are unforgettable, so don’t miss her first appearance in 2017 after you enjoy today’s episode about Magical Negro. Later that same year Magical Negro won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Danez Smith, another past guest of this...

Claudia Rankine first appeared on Between the Covers in 2014 to discuss Citizen: An American Lyric. Our first encounter back then was before January 6th or October 7th, before Trump 1.0 or Trump 2.0, before the public murder of George Floyd or the live-streamed genocide, before the fall of Roe v Wade or the massive worldwide fires felling our forests each summer. Not only do we account for the...

We welcome back Valeria Luiselli—who first appeared on the show eleven years ago—to discuss her new and truly marvelous novel Beginning Middle End. Much like the shapeshifting god Proteus, who figures prominently in this story, Beginning Middle End is many things at once: a road novel, a family drama, a work of climate fiction, a feminist retelling of classical mythology, a novel about writing,...