Category: radio

Supporting roles

I recently had the honor of offering advance praise for Andrew Martin’s new story collection Cool for America, coming out from Farrar Straus Giroux on July 7:

Overeducated and undermined, the women and men in Andrew Martin’s stories fortify themselves with beer, weed, intensely felt verdicts about music and literature, and messing around with people they probably shouldn’t be messing around with. Martin’s prose is as melancholy and ruthless as Raymond Carver’s, and his wit is as dark and sharp as Mary Robison’s or Donald Antrim’s.

Order a copy from your favorite indie bookseller now!

This past Tuesday, I had an electronically mediated conversation, hosted by Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore, with Donald Nicholson-Smith about his new translation of Serge Pey’s new story collection Treasure of the Spanish Civil War, just out from Archipelago Books. The conversation was recorded and is now streamable.

A long time ago—maybe a year ago? in another lifetime, at any rate—I was interviewed by writer Barbara Nichol for a radio show about reading that she was producing for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She tapped me for some of the sociology and neurology that I reported on for The New Yorker more than a decade ago—reporting that I updated a couple of years ago. Her show is now streamable online, in three segments, each about an hour long: part one, part two, and part three. I don’t have a large role—a one-sentence cameo in part two, and a paragraph or two in part three—but it’s an interesting listen.

Best seltzer to drink with my novel, & other book news

According to Mason Neil, who reviews books on Instagram by pairing them with drinks, Overthrow is best washed down with a can of White Claw hard seltzer.

Emily Homonoff interviewed me about Overthrow for the Reading with Robin podcast, and we talked a lot about my dog.

When James Conrad, from the Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock, NY, was a guest on WAMC’s The Roundtable last week, he picked Overthrow as one of his books of the week.

Nicholas Dames, the literary fiction editor at Public Books, wrote about the Jamesianness of Overthrow, which is on his nightstand.

And a site called Read It Forward avers that Overthrow has a cool male protagonist who isn’t secretly an asshole.

Bookforum; WGN Radio

There’s a lovely review of Overthrow in the September issue of Bookforum, which places the novel in the literary tradition and sees in it allegories of queer reading.

Over the weekend, I spoke with Amy Guth of Chicago’s WGN Radio about my recent article in the New Yorker on the history of unions and also, a little, about Overthrow (the segment with me starts at about 6:14).

If you’re in New York, please come to the reading at the Strand on Thursday, September 5, at 7:30pm! Admission is with purchase of the novel or of a $15 gift card.

Emily Dickinson and “The Yellow Rose of Texas”

On Sunday, at Pordenone Legge, a book festival in northern Italy, my interviewer, Chiara Valerio, challenged me to tell the audience something about Emily Dickinson (one of her poems has a cameo in Necessary Errors), who, my interviewer said, is currently having a bit of a moment in Italy. Somehow, a minute or two later, I found myself singing an Emily Dickinson poem to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” And quindi, as the Italians say, when I was interviewed on the radio program Fahrenheit a few days later, the host, Loredana Lipperini, decided to ask me for a reprise, audible with all its involuntary tremolo here, if you click on the word “Ascolta.”