A podcast for writers and readers who are obsessive about their books. Interviews with established and up-and-coming writers, and recommendations for the best in contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama. Chris Holmes. Chris is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Author Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her final project was to write wall labels for the museum's new British Galleries. During that time, she dreamt of using The Met's strict label format to describe people as intricate works of art. The result is this "jewel box of a novel" (Kirkus Reviews) that imagines a privileged 20th-century woman as an artifact--an object prized, collected, and critiqued. One Woman Show (Avid Reader Press, 2023) revolves around the life of Kitty Whitaker as she is defined by her potential for display and moved from collection to collection through multiple marriages. Coulson precisely distills each stage of this sprawling life, every brief snapshot in time a wry reflection on womanhood, ownership, value, and power.
"A moving story of privilege, womanhood, and the sweep of the 20th century told through a single American life" (Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind), Kitty is an eccentric heroine who disrupts her porcelain life with both major force and minor transgressions. Described with poignancy and humor, Coulson's playful reversal on our interaction with art ultimately questions who really gets to tell our stories.
Christine Coulson spent 25 years writing for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and left the museum as Senior Writer in 2019. She started at The Met in 1991 as a summer intern in the European Paintings Department and returned in 1994 to start her first job at the museum after graduate school. During her tenure, she rose through the ranks of the museum, working in the Development Office, the Director’s Office, and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts.
In 2017, The Met gave Coulson a yearlong sabbatical to write Metropolitan Stories, her bestselling 2019 novel about the museum.
Recommended Books:
Katheryn Scanlan, Kick the Latch
J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country
Myra Coleman, Women Holding Things
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Sam Sax, "Yr Dead" (McSweeney’s Books, 2024)
Episode 146
Tuesday, November 26, 2024 • Duration 46:36
Sam Sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They're the author of Yr Dead (McSweeney's Books, 2024), longlisted for The National Book Award and PIG named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit. They're also the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. Sam's received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Lit, MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.
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C. Michelle Lindley, "The Nude" (Atria Books, 2024)
Episode 137
Friday, August 30, 2024 • Duration 37:46
1999: An island off the southern coast of Greece. Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artifact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her career, her ambition, and her troubling history.
Disoriented by jet lag, debilitating migraines, and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth turns to her charming and guileless translator to guide her around the labyrinthine island. Soon, the island's lushness--its heat and light, its textures and tastes--take hold of Elizabeth. And when she's introduced to her translator's inscrutable wife--a subversive artist whose work seeks to deconstruct the female form--she becomes unexpectedly enthralled by her. But once the nude's acquisition proves to be riskier than Elizabeth could have ever imagined, Elizabeth's and the statue's fate are called into question. To find a way out, Elizabeth must grapple with her past, the role she's played in the global art trade, and the ethical fallouts her decisions could leave behind.
The Nude (Atria Books, 2024) is an evocative and intense exploration of art, cultural theft, and what it means to be a woman helming morally complicated negotiations in a male-directed world.
C. Michelle Lindley’s work can be found in Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for 2024 and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and a BA in English and Art History from the University of California at Berkeley. And most recently she is the recipient of the Freund Prize for exceptional creative writing.
Recommended Books:
JoAnna Novak, Domestirexia
Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love
Rose Boyt, Naked Portrait
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Rebecca van Laer, "How to Adjust to the Dark" (Long Day, 2022) & Shannon McLeod, "Whimsy" (Long Day, 2021)
Episode 47
Friday, July 15, 2022 • Duration 52:22
Rebecca van Laer’s writing appears in TriQuarterly Review, joyland, Columbia journal, the Florida review, Salamander, Hobart, mokeybicycle, electric literature and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University. Shannon McLeod is the author of the essay chapbook Pathetic from Etchings Press, and her writings have appeared in Tin House, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, and Smokelong Quarterly. She lives in Virginia where she teaches high school English. Rebecca and Shannon join me to discuss their debut novellas, How to Adjust to the Dark and Whimsy, both out with Long Day Press.
Books Recommended in this episode:
How to Adjust to the Dark and Whimsy
Rebecca Recommends:
Nate Lippens, My Dead Book
Naomi Washer, Subjects We Left Out
Shannon Recommends:
Chloe Caldwell, Women
Chantal V. Johnson, Post-Traumatic
Ursula Villarreal-Moura, Math for the Self-Crippling
Sebastian Castillo, Not I
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Julia Glass, "Vigil Harbor" (Pantheon, 2022)
Episode 46
Tuesday, July 5, 2022 • Duration 51:56
Julia and I discuss her latest novel, Vigil Harbor, a story of the near future in which many of our current crises are amplified in terrifying yet recognizable ways. The Covid pandemic and its aftereffects are still felt, coastal communities are being swept into the sea, a violent wave of xenophobia and anti-immigrant anti-refugee sentiment stokes fire everywhere—such is the world a little more than a decade from now in Julia’s imaginings. Like so many of Julia’s works of fiction, it is the voices of the characters that populate this world that make the novel sing. There’s the architect, Austin Kepner, who obsesses over building houses that are made to withstand the furies of an angry planet’s weather. Margo, the sardonic, brainy teacher. Brecht, home from NYU after escaping a domestic terrorist attack, and so many other unique and compelling voices. Life in the small coastal town of Vigil Harbor is roiled by two unexpected visitors, one a stranger, and the other well-known to certain inhabitants. The result is a novel of many pleasures that unsettles even as it delights.
