Reading Around the Margins – Details, episodes & analysis

In this second episode of Reading Around the Margins, Naomi is joined by Claire Foster, a reader, writer, and literary translator from French. In what is truly a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss, Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes, projects inspired by the act of underlining, and more.

To preorder Naomi’s new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Claire Foster is a reader, writer, and literary translator from French, most recently of Pierre Clémenti’s 1973 prison memoir, A Few Personal Messages. Her writing and translations have been published or will soon appear in The Hopkins Review, Public Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Full Stop Quarterly, and The Kenyon Review. Her translation of Valérie Manteau's novel The Furrow (Prix Renaudot, 2018) is forthcoming from Invisible Publishing. She also works as manager, events coordinator, and bookseller at Type Books, an independent bookstore in Toronto.

Music: lofi london by snoozy beats is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

Episode 1: “Marina Blitshteyn on Theory, A Sunday”

In this first episode of Reading Around the Margins, Naomi is joined by the writer Marina Blitshteyn. They discuss the, perhaps unexpected to Marina, marginalia Marina added to her copy of Theory, A Sunday from Belladonna Press. Their conversation explores books as bodies, how trauma lives in the body, how our selves resurface and reemerge through reading and deep periods of not reading, and much more.

To preorder Naomi’s new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Marina Blitshteyn is the author of two poetry collections, Two Hunters (Argos Books, 2019) and i take your voice (Switchback Books, 2022), Winner of the Gatewood Prize. Her chapbooks include Russian for Lovers (Argos Books), Nothing Personal (Bone Bouquet Books), $kill$ (dancing girl press), and Sheet Music (Sunnyoutside Press). Forthcoming titles include Landguage from Bunny Presse.

Music: lofi london by snoozy beats is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

Naomi is joined by Lauren Elkin for a conversation on the permission-giving qualities of Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, how reading Perec made her into a writer, and what it's like to re-see the world in the way he encourages us to do. Weaving through Elkin's own experiments in seeing with her book No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus and the ways we live in and through our homes with her novel Scaffolding, we land in her current home in London where her accumulated stacks of books are grouped by subject, and we get a taste of how a new stack is building toward a particular new project.

Reading List

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Georges Perec

The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen

The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Jane Gallop

Lauren Elkin is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including Scaffolding, Art Monsters, and Flâneuse. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. An award-winning translator, she lives between Paris and London.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Miranda Mellis joins Naomi for a discussion that indexes Michael Eigen’s book The Psychoanalytic Mystic. They discuss the resonance between annotation and free association; the experience of narrating oneself in analysis, losing the thread, doubling back, and having one’s speech be received by the other; the index as a branching form, a poem of the subjective reader; writing as social practice through collective annotation; and how sometimes a text pours salt in the wound while sometimes it serves as a balm.

Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia (Nightboat Books); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short-story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the co-author of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody (forthcoming, Solid Objects 2026). With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding co-editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she is a professor at The Evergreen State College. Read her intermittencies at: You Are in Love with the Impossible.

She is on tour in support of Crocosmia through November, with upcoming readings this week: 

• 10/29: UCSD New Writing Series in San Diego with Anna Joy Springer | 5PM
• 10/30: Book Soup in Los Angeles with Sarah LaBrie | 7PM
• 11/1: Gattopardo | with Stanya Kahn | 4PM

For more tour dates, click here.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Episode 3: “Rebecca van Laer on Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and theorizing one’s own writings on love”

Naomi is joined by the writer Rebecca van Laer. They discuss Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, writing as self-annotation, how to Pale Fire oneself, and more.

To preorder Naomi’s new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Rebecca van Laer is a writer based in the Hudson Valley. She is the author of a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022), and a memoir, Cat (Object Lessons/Bloomsbury, forthcoming in October 2025).

Music: lofi london by snoozy beats is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

Naomi is out on tour, so she will be back in two weeks with a new, full episode in conversation with Miranda Mellis, author of Crocosmia from Nightboat Books. And, as it happens, Miranda is on tour, too. Click here for a full list of her upcoming stops.

Naomi's next stops are Clio's Books in Oakland, CA on Friday, October 17th with the poet and psychoanalyst Alice Jones and Third Place Books - Ravenna in Seattle, WA on Friday, October 24th with the poet and multimedia essayist/artist Cori A. Winrock.

Looking forward to seeing you out on the tour!

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Lofty Pigeon, Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Check Naomi's website for her upcoming tour dates. And subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Briana Parker, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Lofty Pigeon Books, joins Naomi for a discussion that begins in her thoroughly annotated copy of Ulysses from a high school English class (shouts out to Richard Roundy, Briana’s English teacher and now regular at Lofty Pigeon!) and meanders through the many worlds Briana has occupied and built in New York City — from growing up in Sheepshead Bay, to the Union Square Barnes & Noble, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the cozy kids’ corner at her own Lofty Pigeon Books.

Briana Parker is a third-generation Brooklynite. She spent ten years as an editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before opening Lofty Pigeon Books in Kensington, Brooklyn with her partner Davi in 2023. 

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Lofty Pigeon, Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Check Naomi's website for her upcoming tour dates. And subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

To celebrate the release of Naomi's Marginalia: an autobiography, we have a bit of a role reversal in this episode. Michael Wheaton, publisher of Autofocus Books, joins us today and takes over the host chair as he chats with Naomi about Marginalia, the kind of book it turned out to be, “project” books, the idea of a book as container, and how the process of creating it altered her practice of marginalia today. This is a delightful, insightful episode on the unexpected paths a book takes to find its final form...

Michael Wheaton is the publisher of Autofocus Books. He is the author of the essay Home Movies (BUNNY, 2024). His writing has appeared previously in Essay Daily, DIAGRAM, Burrow Press Review, HAD, Rejection Letters, and other online journals.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Check Naomi's website for her upcoming tour dates. And subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Bookseller Liz Freeman joins Naomi for a conversation about Liz’s marginalia in books by David Wojnarowicz, William Gaddis, and Kathryn Scanlan; the soundtrack playing alongside this marginalia, from Joni Mitchell and the Melvins to Frank Sinatra’s “bipolar big band hits”; her approach to making thoughtful recommendations for readers visiting the store; and more.

Liz Freeman is a writer, artist and careerbookseller. She is from East County, San Diego and currently lives in Oakland where she is the co-owner and stationery buyer at East Bay Booksellers.

Liz and Naomi discussed Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz, JR by William Gaddis, and Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan.

To pre-order Naomi's new title, Marginalia: an autobiography, please click here.

Writer and professor Hilary Leichter joins Naomi for a discussion about books that conjure many different realities; how the reader is made culpable to the events of a text by what they hold and create in their mind, in the gap between what’s stated and what’s implied; how teaching a book you have complex feelings about can enrich the teaching experience; inheriting large libraries; and what happened to that one box of books you shipped that never arrived at its destination? 

Hilary Leichter is the author of the novels Temporary and Terrace Story. She has been a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Prize, and her work in Harper's Magazine won the 2021 National Magazine Award in Fiction. Terrace Story was named a best book of 2023 by Time Magazine, The New Yorker, The LA Times, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. Hilary teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York.

To pre-order Naomis's new title, Marginalia: an autobiography, from Autofocus Books, please click here.