Even in times of stillness and physical distance, reading a great poem has the ability to move us, transport us—in other words, poetry will always retain its power to feel, as Lowell says, like an event. On Well-Versed, we’ll be commemorating the art of verse, with original recordings, conversations with poetry luminaries, and more.
On this episode, Catherine Lacey talks with translator Michael Favala Goldman about his work on the recent work of Tove Ditlevsen, The Copenhagen Trilogy. In the conversation, the two discuss how Goldman knew the work was a masterpiece, the tragic irony throughout the work, and Ditlevsen's commentary on our society of excess.
Danish translator Michael Favala Goldman (b. 1966) is also a poet, educator and jazz clarinetist. Among his sixteen translated books are Dependency (a Penguin Classic) by Tove Ditlevsen, The Water Farm Trilogy by Cecil Bødker, and Something To Live Up To, Selected Poems of Benny Andersen. Goldman’s books of original poetry include Who has time for this? (2020) and Small Sovereign (2021). His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and has received rave reviews in the New York Times and The London Times. Goldman lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA, where he has been running poetry critique groups since 2018. He also serves as Chair of the Program Committee for Straw Dogs Writers Guild and as Member of the Board of Directors for the Northampton Center for the Arts.
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10 Feb 2021
Episode 11: Thomas Grattan
On this week's episode of Well-Versed, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD associate editor Jackson Howard talks with Thomas Grattan about his new book, The Recent East, which follows a mother and two teens as they navigate a new life in East Germany.
Thomas Grattan's short fiction has appeared in several publications, including One Story, Slice, and The Colorado Review, has been shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize, and was listed as a notable stories in Best American Short Stories. The Recent East is his debut novel. He has an MFA in Fiction Writing from Brooklyn College and has taught middle school English for more than a decade. He lives in New York City.
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10 Dec 2020
Episode 10: Jonas Hassen Khemiri
This month on Well-Versed, Julia Ringo, associate editor at FSG, talks with Jonas Hassen Khemiri about his new book, The Family Clause, contemporary fatherhood, and his life in Stockholm during lockdown.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of novels (Everything I Don't Remember, Montecore), plays (I Call My Brothers), and a collection of plays, essays, and short stories (Invasion!). Among his many honors are the August Prize, the highest literary award for Swedish literature; the Enquist Literary Prize; the Borås Tidning Award for Best Literary Debut Novel; and an Obie Award. His novels have been translated into more than thirty languages, and his plays have been performed by more than one hundred companies around the world. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
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3 Nov 2020
Episode 09: Megan Rosenbloom's Dark Archives
This week on Well-Versed, Julia Ringo, associate editor at FSG, talks with Megan Rosenbloom about her new book, Dark Archives, the hunt for books bound in human skin, and her involvement with the death positivity movement.
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2 Oct 2020
Episode 08: Marilynne Robinson
This month on Well-Versed, Jonathan Galassi, publisher of FSG, talks with writer Marilynne Robinson about her new novel, Jack, returning to Gilead, her research on the segregation of St. Louis, and the mysterious impulse of a new novel.
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25 Aug 2020
Episode 07: Héctor Tobar
This week on Well-Versed, Sean McDonald, publisher of MCD, talks with Héctor Tobar about his new book, The Last Great Road Bum, the great road novels in literature, his real-life allegiance to Joe Sanderson and his family, and publishing a novel at the current moment.
In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times.
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28 Jul 2020
Episode 06: Laura van den Berg and Catherine Lacey
This week on Well-Versed, Emily Bell, director and Senior Editor of FSG Originals, talks with writers Laura van den Berg and Catherine Lacey about their new books, making it through the profound bewilderment of novel-writing, and the relationship between the bizarre and the mundane.
Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.
I Hold the Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg’s first story collection since her prizewinning book The Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and the mind. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg’s trademark spiky humor and surreal eye.
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22 Jun 2020
Episode 05: Eric Cervini and Mark Gevisser
This week on Well-Versed, FSG editor Jackson Howard discusses queer rights past and present with Eric Cervini, the award-winning historian and author of The Deviance War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, and Mark Gevisser, author of The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers.
This podcast was produced for Lit Hub in partnership with ALOUD, a program of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.
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19 May 2020
Episode 04: Carl Phillips and francine j. harris in Conversation
On this episode of Well-Versed, poets Carl Phillips and francine j. harris discuss their bodies of work, the representation of people of color in poetry, and answering a question that shouldn't be able to be answered.
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5 May 2020
Episode 03: Hannah Sullivan's Three Poems
Three Poems, Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection, which won the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize, reinvents the long poem for a digital age. “You, Very Young in New York” paints the portrait of a great American city, paying close attention to grand designs as well as local details, and coalescing in a wry and tender study of romantic possibility, disappointment, and the obduracy of innocence. “Repeat Until Time” shifts the scene to California and combines a poetic essay on the nature of repetition with an enquiry into pattern-making of a personal as well as a philosophical kind. “The Sandpit After Rain” explores the birth of a child and death of a father with exacting clarity.
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24 Apr 2020
Episode 02: Roya Marsh's dayliGht
Growing up, Roya Marsh was considered “tomboy passing." With an affinity for baggy clothes, cornrows, and bandanas, she came of age in an era when the wide spectrum of gender and sexuality was rarely acknowledged or discussed. She knew she was “different,” her family knew she was “different,” but anything outside of the heteronorm was either disregarded or disparaged.
In her stunning debut, written in protest to an absence of representation, Marsh recalls her early life and the attendant torments of a butch Black woman coming of age in America. In lush, powerful, and vulnerable verses, dayliGht unpacks traumas to unearth truths, revealing a deep well of resilience, a cutting sense of irony, and an astonishing fresh talent. This is a dazzling debut from a necessary new voice, at once a clarion call for stories of Black women and a rebuke of broken notions of sexuality and race.
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17 Apr 2020
Episode 01: A History of Poetry at FSG
“Poetry is not the record of an event—it is an event.” —Robert Lowell Even in times of stillness and physical distance, reading a great poem has the ability to move us, transport us—in other words, poetry will always retain its power to feel, as Lowell says, like an event. At Work in Progress, we’ll be commemorating the art of verse all throughout April to honor National Poetry Month with exclusive features, including original pieces, conversations with poetry luminaries, a podcast produced in tandem with LitHub, and virtual events with poets.
Recordings used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Music licensed under standard license from Exzel Music Publishing (freemusicpublicdomain.com).
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