The Lit Show show

The Lit Show

Summary: The Lit Show is a weekly literary radio show based at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and broadcast on KRUI Radio in Iowa City. Founded in January 2010 by host Joe Fassler, The Lit Show features interviews with writers, readings and performance, reviews, and literary news. The program airs Wednesdays at 3 PM CST on KRUI Radio and litshow.com. There are many ways to listen to The Lit Show: by radio or web broadcast through KRUI, by podcast, and by visiting our archives.

Podcasts:

 #83: Vivian Gornick | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 59:46

(http://www.litshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/gornick_index_745.jpg) Unparalleled in her unflinching candidness, Vivian Gornick renders the political as personal and shows the self to be a mirror of the culture that made it. “Gornick is fearless,” Elizabeth Frank writes in The New York Times Book Review. “Reading her essays, one is reassured that the conversation between life and literature is mutually sustaining as well as mutually corrective.” Best known for her acclaimed 1987 memoir, Fierce Attachments, and her work with The Village Voice, Gornick is also a frequent contributor to The Nation, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. She is the author of more than a dozen other books and essay collections, including The End of the Novel of Love, Essays in Feminism, and The Men in My Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gornick teaches creative writing at The New School in New York, NY. Her most recent book, Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life, is out now from Yale University Press, and her essay “Letter from Greenwich Village” can be found in the 60th anniversary issue of The Paris Review (Spring, 2013). Gornick will be reading from a selection of her work at Prairie Lights in Iowa City on Monday, April 8, at 8:00pm. Complete episode

 #82: Mary Jo Bang | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 57:03

(http://www.litshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/mjb_index_745.png) On this Lit Show, Mary Jo Bang discusses her new book, an irreverent translation of Dante's Inferno, aptly titled Inferno. Mary Jo Bang is the author of several books of poetry, including Elegy, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007. Her most recent book is an audacious, pop-culture-laden, interpretive translation of Dante's Inferno, which is being heralded by critics like Adam Fitzgerald of The Brooklyn Rail: "Though no Italian scholar proper, Bang is, however, one of the most wonderfully disturbing and haunted poets of our time...she has attempted to rethink, relive, and re-envision a 21st century Inferno." Bang is currently a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. Interview by Micah Bateman. Complete audio transcript (http://www.litshow.com/2013/10/21/82-mary-jo-bang-interview-transcript/). Excerpts Complete Episode  

 #81: Roxane Gay | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 48:03

(http://www.litshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/index_gay_7451.png) (http://www.litshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/index_gay_image.png) On this Lit Show, Roxane Gay discusses her prolific body of work, the perils of frequent publication, and her two upcoming books: a novel, An Untamed State, and essay collection, Bad Feminist. It would be hard to keep up with the online literary world and not be constantly running into Gay’s byline. She is everywhere. Her heavily anthologized fiction and essays have appeared in VQR, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, Melville House, mud luscious, The Indiana Review, and dozens of other venues. Her criticism appears in the New York Times and on the Wall Street Journal's website, where she reviews and live-blogs reality TV, including and especially ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. She is a frequent contributor to HTMLGIANT, Salon, Bookslut, and The Rumpus, where she is the essays editor. She is also the co-editor of [PANK] Magazine. Gay’s works have earned her fourteen Pushcart nominations the last three years. She is, in other words, one of contemporary literature's most prolific voices, and she is this year’s Writer-in-Residence at the Mission Creek Festival taking place from April 2 - April 7 in Iowa City. Unsurprisingly, she maintains an active online presence, tweeting here (https://twitter.com/rgay), and blogging on tumblr (http://roxanegay.tumblr.com/) and on her website, I Have Become Accustomed to Rejection (http://www.roxanegay.com/). Interview by Ben Mauk. Excerpt Complete Episode

 #80: Russell Jaffe | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 54:29

(http://www.litshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/index_jaffe_7451.png) On this Lit Show, Russell Jaffe discusses his new book, participatory poetry, small presses, the 2013 Mission Creek Festival, and building a community around art. Jaffe is an artist, poet, teacher, event organizer, and all-around participator. His debut collection, This Super Doom I Aver(http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=thlish065-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1937202062), is a collection of self-described “Mad Libs poems” that are designed to be co-written by and with their reader. Despite Jaffe’s claims that “our new history is avant-doom,” CA Conrad calls the book “anything but a place where we are doomed. It's house of Magic!!” Jaffe is also the founder and editor of Strange Cage (http://strangecage.org/), the small press and long-running poetry series that returns to Iowa City on April 15. His poems appear all over the Internet and are forthcoming in [PANK] and H_NGM_N. He has exhibited found sculptures made from discarded video game systems. He teaches poetry workshops in and around Iowa City. He holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. He loves professional wrestling in what appears to be a sincere way. His work is riotously fun, doggedly unpretentious, and [________]. Interview by Ben Mauk. Excerpt Complete Show

 #79: Terry Tempest Williams (3-12-2013) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 48:32

On this Lit Show, co-host Gemma de Choisy speaks with Terry Tempest Williams about her memoir When Women Were Birds. Williams is the author of fourteen books, including Leap, Refuge, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and the essay collection, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. She is a frequent contributor to Orion Magazine and is a columnist for The Progressive. The current Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, Williams splits her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Moose, Wyoming.

 #78: Lawrence Weschler | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 25:59

On this Lit Show, Ben Mauk speaks with acclaimed writer Lawrence Weschler, who was for more than twenty years a staff writer at The New Yorker. Weschler is the author of eleven books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, which was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and most recently Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Bard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, NYU, and his alma mater, Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

 #77: Dina Nayeri | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 42:44

On this episode of The Lit Show, current Iowa Writers’ Workshop student Dina Nayeri discusses her debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea. Nayeri was born in Iran and moved to Oklahoma at the age of ten. Her work is scheduled for publication in over twenty countries, and has appeared in Granta New Voices, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Glamour, and elsewhere. She holds an MBA from Harvard and a BA from Princeton, and is currently a Teaching Writing Fellow at the Workshop.

