Ten men have already died while searching the jungles of Uruguay for a reclusive writer, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who Jacov Reinhardt believes knows the key to understanding melancholy. < Back Reinhardt's Garden Mark Haber April 1, 2020 Ten men have already died while searching the jungles of Uruguay for a reclusive writer, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who Jacov Reinhardt believes knows the key to understanding melancholy. Carried in circles through the jungle on a stretcher, the narrator recalls how Reinhardt fueled himself with copious amounts of cocaine, built himself an outrageous castle with fake walls and trap doors, and cared nothing for the safety of those those around him, including Ulrich the dog killer, Sonja the one-legged former prostitute, and the unnamed narrator himself. The only thing that really mattered to Reinhardt, according to his amanuensis, was his search for the essence of melancholy. Mark Haber is the author of Reinhardt's Garden (Coffee House Press, 2019). He was born in Washington DC and grew up in Florida. His first collection of stories, Deathbed Conversions , was translated into Spanish in a bilingual edition as Melville’s Beard. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for a Debut Novel and was listed as one of the Texas Observer ’s Best Texas Books of the Decade. He lives in Houston, Texas, loves reading and Vietnamese soup, and is operations manager and a bookseller at Brazos Bookstore in Houston. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Steve Stern’s astonishing new novel The Village Idiot begins on a glorious spring day in Paris 1917. Amid the carnage of World War I, some of the foremost artists of the age have chosen to stage a boat race. < Back The Village Idiot Steve Stern September 13, 2022 The Village Idiot by Steve Stern (Melville House, 2022) opens with a marvelous boat race on the River Seine in 1917. The already well-known artist Amedeo Modigliani is in a bathtub ostensibly being pulled by a flock of ducks, but actually being hauled by immigrant painter Chaim Soutine. Soutine, a poorly educated, rough, and unmannered immigrant from a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, is disoriented by the recycled air he breathes into his helmet. As he trudges along the river bottom pulling the bathtub along, he considers his past and future life. Soutine painted as a child even when it led to humiliation and beatings by his father and brothers. Neither the collectors who supported him, the friends (like Modigliani) who stood up for him, or the women who fought over him could get in the way of his painting. But then the Nazis swept across Europe, destroying everything Jewish in their path, including a generation of talented Jewish artists. Some, like Soutine, managed to evade capture. Stern’s gorgeous novel is a sweeping, imaginative story of a great artist who was uniquely brilliant but simultaneously unpleasant and unwashed. Steve Stern was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1947, and left to attend college, then to travel before ending up on a hippie commune in the Ozarks. He studied writing in the graduate program at the University of Arkansas, at a time when it included several notable writers who've since become prominent, including poet C.D. Wright and fiction writers Ellen Gilchrist, Lewis Nordan, Lee K. Abbott and Jack Butler. In his thirties, Stern accepted a job at a local folklore center where he learned about the city's old Jewish ghetto, The Pinch, and began to steep himself in Yiddish folklore. His first book, Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter, 1983 won the Pushcart Writers' Choice Award. By decade's end Stern had won the O. Henry Award, two Pushcart Prize awards, published more collections, including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction) and the novel Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, and was being hailed by critics, such as Cynthia Ozick, as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. Stern's 2000 collection The Wedding Jester won the National Jewish Book Award and his novel The Angel of Forgetfulness was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Washington Pos t . Stern, who teaches at Skidmore College, has also won some notable scholarly awards, including a Fulbright fellowship and the Guggenheim foundations Fellowship. He splits his time between Brooklyn and Balston Spa, New York and enjoys hiking, climbing, biking, and kayaking. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Peppered with Yiddishisms and salted with sisters, brothers, parents, children, grandparents, neighbors, and friends, Moses tells the stories of regular people faced with the problems of daily life but weighted with the 4000-year-old history of Judaism. < Back The Man Who Loved His Wife Jennifer Anne Moses March 9, 2021 In The Man Who Loved His Wife (Mayapple Press, 2021), Jennifer Anne Moses creates characters who grapple with the minutiae of their lives while considering family, fate, love, death, the afterlife, the divine presence, and spirituality. Peppered with Yiddishisms and salted with sisters, brothers, parents, children, grandparents, neighbors, and friends, Moses tells the stories of regular people faced with the problems of daily life but weighted with the 4000-year-old history of Judaism. She is reminiscent of writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, and Philip Roth (to name a few) who captured the spirit of humanity in a specific time and place. Jennifer Anne Moses was born in 1959 and grew up in McLean, Virginia. She always wanted to be a writer, so she read a lot and later earned a degree at Tufts. Eventually she married, had three children, taught herself to paint, and moved from Washington D.C. to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Montclair, NJ. In addition to her books (Food and Whine , The Book of Joshua , Bagels and Grits , Visiting Hours , Tales from My Closet , and The Art of Dumpster Diving ), she's published dozens of essays, articles, Op Ed pieces, and short stories. Her work has also been anthologized in the Pushcart Prizes and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. Moses loves to bicycle, garden, play the piano, and dance, although she can’t do it like she used to. She also adores her two smelly mutts. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

