Between The Covers

  Host Bethany Grabow talks with Jesse Andrews, author of the new book The Haters. This hilarious and touching story follows Wes Doolittle and his friends as they escape the oppression of jazz band camp and set off on a road trip in search of a venue to play an epic con... Read more

  A go-for-broke essay collection that blends cultural close reading and dicey autobiography. Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics —Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br’er Rabbit, Housesitt... Read more

Host Ken Jones talks with Dmae Roberts, author of the new book The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family. The book takes the form of a series of personal essays, in which Dmae writes about her biracial identity as the child of a Taiwanese mother and white ... Read more

  Deep in gambling debt, the celebrated Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda is last seen holding a suitcase and a cigar and climbing into an almond tree. She abruptly vanishes. In snowy Pittsburgh, her American translator Emma hears the news and, against the wishes of her b... Read more

Late in the Day, Ursula K. Le Guin’s new collection of poems (2010–2014) seeks meaning in an ever-connected world. In part evocative of Neruda’s Odes to Common Things and Mary Oliver’s poetic guides to the natural world, Le Guin’s latest give voice to objects that may no... Read more

  Host Bethany Grabow talks with Cat Winters, author of the new book The Steep and Thorny Way. This historical fiction, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, follows protagonist Hanalee as she navigates rural Oregon in the 1920’s as a biracial teen coming to terms with... Read more

Host Ken Jones talks with Stephanie Storey, author of the new book Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo. The novel depicts the fierce rivalry between these two great artists as they struggle to complete their masterworks -- the Mona Lisa and the David -- ... Read more

A stuffed bear's heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby; Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive; and in a mine on another planet, the dust won't stop seeping in. In these stories, Brian Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary... Read more

In this stunning work of historical fiction, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America, a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record. In 1527, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port of San... Read more