Thresholds

Jordan sits down with Renee Gladman to talk about prose architecture, Henry James, walking in cities, and mushrooms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nicholson Baker sits down with Jordan to discuss writing about the unsung pleasures and details of the world-- things like the way your mother cuts up a banana, or the advertisements in your favorite magazine. Things that "live in this between area of noticing, they're part of the background of life." Mentioned in the episode: Nicholson Baker has written seventeen books, including The Mezzanine, Vox, Human Smoke, The Anthologist, and Baseless—also an art book, The World on Sunday, in collaboration with his wife Margaret Brentano. Several of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and he has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Herman Hesse Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Aziza sits down with Jordan to talk about the eating disorder that almost took her life in 2019, and the search into her family's history in Palestine that she undertook in a bid for her own survival. Mentioned in the episode: the Nakbatransgenerational traumaCruising Utopiaghurba Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of The Hollow Half, a genre-bending work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other publications. Previously a Fulbright fellow in Jordan, she is the recipient of numerous Pulitzer Center grants for Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Writer’s Workshop, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lisa Ko sits down with Jordan to talk about the daily journaling practice that she started at age five, and the period of creative crisis between her first and second novels when she began methodically destroying every journal she'd ever kept. Mentioned in the episode: Lisa Ko is the author of the new novel Memory Piece and the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and The Believer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan sits down to talk with Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches, about writing the non-human world, leaving the world of legacy media, and how they've learned from the deep sea --and from their colleagues-- about the power of collectivity. Mentioned in the episode: uncharismatic microfaunaessay on salps and queer collectivity Sabrina Imbler is a staff writer at Defector, a worker-owned site, where they cover creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a Los Angeles Times book prize in science and technology. Their chapbook Dyke (geology), was published by Black Lawrence Press, and was selected for the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Program. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Jordan sits down to talk with Maya Binyam, author of the novel Hangman,about a near-drowning that changed her life. Maya Binyam is the author of Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Dublin Literary Award. She is the recipient of the 2025 Bard Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, theNew Yorker,Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is an advisory editor of theParis Review. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we're sharing a live conversation between Jordan and Carvell Wallace, recorded last year at P&T Knitwear in New York. They talk about his new memoir, Another Word for Love, a moment of real peril from his childhood, and the long process that followed for him of learning to embrace vulnerability, connection, and his own writing voice. Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster who has contributed to The New Yorker, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, MTV News, and Al Jazeera. His debut memoir, Another Word For Love (MCD, 2024), explores his life, identity, and love through stories of family, friendship, and culture and is a 2024 Kirkus Finalist in Nonfiction. He was a 2019 Peabody Award nominee, a 2022 National Magazine Award Finalist, a 2023 winner of the Mosaic Prize in Journalism, and a 2025 UCross Fellow. He lives in Oakland. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Jordan sits down to talk with Lidia Yuknavitch about menopause, where stories lodge in our bodies, having a creative process that takes the shape of an ocean wave, and more. Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of four novels: Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the OBA Reader's Choice Award. She has also published a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books in 2017. Verge, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2020. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Her newest memoir, Reading the Waves, was published by Riverhead books in 2025. She is a very good swimmer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we bring you a live interview with Garth Greenwell, conducted in October 2024 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Garth talks about growing up in Kentucky assuming that he would die young, the teacher who gave him a path toward being an artist, and the doggedness with which he has pursued his aesthetic practices (in both music and literature) ever since. Mentioned: Garth's new novel, Small Rain (FSG 2024) Frank Bidart Benjamin Britten Così Fan Tutte The HIV/AIDS crisis Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Cleanness was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. A new novel, Small Rain, is now out from FSG. He is the recipient of many honors for his work, including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Grinnell College, the University of Mississippi, Princeton, and NYU. He writes regularly about literature, film, art and music for his Substack, To a Green Thought. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're revisiting our 2021 interview with the poet Jericho Brown, who this week was named a MacArthur Fellow-- one of the highest honors in the arts and humanities. He and Jordan talk about the great mystery of why we desire the things we desire; about oration and the poets he read and memorized as part of his own becoming; mitigating our impulses toward violence with tenderness, and more. Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Jordan talks to the novelist Sigrid Nunez about her youthful preoccupation with mimicking the prose of Virginia Woolf, the step-by-step intuitive way she writes prose now, and the best way to make overnight oats. Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In 2024, The New York Times listed The Friend among the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The Friend has been adapted for film by directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee (2024). What Are You Going Through has been adapted for a film directed by Pedro Almodóvar, The Room Next Door (2024). Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan chats with Sofia Samatar (The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain and Opacities) about having two books out this year, doing everything twice (once in non-fiction, once in fiction), and her growing sense of an ongoing overarching project to her work. MENTIONED: A Stranger in OlondriaMonster PortraitsThe White MosqueTender: Stories ToneQuicksandSeasonal Associate Sofia Samatar is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist. Her works range from the award-winning epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria to Opacities, a nonfiction book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan chats with Emma Copley Eisenberg (Housemates) about a ghostly encounter that led to her new novel, the opposing worldviews of Grace Paley and Ottessa Moshfegh, and the choice to make art in difficult times. MENTIONED: Jazz Fleishman is in TroubleAmerican PastoralTerrace Story"Why I Write" Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of the nationally bestselling novel Housemates and the narrative nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Award, among other honors. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, VQR, American Short Fiction, and other publications. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shades on, sleeves up—it's summertime and we're back! This week, Jordan talks with Amy Lin, author of Here After, about grief, the sudden loss of her husband, miracles, and her family's history with thin places. Amy Lin lives in Calgary, Canada where there are two seasons: winter and road construction. She completed her MFA at Warren Wilson College and holds BAs in English Literature and Education. Her work has been published in places such as Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. She writes the Substack At The Bottom Of Everything where she wonders: how do we live with anything? Here After is her first book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a re-airing of our 2021 episode with the poet and bestselling essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil. We're celebrating the release of her new collection, BITE BY BITE: NOURISHMENTS AND JAMBOREES. Come for the new intro about pizza on the beach, stay for Aimee's reflections on everything from champion trees to 80s-era Madonna to what society tells us about who "gets to" be comfortable in nature. Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS (2020, Milkweed Editions), which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year. She has four previous poetry collections: OCEANIC (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), LUCKY FISH (2011), AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007), and MIRACLE FRUIT (2003), the last three from Tupelo Press. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan chats with Dorothea Lasky (The Shining) about interpreting a horror classic in her latest poetry collection, her love for horror, and why playfulness and horror aren't incompatible—and might in fact be inextricably connected. MENTIONED: The ShiningThe Shining"Memory" project Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of The Shining (October 2023), and Animal, published in 2019 in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She is also the author of Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of six chapbooks. Born in St. Louis in 1978, she has poems that have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, MAKE magazine, Phoebe, Poets & Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, and 6x6, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013), co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (with Alex Dimitrov, Flatiron Books, 2019) and is a 2013 Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in New York City. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan talks with Vinson Cunningham (Great Expectations) about finding himself in the midst of history, discovering ways to hang onto moments, and why he turned to his real life for his debut novel. MENTIONED: The Vanity Fair DiariesAnswered Prayers"How Auto is Auto-fiction"EstelleThe IdiotShadow and Act Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Fader, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney’s. A former staffer on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and in his White House, Cunningham has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Art, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in New York City. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan chats with Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom) about hiding from herself, the death of her father, and the challenges of writing a book without knowing where it will go. MENTIONED: The Riddles of the SphinxWalking and Talking"The Teens Have Made Nirvana Preppy" Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness and The Long Goodbye, as well as the poetry collections Sun In Days, Once, and Halflife. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and more. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Whiting Nonfiction Award, she resides in New Haven, where she teaches at Yale University and is the editor of The Yale Review. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan talks with Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) about money, freedom, his recent period of creative fecundity, and the enduring power of art. MENTIONED: The Golden BowlAppropriateFamily MealZero K Rumaan Alam is the author of three novels: Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. Other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the New Republic. He studied writing at Oberlin College and now lives in New York with his family. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan talks with artist and writer Maira Kalman about the death of her husband Tibor Kalman, the process of grief, and her irrepressible creative spirit. MENTIONED: Pippi Longstocking Sarah Berman's ClosetThe Diaries of Franz Kakfa"Cheek to Cheek" Maira Kalman was born in Tel Aviv and moved to New York City with her family at the age of four. She has written/illustrated over 30 books for adults and children, been a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker, and created textiles for Isaac Mizrahi and Kate Spade and sets for Mark Morris. Other collaborations have been with Nico Muhly, Alex Kalman, Michael Pollan, David Byrne, John Heginbotham, and Gertrude Stein. Her watch and clock designs appear under the M&Co label, the design studio created by her late husband Tibor Kalman. She has won many awards and given numerous talks, including several TED talks. Her art has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Her latest book is Women Holding Things. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.