Julia Recommends:
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall
Elliott Ackerman, 2034: A Novel of the Next War
Stewart O’Nan, Ocean State
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Elisabeth Anker, "Ugly Freedoms" (Duke UP, 2022)
Episode 45
Friday, June 24, 2022 • Duration 52:05
With me on today’s show is Professor Elisabeth Anker, whose most recent book, Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022), works to understand how the idea of freedom, seemingly so fundamental to our understanding of the American experience, is often the very concept that allows for the brutal deprivation of the freedom of others. As she writes, “ugly freedom entails a dynamic in which practices of freedom produce harm, brutality, and subjugation as freedom.” Today we will be discussing Professor Anker’s theory of ugly freedom in the context of our unending crisis of gun violence in the United States. This show’s topic feels as essential as any that I have offered thus far. I hope you will find something hopeful in our conversation.
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Shelly Oria and Kirstin Valdez Quade, "I Know What's Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom" (McSweeney’s Books, 2022)
Episode 44
Tuesday, June 21, 2022 • Duration 57:45
Shelly Oria has just produced an anthology of writings on reproductive freedom that is available now from McSweeney’s Books, in partnership with The Brigid Alliance. Spanning nearly every genre of writing, the collection greatly broadens the parameters for how we might speak of reproductive freedoms and fight for their continuation even in this particularly bleak time. She is joined by the novelist, Kirstin Valdez Quade, author most recently of The Five Wounds. It was an honor to talk to Shelly and Kirstin about their hopes and fears for a future after Roe vs Wade and the potential for writers to enter the fray as defenders of the right to abortion, but also to be issuers of a clarion call for the many other natural rights that are being trammeled upon. Please consider supporting I Know What's Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom by purchasing it directly from McSweeney’s or your local bookstore. The work within is moving, empathetic, horrifying, touching, and unforgettable.
Books Recommended in this episode:
Peter Ho Davies, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
Torry Peters, Detransition Baby
Lydia Conklin, Rainbow Rainbow
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Marcy Dermansky, "Hurricane Girl" (Knopf, 2022)
Episode 43
Tuesday, June 14, 2022 • Duration 42:42
An interview with novelist Marcy Dermansky. Hurricane Girl (Knopf, 2022) brings us another unforgettable Dermansky-character, Allison Brody, whose rashness and seeming detachment are matched only by her commitment to finding a place in the world that is truly her own. Allison has just fled an abusive relationship, albeit one that provided a great deal of privilege, and has spent her own savings to buy a cottage on the ocean. When that cottage is lost in a freak storm, what little control Allison had felt spins slowly out of reach, first with another violent interaction with a man that leaves her with severe brain trauma, and later in Allison’s suspicions that everyone around her would like her to be someone else. In classic Dermansky style, what could be a horror novel is in fact a comedy, often riotously funny even in scenes of intense dread and violence. The final product is a novel that entertains even as it disorients, forcing us to admit that Allison’s brain injury may in fact be a source of clarity and insight into a world that operates with a cruel illogic.
Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen.
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Peter C. Baker, "Planes" (Knopf, 2022)
Episode 42
Wednesday, June 1, 2022 • Duration 42:41
An interview with debut novelist Peter C Baker. Planes (Knopf, 2022) is the story of a global crime unfolding principally in the domestic lives of two women, Amira, an Italian convert to Islam living in Rome, and Mel, a school board member in North Carolina. Amira is a direct victim of the crime of extraordinary rendition, her husband, Ayoub, having been abducted without criminal charges and taken first to Pakistan and then Morocco, where he was imprisoned and tortured. Ayoub’s eventual return to Amira is a lesson in how trauma comes like a wave for all those in its path.
Mel’s life appears quieter. Her activist days behind her, she lives an ordinary suburban life, throwing herself into work on the school board and into a workmanlike affair that seems, at the surface, to have little effect on her family life. That is until the affair is discovered and her onetime partner on the school board is revealed to be deeply intwined with the rendition program that abducted Ayoub.
Peter and I talk about how to write about torture outside of the torture room, our unwitting complicity with illegal rendition programs in the US, and our shared love of W.G. Sebald.
Books Recommended in this episode:
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Marlen Haushofer, The Wall
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Elif Batuman, "Either/Or" (Penguin, 2022)
Episode 41
Tuesday, May 24, 2022 • Duration 01:00:43
An interview with novelist Elif Batuman. The international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot now has a sequel. In Either/Or (Penguin, 2022), Batuman picks up the story as her character, Selin, returns for her sophomore year at Harvard. Either/Or, like its predecessor, is a novel of ideas wrapped in a campus novel, told in a voice so unique that you may never get over it. Elif and I talk Cartesian dualism, Voltron’s tardiness, the novel of ideas vs the thinking novel, eros defused over the body, and so much more. You can’t miss this episode.
Books Recommended in this episode:
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
John William, Stoner
Nino Haratischvili, The Eighth Life
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
