Weird Era

Weird Era
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Weird Era

Hosted by Sruti Islam and Alex Nierenhausen Theme Songs by Gino Visconti and Michael Jaworski (@mikejaws) Audio Production by Kyel Loadenthal

  1. Episode 109: Weird Era feat. Katie Kitamura

    2D AGO

    Episode 109: Weird Era feat. Katie Kitamura

    About Katie Kitamura: Katie Kitamura is the author of four previous novels, most recently A Separation and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Lannan fellowship, and many other honors, and her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University. About Audition: One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.

    29 min
  2. Episode 108: Weird Era feat. Kevin Nguyen

    APR 4

    Episode 108: Weird Era feat. Kevin Nguyen

    About Kevin Nguyen: Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves. He is the features editor at The Verge and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn. About My Documents: Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family. As young adults, they’re on the precipice of new ventures: Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naïve freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America creates a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions. Cut off entirely from the outside world, forced to work jobs they hate, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long, dusty days in camp and acclimate to life without the internet. That is, until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this connection as a chance to tell the world about the horrors of camp—and as an opportunity to bolster her own reporting career in the process. Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.

    42 min

  3. MAR 28

    Episode 107: Weird Era feat. Laurie Woolever

    About Laurie Woolever: Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor. She spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she coauthored the cookbook Appetites and World Travel. She’s written about food and travel for the New York Times, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others, and has worked as an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography. About Care and Feeding: A candid, funny, and occasionally devastating memoir of a woman making her way through the food world, navigating addiction, a cultural reckoning, and an unexpected tragedy In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there’s more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. Behind the scenes, Laurie’s life is frequently chaotic, an often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating. Laurie seeks to try it all—from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli—while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood. As the food world careens toward an overdue reckoning and Laurie’s mentors face their own high-profile descents, she is confronted with the questions of where she belongs and how to hold on to the parts of her life’s work that she truly values: care and feeding.

    46 min
  4. Episode 106: Weird Era feat. Andrew Lipstein

    MAR 21

    Episode 106: Weird Era feat. Andrew Lipstein

    About Andrew Lipstein: Andrew Lipstein is the author of Last Resort (2022), The Vegan (2023), and Something Rotten (2025). He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons. About Something Rotten: In his provocative, crackling new novel, Andrew Lipstein spins a wicked web through the heart of Copenhagen. You'll question everyone and everything—even the very nature of truth. Cecilie is a fed-up New York Times reporter. Her husband, Reuben, is a disgraced former NPR host and grudging stay-at-home dad. Neither can wait to flee New York and spend the summer in Copenhagen, Denmark, Cecilie’s hometown. But their vacation begins to turn inside out as soon as they land: Cecilie’s first love, Jonas, has been diagnosed with a rare, fatal illness. All of Cecilie’s friends are desperate to get him help—that is, except for Mikkel, a high-powered journalist who happens to be the only one Jonas will listen to. Mikkel’s influence quickly extends to Reuben, who’s not only intoxicated by Mikkel’s charm, but discovers in him a new model of masculinity—one he found hopelessly absent in America. As Mikkel indoctrinates Reuben with ever more depraved stunts, Reuben senses something is seriously amiss. Cecilie, too, begins to question who to trust—even herself. Drawn in by the gravity of the past, she can’t help but stray onto the road not taken. A twisting, thrilling tale of loyalty and deceit, lovers and fools, Andrew Lipstein's Something Rotten proves that sometimes to be kind you have to be cruel beyond belief.