 #76: Understanding the Essay | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 52:51

After centuries of suffering the cold shoulder from scholars and critics (Michel de Montaigne’s blockbuster collections were, after all, released in 1580) the essay’s stylistic strategies are finally given their due in Understanding the Essay, a scholastic cri de ceour edited by Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter. Understanding the Essay’s contributors are writers who have made their own mark on the form, including Eula Biss (writing on Ann Carson), Sven Birkerts (writing on Cynthia Ozick), Honor Moore (writing on James Baldwin), and the editors themselves. Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (2002) and Just Beneath My Skin (2004). A recipient of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for nonfiction and the Fred Bonnie Award for a first novel, she is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa where she teaches in the MFA Program in Nonfiction. Jeff Porter is the author of Oppenhiemer is Watching Me (2007). His essays have appeared in Missouri Review, Isotope, Hotel Amerika, and Antioch Review, among other journals. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa where he also teaches in the MFA Program in Nonfiction. Complete Episode

 #75: Dan Beachy-Quick and Sally Keith | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 41:43

On this Lit Show, Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumni Dan Beachy-Quick and Sally Keith discuss their recent collections, their relationship as fellow poets and readers of one another’s work, and their relationship to Iowa City. Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of several books, spanning the realms of poetry, collaboration, essay, and philosophical inquiry. His most recent book, Works from Memory, is a collaboration with Matthew Goulish. Sally Keith is the author of a delighting handful of poetry collections. These include Design, which was the winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry, Dwelling Song, and most recently The Fact of the Matter (available through Milkweed Editions). Interview by Grant Souders.

 #74: Ayana Mathis | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 52:38

On this episode of the Lit Show, Deborah Kennedy talks with University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum and visiting fiction professor Ayana Mathis about her debut novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which has not only received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist, but was also singled out by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club 2.0 series. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie tells the story of Hattie Shepherd, who, in 1923, flees the violence and oppression of Jim Crow Georgia for Philadelphia, hoping for a brighter future and a share of the American dream. Winfrey has said she picked The Twelve Tribes of Hattie for her much-coveted book club partially because of Mathis’s compassionate characterization of Hattie, an indomitable heroine who does battle with the cruel forces of poverty, prejudice, and heartbreak in order that others might have a chance at something better.

 Episode 0703: Michael Palmer (2-15-2013) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 46:37

On this Lit Show, award-winning poet Michael Palmer speaks with hosts Dan Poppick and Jessica Laser about his work. Born in 1943, Michael Palmer has written twenty books of poetry, most recently Thread (New Directions, 2011). Known as the "foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations" (citation for the Poetry Society of America's Wallace Stevens Award, which he won in 2006), Palmer accepts language in all its imperfection—fissures, breaks, echoes, inability to sound like a singular utterance—because he trusts that a fragment can communicate a possible whole, or a number of wholes. Words may be slippery, exceeding our reach, yet, in Palmer's work, it is through this very distance that we reach words and call them home.

 Episode 0702: Lit Scene Roundup, Iowa City (2-5-2013) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 52:26

This episode of The Lit Show welcomes the editors of two new Iowa City-based literary journals. Draft: The Journal of Progress publishes working drafts of stories and poems, plus interviews that emphasize the creative process and investigate the aesthetics of revision. Editors Mark Polanzak and Rachel Yoder will discuss the journal’s inception and its recently released second issue, which features the work of Donald Dunbar and Alicia Erian. Ink Lit Mag is the one-year-old literary journal of the Iowa Writers Living-Learning Community at the University of Iowa. Designed, staffed, and published by undergraduate editors, Ink has just released its third issue. Interview by Ben Mauk.

 Episode 0701: Benjamin Nugent (1-30-2013) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 40:33

On this episode of The Lit Show, Benjamin Nugent discusses his debut novel, Good Kids. Nugent’s first book, a cultural memoir, is American Nerd: The Story of My People; Good Kids continues the project described in that subtitle. Here the “people” in question are bourgeois families in New England and the bright but compromised children they send into the world: indie rock also-rans in L.A.; budding first-world anarchists in Boston; good kids whose understanding of fidelity is complicated by their parents’ dalliances and divorces. Interview by Ben Mauk.

 Episode 0616: Arda Collins (12-06-2012) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 34:34

On this Lit Show, Iowa Writers’ Workshop visiting professor Arda Collins discusses her book of poems, It Is Daylight. Winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and championed by Louise Glück, It Is Daylight is an abrasive, brutal, and very funny collection that speaks of modern desolation through a voice that is both ironic and afraid. Collins’s speaker inhabits kitchens and department stores in a state of holy terror, never finding God but asking all the right questions: “Can I guess what I am thinking? Can I tell you what it is?” Collins’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and A Public Space, among other venues. She studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Denver, and is a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Glück described It Is Daylight as “a book of dazzling modernity…caustic, pithy, ruthlessly sharp witted and keen eyed.” Collins will read from her work in Iowa City at the Dey House on Thursday, December 6, at 8:00 PM. Interview by Ben Mauk.

 Episode 0615: Charles Baxter (12-06-2012) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 54:41

On this Lit Show, Deborah Kennedy speaks with distinguished novelist, essayist, and short story writer Charles Baxter. Baxter is the author of 5 novels, including First Light, The Feast of Love, and The Soul Thief, 5 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, 2 collections of essays on fiction, and has served as the editor for such works as A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations and Best New American Voices 2001. Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan where he headed up its MFA program for several years. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.

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