Between The Covers

  “Max Porter's innovative hybrid of fairy tale, fable, and myth cunningly evokes the freewheeling fantasies of children at play. . . .The result is a puckish celebration of imagination and free spirits rising above the buzz of societal scolds and the anxieties of parental... Read more

Portland author Renee Watson discusses her latest book, "Watch Us Rise." This episode originally aired Feb 07, 2019 on Black Book Talk. Jasmine and Chelsea are best friends on a mission--they're sick of the way women are treated even at their progressive NYC high school, so... Read more

  “Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro,  Ted Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional wa... Read more

  “One of the first great novels of the year... In a narrative so sharp it could draw blood, Miriam Toews' Women Talking asks an immense, weighty question: How do women who have lived their entire lives in a society that severely limits their agency act when suddenly needi... Read more

“Kenji Liu’s Monsters I Have Been writhes knotty tentacles through textual boneyards," raves Douglas Kearny, "disturbing screenplays, theoretical works, and literatures in their coffined-off sleeps... Sharp, protean, dexterous, and discontent―Liu’s collection shows where th... Read more

Host Ken Jones talks with Karen Russell, author of the new book Orange World and Other Stories. Orange World is Karen’s fifth book, following the novel Swamplandia!, the novella Sleep Donation, and two collections of short fiction – St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolv... Read more

  The lyrical prose of Sophia Shalmiyev’s memoir, Mother Winter, splits open like layer after layer of an ornate matryoshka. With a mesmeric voice and scathing vulnerability, Shalmiyev peels her past down to its hollow core: the vacancy left by her absent mother. Across ti... Read more

  “Magical Negro is unsettlingly new: a book that incisively explores states of black womanhood with astonishing buoyancy and grief. I can’t stop thinking about the songs it sings, songs that feel inevitable and yet unvoiced, complex and yet urgent; poems that are steeped ... Read more

  “The contemporary Latin American detective novel is a form that uses the individual’s rollicking quest as a means of resistance against repressive structures and the violences they engender. Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome, in this stellar translation by Suzan... Read more