The Spine

In Shelf Awareness, a reviewer of Mattilda Berstein Sycamore's latest book "Sketchstasy" wrote, “If you've heard her read, you know Sycamore's voice is one in a zillion. She’s at her very best in Sketchtasy.” Click Play to (literally) hear for yourself. Largely self-educated and widely read, Mattilda is wise and whimsical. It's a magnetic combination. Her reading story takes an important turn when she moves to San Francisco at 19 and meets a vibrant queer community that loves to read as much...

"I really think that being obsessed with books and reading and other people's stories has had a huge impact on pretty much every aspect of my life," says journalist and host of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, Ann Friedman. In this episode of The Spine, hear how she got away with checking out more than the 10 books allowed to children with library cards, how reading bell hooks shaped her understanding of feminism, and which books she did NOT like (hint: anything with petticoats and...

A mixed-race child of an immigrant, Iain Haley Pollock began reading books his father read as a child, a tradition he carries on with his own kids. Two of the most influential books have been poetry collections, where he was able to discover multiple poets at once. Never underestimate the anthology! His conversation with the host, Gail Marie, ends with the story of how and why he read Malcolm X's autobiography...as a fourth grader. SHOW NOTES: https://thespineshow.com/iain-haley-pollock/

Though a citizen of the United States and Austria, author John Wray currently lives in Mexico City. And that is where I spoke with him, via Skype, to talk about his reading life. As a child, he was read to in German. As an adult, he often prefers to read books he finds left outside for anyone to take. And though he prefers fiction, when he's working on a book, he turns to biographies. https://thespineshow.com/john-wray/

A designer by schooling and trade, Jez Burrows is also a writer who enjoys having fun with words. The books he likes best do, too. In one, letters start disappearing from a plaque on a statue in town, and the residents must do without them, one by one, until only a few are left. Which means the writer does without them as well. In another, originally written in French, the letter E is missing. And guess what? It's missing in the English translation, too (how did they do that?!). You have...

Critic, poet, and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib remembers "sneak reading" Thomas Pynchon's novel "Gravity's Rainbow" as a freshman in high school, but he quickly grew out of hiding his passion for books. Later in high school, he read Shakespeare, and his musically inclined hear heard the meant-to-be-spoken rhythms in his plays. But music criticism is where he felt spoken to, specifically Lester Bangs, and it this writing that continues to influence his own. Show Notes:...

Author Paul Lisicky's interview was recorded in 2016 when The Spine was a radio program on WHUP FM out of Hillsborough, North Carolina. He's the author of five books, including “The Narrow Door,” published by Graywolf Press in 2016. A New York Times Editor’s Choice, "The Narrow Door" was named one of the most exciting books of the year by Buzzfeed and one of the best books of the year by Shelf Awareness. Paul is working on a new book, which is coming out in 2020, also from Graywolf. It’s...

A recipient of both the NYC Emerging Writer's Fellowship and an Aspen Words scholarship, author Lexi Freiman's reading life didn’t begin until she discovered plays. This makes perfect sense considering her passion for acting. In fact, Lexi worked as an actress with Australia’s national Shakespeare company before moving to New York in 2010, when she focused on writing. Her debut novel, “Inappropriation,” has been described by a reviewer as "intense, crackling, hilarious.” You could say...

“I was such a massive reader when I was young, and it’s the books that I read as a child that stuck with me and went on to influence me the most.” Dana Schwartz is a correspondent at Entertainment Weekly, based in Los Angeles. She's written for The New Yorker, The Guardian, the New York Observer, Marie Claire, Glamour, Mic, GQ, VICE, and more. She is also the author of two books: a young adult novel entitled "And We're Off" and a memoir entitled "Choose Your Own Disaster.” Head over to the...

Tobias Caroll is the author of the novel "Reel," which was named one of 2016's best books by Nylon, and the collection "Transitory." During the recording of this episode, Tobias was doing a short residency on Governor's Island, and he’s the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. The list of books and writers that he sent me before we spoke was long and varied — but as we spoke, a couple of themes presented themselves. See a list of all the books he mentions at thespineshow.com/shownotes. QUOTES...

As a graduate student at Duke University English Department, Ken Ilgunas lived out of a van so that he could (and did!) graduate without incurring debt. You can read about it in "Walden on Wheels," his first book, which just celebrated its fifth anniversary. His third book, "This Land is Our Land," was released this spring. On The Spine, he talks about how his love of video games as a child prepared him for a love of books in college. KEY QUOTES: "Being exposed to stories in [video games]...

Megan Cummins is the managing editor at A Public Space, a tri-quarterly magazine. I reached out to Megan because I wanted to speak with someone who was working at a magazine that publishes disparate and untraditional pieces. I wondered how she got there, as a reader. It’s a great story, full of medieval heroines, Holocaust survivors, and 20-somethings in Manhattan. A Public Space is a nonprofit magazine that publishes everything from fiction and art to nonfiction and poetry. Founded in 2006...

It was recently announced that Janice Y.K. Lee's latest book, "The Expatriates," is going to be made into an Amazon Prime TV series by Nicole Kidman. That sounded like a great reason to replay her 2016 interview on The Spine. Reading, for Janice, was "like ice cream" in that she couldn't get enough. But reading was always her private pleasure: Because her parents read books in Korean, she still doesn't know what kinds of readers they are.

The award-winning writer Allan Gurganus discovered the library later in life than most writers. “All of the imagination that a lot of people use in reading I used to read the woods." But he made up for lost time quickly, finishing 1,200 books (and writing book reports on each one) in under four years. He says it saved his life, and after listening to his story, you'll understand why. Allan Gurganus is best known for his first book, "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” which was on...

Elizabeth Cox is an award-winning author of several collections of poetry, short stories, and four novels. Her most recent is called "A Question of Mercy." Long before she won the Robert Penn Warren Award for fiction for her entire body of work, she grew up 100 yards from a library with two older brothers who became poets — Herb Barks and Coleman Barks. You can only imagine the kind of reading life she’s had! Or you can listen to her story right now.

Krista Bremer is the author of "My Accidental Jihad: A Memoir" and editor at The Sun. She shares with listeners of The Spine how she became a reader (including "the thrill of browsing" she still experiences at the library), how her reading informs and affects her writing, and her all-time favorite book (by Virginia Woolf). KEY QUOTES: About the difference between fiction and nonfiction: "Fiction can be truer than nonfiction. There are the facts of what happened, and then there are the hard...

Her greatest reading achievement? Being the first first-grader to read 100 books and sitting in the birthday chair even though it was not her birthday. But it was the $75 gift certificate to a West LA feminist bookstore that changed poet Lynn Melnick the most as a reader. In its stacks, she met Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Adrianne Rich, Rita Dove, and other women writers. She never looked back. QUOTES About reading Diane Wakoski: “The rhythms of her words have always been...

Writer and reader Michele Filgate credits her grandmother for generating her love for books; for Michele's 10th birthday, she even paid Michele's $100 library fee. Who does she consider "the patron saint of book worms"? What kind of fan fiction did she write as a kid? And what was her role in Paul Harding's "Tinkers" winning the Pulitzer Prize for literature? You'll have to listen to find out.