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

“Morgan Parker’s latest collection, Magical Negro, is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness. . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read—both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest.”—Glory Edim, Time Magazine

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Today’s guest is one of the most singular and celebrated Anglophone poets writing today, Carl Phillips. We center his latest collection, Scattered Snows, to the North, his first since winning the 2023 Pulitzer prize in poetry. But we also use his three craft books written over the decades (in 2004, 2014 and 2023 respectively) to look at his body of work across time. We spend time attending to language, to syntax, to form. And equally, we look outward toward questions of voice, community, identity and more.

For the bonus audio, Carl contributes a reading of a medley of poems about black swans, poems by James Merrill, Randall Jarrell and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, which he comments on as he goes. He ends this remarkable reading with a black swan poem of his own. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about all the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation.

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Today’s conversation with Álvaro Enrigue about his latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires, translated by Natasha Wimmer, is set during the relatively undocumented first encounter between Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés. The novel dilates the knife’s edge moment when the Aztec emperor invites the conquistador, with his small band of Spanish soldiers, into the palaces of Tenochtitlan as guests. We talk about writing into the gaps of history, fiction’s influence on the “official” record, histories that are actually fictions, and how writing into erased or distorted histories can be a way to speak to the present moment. We talk of hornless deer, ritual cannibalism, psychedelic tomatoes, and a surprising influence of the indigenous cultures of the Americas on all of our lives today.

If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the potential gifts and rewards of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.

Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode with all the books, fiction and nonfiction, literary and scholarly, that we reference today.

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In Early Medieval Ireland there was a language called Ogham that was sometimes referred to as the “Celtic Tree Alphabet'” because its letters each corresponded to and depicted a different tree. At one point Ireland, now one of the most deforested countries in Europe, was largely covered in forest, its culture deeply entwined with the life of trees. Irish visual artist Katie Holten has created a new contemporary tree alphabet, gathered the voices, thoughts, poems, and meditations of some of the great thinkers about trees and the natural world, and translated their writings into “tree.” A book of image and a book of text, the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin and Richard Powers, Ross Gay and Robert Macfarlane, Amitav Ghosh, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ada Limón, and many more, is transformed into tree language as they each, in their own way, evoke the complex beings that are trees, and argue, as Richard Powers does, that “this is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”

If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.

Today’s conversation was recorded at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland before a live audience.

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Today’s guest, Bulgarian novelist, storyteller, poet, essayist, and more, Georgi Gospodinov, is the perfect writer to bring in the new year. Gospodinov is a writer obsessed with beginnings and endings, with time, history, imagination, and memory. A writer raised on the stories of his grandmother, on the fantastical tales of Márquez and Borges, on the notion that stories themselves can not only comfort and console, but sometimes save a life. His latest novel, Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel (who is part of today’s conversation), is about the comforts and dangers of the past, of nostalgia, and what happens to a country, to a world, when the future feels canceled and we look backward for somewhere to live. As Bulgarian translator Izidora Angel said in her review of the book: “Beneath the book’s speculative façade, it’s also clear the author is meditating on his own legacy as a man of words within it. Real, bloody conflict exists but something else is eating away at us too—a critical depletion of empathy, a critical mass of meaninglessness, as Gospodinov has called it, and it is the job of writers to counter these metaphysical but no less real dangers. Words are time shelters too—living, breathing portals to memory, experience, and history, archives and blueprints all at once.”

For subscribers to the bonus audio archive, there is a supplementary interview with Georgi’s translator, Angela Rodel, about the questions and conundrums of translation that arose with Time Shelter, about how Gospodinov’s work is distinct within Bulgarian literature, and about her own artistic pursuits beyond translation, from starring in Bulgarian films and television to performing in a Bulgarian folk-rock band and more. This joins other long-form conversations with translators of other previous guests including Megan McDowell translating Alejandro Zambra, Ellen Elias-Bursać translating Dubravka Ugrešić, and more. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page.

Finally here is today’s Bookshop.

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