After losing their young son in a tragic accident, Astrid, a Norwegian botanist specializing in Arctic flora, decides to join her husband, Tor, at a remote whaling station in the Arctic, where he spends every whaling season hunting belugas. In heartfelt journal entries, Astrid describes being stranded in a whaling hut through the dark season of 1937-38. < Back The Last Whaler Cynthia Reeves October 15, 2024 After losing their young son in a tragic accident, Astrid, a Norwegian botanist specializing in Arctic flora, decides to join her husband, Tor, at a remote whaling station in the Arctic, where he spends every whaling season hunting belugas. In heartfelt journal entries, Astrid describes being stranded in a whaling hut through the dark season of 1937-38. She writes about the miscalculations, the terrible weather, the fear of polar bears and freezing to death, the people they’ve met on their journey, Tor’s crew, and her slow disintegration after giving birth to another son, alone in the freezing, dark hut while Tor hunts for food. We know that Tor survived the ordeal, because he is reading Astrid’s journal filled with letters to their dead son. The Last Whaler (Regal House, 2024) is a gorgeous, well-researched historical novel about endurance, isolation, the environment, the Nazi incursion into Norway, the pain of postpartum depression, and the human will to survive. Cynthia Reeves is the author of two previous books of fiction: the novel in stories Falling Through the New World (2024), winner of Gold Wake Press’s Fiction Award; and the novella Badlands (2007), winner of Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared widely. Most recently, her short story “The Last Glacier” was included in If the Storm Clears (Blue Cactus Press, 2024), an anthology of speculative literature that concerns the sublime in the natural world. Her lifelong interest in the Arctic began in childhood reading tales of doomed Arctic explorers. But it was her participation in the 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, which sailed Svalbard’s western shores, as well as two subsequent residencies in Longyearbyen, that have inspired her writing since then. In August 2024, she circumnavigated Svalbard aboard the icebreaker MV Ortelius carrying a hundred artists, scientists, and crew. A Hawthornden Fellow, Cynthia has also been awarded residencies to Vermont Studio Center and Art & Science in the Field. She taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr and Rosemont Colleges, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson’s low-residency program. She lives with her husband in Camden, Maine. Find out more at cynthiareeveswriter.com . Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Today I talked to Esinam Bediako about here novel Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024). < Back Blood on the Brain Esinam Bediako October 8, 2024 When Akosua, a 24-year-old grad student in New York, falls and bangs her head, she has too much drama in her life to pay attention to her headaches and exhaustion. She’s just broken up with Wisdom, her boyfriend, she learns that her long-estranged Ghanian father is in New York, and she’s worried that dropping so many graduate classes means that she’ll lose her scholarship and work-study job in the library (where she met Daniel, her new crush). As she grapples with her Ghanian-American identity, her mother’s wishes for her, her troubled relationship with the father who left when she was a child, and her coursework, Akosua’s head injury worsens, and she wakes up in the hospital, forced to confront her own history, memory, dreams, and desires. Esinam Bediako is a Ghanaian American writer from Detroit. She writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including awkward third-person autobiographies. A graduate of University of Southern California (M.A.T. in Secondary English), Sarah Lawrence College (M.F.A. in Fiction), and Columbia University (B.A. in English and Comparative Literature), she has worked as a high school English teacher and administrator, a textbook editor, and, during one nerve-wracking summer, a pharmacy technician. She currently writes and edits for the Spondylitis Association of America. She is the author of the Ann Petry Award-winning novel, Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024), as well as the essay/poetry chapbook, Self-Talk (Porkbelly Press, 2024) and you can find some of her recent work in Porter House Review, Cathexis Northwest press, Great River Review, North American Review, and Southern Humanities Review. Esi lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and their two sons, who create stories, videos, and other artwork with enviable speed and imagination. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Georgette Heyer: Mysteries < Back Georgette Heyer Author of various mystery novels August 1, 2019 One of my literary heroes is Georgette Heyer (London 1902 – 1974), who never appeared in public or gave an interview. She was a bestselling author for over fifty years without spending a single minute building a social media presence when she could have been writing. Maybe if I’m jealous, I should just sit down and write excellent books, at least one every year, that people will continue to read a half century after I’m gone. She wrote her first book at seventeen, and it is still selling, but she was known to be extremely private. When someone would ask about herself, Heyer would refer the person to her books, and most of what is known about her comes from her correspondence ( I skimmed through her bio). She was known for her romances and is considered by some to be the inventor of the Regency Romance genre (which inspired Jane Austen, among others). There was a period of many years during which she wrote one romance and one thriller every year, but I am particularly interested in her Country House, Inspector Hemingway, and Inspector Hannasyde mysteries (12 in all). They are terribly droll and describe period dress, behavior and standards in great detail. The first three (I look forward to reading through the rest) take place in 30’s London and evoke a bygone age of wealth and prestige. The nuances of visiting a manor house, dress, comportment, dining, and after-dinner entertainment are delightfully precise. Readers can almost see the characters coming to life in all their 30’s finery. In terms of Juicy Must-Read Mysteries, Georgette Heyer is pretty high on the list: Neville opened his eyes, and looked at her in undisguised horror. “Oh, my God, the girl thinks I did it!” “No, I don’t. I’ve got an open mind on the subject,” said Sally bluntly. “If you did it, you must have had a darned good reason, and you have my vote.” “Have I?” Neville said, awed. “And what about my second victim?” “As I see it,” replied Sally, “the second victim — we won’t call him yours just yet — knew too much about the first murder, and had to be disposed of. Unfortunate, of course, but, given the first murder, I quite see it was inevitable.” A Blunt Instrument, Georgette Heyer Previous Next

Mosely Albright works in a Mission house helping drug addicts, alcoholics and those who are down on their luck. The reverend has asked him to search for one of the men who isn’t capable of surviving in the freezing cold. < Back Speed of Dark Patricia Ricketts July 5, 2022 Speed of Dark (She Writes Press, 2022) by Patricia Ricketts opens with a black man getting off Metra train in Northbrook, Illinois to search for someone who might be hiding in the woods. Mosely Albright works in a Mission house helping drug addicts, alcoholics and those who are down on their luck. The reverend has asked him to search for one of the men who isn’t capable of surviving in the freezing cold. The man he finds is a different one though, and he’s gone when Mosely wakes up, stiff and frozen the next morning. He’s forgotten the way back to the station and knocks on Mary M. Phillips’s door to ask for a glass of water and directions. Mosely has the gift of seeing when people need help, and he knows that Mary Em is desperate. He wants to help her, but the lake, (Mishigami – its Ojibwe name) wants her in its icy waters. Told by Mary Em, Mosely, and Mishigami, Speed of Dark is a story about human connection, the plight of the great lakes, and the power of kindness, friendship, and love. Patricia Ricketts inherited a lifelong love of music, the written word, the visual arts, and healthy arguing from her Irish Catholic household. While teaching English to many wonderful students, Patricia raised two fine daughters and a stand-up son and now has six beautiful grandchildren who live in the Kansas City area. Throughout her life, she penned essays, short stories, poems, and novels; however, her passion for writing escalated after being awarded a scholarship for creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Since then, she has had short stories published in New Directions, Slate, Meta, Blue Hour, Realize Magazines, and on NPR’s “This I Believe” website. The Peninsula Pulse awarded her third place among hundreds of entries in its short story contest. She is currently working on a new novel, tentatively titled The End of June. Patricia lives in Chicago with her partner, artist and photographer, Peter M. Hurley. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Starting in Jamaica, the stories shift back and forth in time and place, from Europe to Chicago to Door County, Wisconsin. We follow Greta’s emotional journey, spiritual longings, and religious awakening as she survives the complexities of a full life. < Back Side by Side but Never Face to Face Maggie Kast July 1, 2020 During the first few stories, we think the book centers on Manfred, an Austrian Holocaust survivor whose parents converted out of Judaism to save him from centuries of oppression. He and his third wife, Greta, are forced to mourn the accidental death of their youngest child, a trauma that affects them deeply but differently. Only after several stories focused on Manfred’s upbringing and young adulthood do we realize that the protagonist is his wife and then widow, Greta. Starting in Jamaica, the stories shift back and forth in time and place, from Europe to Chicago to Door County, Wisconsin. We follow Greta’s emotional journey, spiritual longings, and religious awakening as she survives the complexities of a full life. Today I talked to Maggie Kast about her new book Side by Side but Never Face to Face: A Novella and Stories (Orison Books, 2020) Kast received an M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published fiction in The Sun, Nimrod, Rosebud, Paper Street and others. A chapter of her memoir, published in ACM/Another Chicago Magazine , won a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council. Her essays have appeared in America, Image, Writer’s Chronicle, and Superstition Review and have been anthologized in Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press) and Gravity Pulls You In: Perspectives on Parenting Children on the Autism Spectrum (Woodbine House). Kast is a Board Member of Links Hall , an incubator and presenter of dance and performance art in Chicago. When not writing, Maggie loves cooking, and although she loves traditional midwestern food, also specialized in Viennese cuisine. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

