Between the Covers

  “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

  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

Host Suzanne LeGrande interviews Amy Stanton and Catherine Connors, authors of The Feminine Revolution. Read more

Host Ken Jones talks with Meg Vogt, author of the new book of photographs and poems MYKU: My Portland. “MYKU” is what Meg calls her variations on the haiku form, a poem in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. The book pairs Meg’s MYKU’s with photographs from her... Read more

Host Ken Jones talks with Paul Skenazy, author of the new novel Temper CA, from Miami University Press. Paul’s essays, stories, and book reviews have appeared in a range of newspapers and magazines, and he’s published critical work on noir writers such as Dashiell Hammett,... Read more

Host Ken Jones talks with Liz Scott, author of the new memoir This Never Happened, from University of Hell Press. Liz is a practicing psychologist in Portland, and a practicing writer. Her work has appeared in The MacGuffin, New Stone Circle, and Lake Effect, among other j... Read more

  From “Speak Truth to Power,” about the condition of not being believed about rape and assault; to “Goliath,” about the ways evil is used as a form of social control; to “The Fallout,” about ecological and generational violence, Lacy M. Johnson creates masterful, elabora... Read more