    47 min
  5. Episode 105: Weird Era feat. Haley Mlotek

    MAR 14

    Episode 105: Weird Era feat. Haley Mlotek

    About Haley Mlotek: HALEY MLOTEK is a writer, editor, and organizer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Nation, T Magazine, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Hazlitt, and n+1, among others. She is a founding member of the Freelance Solidarity Project, a distinct division for digital media workers within the National Writers Union, and teaches in the English and Journalism departments at Concordia University. Previously, Mlotek was the deputy editor of SSENSE, the style editor of MTV News, the editor of The Hairpin, and the publisher of WORN Fashion Journal. About No Fault: When Haley Mlotek was ten years old, she told her mother to leave her father. Divorce was all around her. Her mother ran a mediation and marriage counseling practice out of Mlotek’s childhood home, and Mlotek spent her preteen years answering the phones and typing out parenting plans for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire, an ordeal that promised something better on the other side of something bad. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider everything she thought she understood about divorce. Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, No Fault is a brilliant account of 21st century divorce—its remarkably common yet seemingly singular impact, and what it reveals about our society and our desires for family, love, and friendship. Mlotek asks profound questions about what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power, all while charting a poignant and cathartic journey away from her own marriage and towards an unknown future. Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, No Fault is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it truly means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.

    42 min
  6. Episode 104: Weird Era feat. Torrey Peters

    MAR 7

    Episode 104: Weird Era feat. Torrey Peters

    About Torrey Peters: Torrey Peters is the bestselling author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and was named one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and an MA in comparative literature from Dartmouth. Peters rides a pink motorcycle and splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont. About Stag Dance: n this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing. In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition. Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,” a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,” a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood. Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.

    55 min
  7. Episode 103: Weird Era feat. Lauren Elkin

    2024-12-06

    Episode 103: Weird Era feat. Lauren Elkin

    About Lauren Elkin: Lauren Elkin is the author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse, a New York Times Book Review notable book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frieze, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. A native New Yorker, Elkin lived in Paris for twenty years and now resides in London. About Scaffolding: The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time. Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective. Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood. Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.

    47 min
  8. Episode 101: Weird Era feat. Fawn Parker

    2024-11-29

    Episode 101: Weird Era feat. Fawn Parker

    About Fawn Parker: FAWN PARKER is the author of the novels What We Both Know, longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Set-Point, and Dumb-Show, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, winner of the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize and the J. M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. Her story “Feed Machine” was longlisted for the 2020 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, and her story “WunderHorse II” was anthologized in André Forget’s After Realism. Fawn is a Ph.D. student at the University of New Brunswick. She divides her time between Toronto and Fredericton. About Hi, It's Me: Shortly after her mother’s death, Fawn arrives at the farmhouse. While there, she will stay in her mother’s bedroom in the house that is also occupied by four other women who live by an unusual set of beliefs. Wrestling with longstanding compulsive and harmful behaviours, as well as severe self-doubt, Fawn is confronted with the reality of her mother’s death. It is her responsibility to catalogue the furniture and possessions in the room, then sell or dispose of them. Instead, Fawn becomes fixated on archiving her mother’s writing and documents, searching for signs, and drawing tenuous connections to help her understand more about the enigmatic woman in the pages. I am surrounded by mocking evidence of her inhabitancy of this room. Quickly, it is expiring. Today she was alive. When the day runs out that will no longer be true. Tomorrow I will be able to say that yesterday she was alive, at least. The next day, nothing. She will just be dead. The fact seems to be at its smallest now, growing with time. For now she is many things, and there are many places left to find her. In Hi, It’s Me, Fawn Parker is unafraid to explore the bewildering relationship between the living and the dead. Strikingly original, provocative, and engrossing Hi, It’s Me takes us into the furthest corners of grief, invoking the physicality and painful embodiment of terminal illness with astonishing precision and emotional force. This mesmerizing, devastating novel asks: Why must it be this way?

    37 min
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5
out of 5
37 Ratings

About

Hosted by Sruti Islam and Alex Nierenhausen Theme Songs by Gino Visconti and Michael Jaworski (@mikejaws) Audio Production by Kyel Loadenthal

Information

  • Creator
    Weird Era
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2025
  • Episodes
    108
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Weird Era
  • Show Website
    Weird Era

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