What do you do when you want to cook something special and filling for breakfast that is packed with vegetables and doesn't need eggs? < Back Almond Zucchini Apple Fritters February 12, 2023 Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: 15-20 minutes Serves: 4-5 Tags: About the Recipe I've got a zillion variations of the theme of fritters - try switching out vegetables or replacing apple with banana. Ingredients 1 cup almond flour, 1 grated apple ½ cup grated zucchini Optional: chopped sweet red peppers ½ cup olive oil 2 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp flax meal 1 tsp pure vanilla extract ¼ tsp salt Preparation Stir everything together in a bowl and let sit for 10 minutes. Heat a non-stick frying pan to medium. When hot, drop 1 Tablespoon size pancakes and turn when they start to bubble. Previous Next

In Everywhere You Don’t Belong (Algonquin Books, 2020), Gabriel Bump has created an unforgettable debut novel that will sometimes make you laugh, and sometimes pull at your gut. < Back Everywhere You Don’t Belong Gabriel Bump June 8, 2020 Abandoned by his parents and raised by a strong-willed grandmother and her live-in friend, Claude McKay Love just wants to have friends and fit in at school or on the playground. He faces all the usual hurdles of growing up, with the additional challenge of being black. And he lives in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, formerly home of both Michelle Obama and Kanye West. It’s packed with beautiful old homes and sits on the lakefront about 9 miles from downtown Chicago, but it was a food desert for a number of years and missed out on much of Chicago’s growth and expansion. Claude has to navigate past gangs, drug wars, and a riot in which seventy neighbors and friends are killed. He also falls in love. In Everywhere You Don’t Belong (Algonquin Books, 2020), Gabriel Bump has created an unforgettable debut novel that will sometimes make you laugh, and sometimes pull at your gut. Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His work has appeared in: McSweeney’s, Guernica, Electric Literature, SLAM , and elsewhere. Everywhere You Don’t Belong is his first novel. His second novel is forthcoming, also from Algonquin. He was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction and the 2015 Summer Literary Seminars Montreal Flash Fiction Prize. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. He currently lives in Buffalo, New York, where he teaches at Just Buffalo Literary Center and University at Buffalo. When he’s not writing or reading, Gabriel enjoys playing video games and starting, sometimes finishing, long boring history books. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

This is a story about family, the opioid epidemic in rural America, the rise of hatred and bigotry during the past few years, and the grip of creating art on those who feel its pull. < Back Take What You Need Idra Novey March 14, 2023 Today I talked to Idra Novey about her new novel Take What You Need (Viking, 2023). Leah, her husband, and their little son are driving back to where she grew up in the mountains of Appalachia. They are heading to the home where her stepmother fled after leaving Leah’s father, and after the divorce, Jean was no longer allowed to stay in touch with Leah. But she was the mother Leah knew and loved. Now, Jean has died and left Leah her artwork, and when they arrive at the house, Leah is stunned to find giant sculptures welded from scrap metal. During her final years, Jean had needed the help of a troubled young man, a neighbor who has no chance of finding employment and who is squatting without water in the house next door. He’s the one who tells Leah that Jean has died. This is a story about family, the opioid epidemic in rural America, the rise of hatred and bigotry during the past few years, and the grip of creating art on those who feel its pull. Idra Novey earned degrees at Barnard College and Columbia University. She’s the author of Those Who Knew , a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Time s Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year with over a dozen media outlets. Her first novel Ways to Disappear received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian , selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series, The Next Country , a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award, and Clarice: The Visitor , a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Idra teaches fiction writing at Princeton University and in the New York University MFA program in Creative Writing. When she is not writing or teaching, Idra likes welding and making collages with old literature magazines. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Personal and insightful stories about our connections to each other and the world, our attempts to weave the past and present into a meaningful future, and our varying ways of seeking redemption. Unforgettable characters encounter gorgeous landscapes, nasty betrayals, shocking technology, a heartless future, and a decaying city neighborhood. < Back Grace: Stories and a Novella Dan Burns December 5, 2019 Personal and insightful stories about our connections to each other and the world, our attempts to weave the past and present into a meaningful future, and our varying ways of seeking redemption. In Dan Burns ’ latest book, Grace: Stories and a Novella (Chicago Arts Press, 2019), unforgettable characters encounter gorgeous landscapes, nasty betrayals, shocking technology, a heartless future, and a decaying city neighborhood. Burns is also the author of the novels A Fine Line and Recalled to Life and the short story collection No Turning Back: Stories . He is an award-winning writer of stories for the screen and stage, resides with his family in Illinois, and enjoys spending time in Wisconsin and Montana, where he stalks endless rivers in pursuit of trout and a career as a fly fisherman. When not writing or spending time outdoors, Burns plays guitar in his pursuit of rock and roll greatness (or to learn how to play all the memorable rock songs of his youth). Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next