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We’re excited to bring you a special clip from Well-Read Black Girl, hosted by Glory Edim. Well-Read Black Girl is the literary kickback you never knew you needed. Each week, Glory sits in deep, honest and close conversation with authors like Tarana Burke, Min Jin Lee, Anita Hill, Gabrielle Union, Elizabeth Acevedo and more. You’ll also meet WRBG Book Club members, literacy advocates, and Black booksellers to hear what they’re reading and what it means to be well-read. Join Glory through this current cultural moment – where art, justice and literature collide – and pay homage to the literary legacies of the women who paved the way. You’ll laugh, cry, connect and build space for kinship in a shared love of literature. Tune in, turn the page, and join the celebration.



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Our Season 3 finale opens with “The Trick Is to Pretend,” a poem by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, read by the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers: “I climb knowing the only way down / is by falling.” The actor Jessica Hecht plays Joan Didion in a reenactment of her classic Art of Fiction interview with Linda Kuehl. Jericho Brown reads his poem “Hero”: “my brothers and I grew up fighting / Over our mother’s mind.” The actor, comedian, and podcaster Connor Ratliff reads Bud Smith’s “Violets,” the story of two unlikely arsonists rediscovering life in the flames. The episode closes with Bridgers performing “Garden Song.”

 

To hear more from Connor Ratliff, check out his podcast Dead Eyes. To hear Avery Trufelman’s latest show, find the podcast Nice Try!


“Hero” by Jericho Brown appears courtesy of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

 

This episode was sound designed and mixed by Hannis Brown, and mastered by Justin Shturtz.

In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.

 

To check out Captioning the Archives, the book Aisha Sabatini Sloan created with her father, Lester Sloan, visit McSweeney’s.

 

This episode was sound designed and mixed by John DeLore, and mastered by Justin Shturtz.

This episode focuses exclusively on the work of fiction writer Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Known World and All Aunt Hagar’s Children, and subject of the Art of Fiction no. 222. The episode opens with an excerpt from that interview, a conversation between Jones and Hilton Als. Then actor Amber Gray (Hadestown) reads Jones’s story “Marie” from issue no. 122.

 

This episode was sound designed and mixed by Helena de Groot, and mastered by Justin Shturtz.

George Saunders, in an excerpt from his Art of Fiction interview, explains how his teenage job delivering fast food prepared him to write fiction; Monica Youn reads her poem “Goldacre,” which tells the truth about Twinkies; Molly McCully Brown reads her essay “If You Are Permanently Lost,” in which she confesses that “space makes no sense”; and Venita Blackburn reads “Fam,” a very short story about self-love and social media.

This episode was sound designed and mixed by Helena de Groot, and mastered by Justin Shturtz.

Robert Frost defines modern poetry in an excerpt from his Art of Poetry interview; the Italian poet Antonella Anedda discusses her poem “Historiae 2” with her translator Susan Stewart before the American vocal ensemble Tenores de Aterúe re-imagines the poem as a song in the folk tradition of Anedda’s native Sardinia; and Yohanca Delgado reads her story “The Little Widow from the Capital,” a tale of mystery, heartbreak, and embroidery set in a New York apartment building.

 

Robert Frost’s December 16, 1959, interview with Richard Poirier appears courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University's Houghton Library. PS3511.R94 Z467 1959x. HOLLIS Permalink: 990023780790203941.

 

To learn more about Tenores de Aterúe, check out their documentary feature at www.aterue.com. Visit Bandcamp to hear more of their music.

This episode was sound designed and mixed by John DeLore, and mastered by Justin Shturtz.