Martyr Loser King, the debut graphic novel of poet, musician, actor and director Saul Williams, with art by Morgan Sorne, not only exists in the same world as his feature film Neptune Frost, but also that of three of his albums, one of his poetry collections and a touring dance performance called The Motherboard Suite. All of these works, in their respective disciplines, explore the distribution of power, the intersection of technology and race, and how our digitally-mediated lives are sustained by the crudest and cruelest of analog exploitations.
In Martyr Loser King we follow two Central African protagonists—a miner of coltan, the trace mineral that powers our smart phones and laptops, and an intersex hacker with designs on the system extracting wealth from their country and people. To borrow words from Saul’s song and poem “Coltan as Cotton,” in today’s conversation we hack into land rights and ownership, faith and morality, masculinity, femininity and sexuality. We hack into the rebellious gene, the storyboard, and the history of revolutions. We hack into the database and the panel marked “survival.”
Don't miss this one. Link in the bio!
#saulwilliams #martyrloserking #neptunefrost #morgansorne #coltanascotton
Surely you are already listening to the new Le Guin podcast IN YOUR SPARE TIME, a podcast that will span 130 weeks, where each week a different guest will engage with and read one of Ursula's 130 blog posts? It is absolutely wonderful--moving, motivating, funny, philosophical and both a balm and a beacon for catastrophic times—and four of the five first episodes are with past guests of Between the Covers (David Mitchell, Julie Phillips, adrienne maree brown and Omar El Akkad). We were all invited, over a hundred of us!, a year ago now, to pick a post of Ursula's to record (mine will air in 2028!) and as a token of appreciation we received this commemorative mug of Ursula's drawings of cats. My cat, Zora, definitely approves!
#ursulakleguin #inyoursparetime
One of the elements that makes Molly Crabapple’s latest book so remarkable is, not only the remarkable stories it unearths and retells, but more specifically how she tells these stories, these erased stories, these stories meant to be forgotten. Not only does she tell them in a dynamic, often thrilling, way, she also does so in a way that somehow opens up the history and gifts it to contemporary movements, organizers and their artists. You can feel how alive to the moment Molly’s book of history is in the words of everyone who praises it. Whether Naomi Klein calling it a “gripping, human story of love, idealism and betrayal” or Tareq Baconi “a road map for our revolution today” and we explore this together—how to write, in whatever genre, in a way that offers one’s work to anti-colonial movements of liberation.
link in bio!
#mollycrabapple #jewishbund #jewishlaborbund #herewhereweliveisourcountry
Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins is both a cleverly plotted page-turner, and an emotionally engaging, character-driven novel with an unforgettable protagonist; it’s both erudite and a wild ride, inviting and yet mysterious, only slowly revealing its cards. Through the lens of archaeology, Ruins explores how cultures construct history and shape memory, and through our prickly protagonist Ember, the difficulties and rewards of questioning the beliefs we’ve inherited.
link in bio!
#lilybrooksdalton #ruins #thelightpirate #goodmorningmidnight #motorcyclesiveloved
This virtual exhibition of Lucie Bonvalet's visual art is really incredible. Spanning ten years of her visual art practice—paintings, drawings and photography—you can scroll down on the landing page and see all her works in two dimensions. And yet, it is an entirely different experience to also enter the three-dimensional gallery space, to see them grouped on one wall or another, to look at them from a far and up close, individually and collectively, and to move in the virtual space as you do. To compare the two experiences, makes each of the works feel, somehow, more alive.
I've included the link in my bio.
Excited to share this classic episode from the archives with one of the great short storytellers of our time, Ted Chiang. This conversation happened in 2019 at the studios of KBOO community radio in Portland, Oregon. Blake Crouch speaking of Exhalation, the book we discuss today, says “Ted Chiang has no contemporary peers when it comes to the short story form. His name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Carver, Poe, Borges, and Kafka. Every story is a universe. Every story is a diamond. You will inhale Exhalation in a single, stunned sitting, because true genius doesn’t come along nearly as often as advertised. This is the real thing.” Don't miss this one.
Link in bio!
#tedchiang #exhalation
Today’s conversation with Jordy Rosenberg is many things but at its heart it explores the question of what it means to write revolutionary literature (or as Trotsky would call it “October literature”). Whether we are talking about trans horror or a Marxist surreal, the originating violence of early capitalism or writing toward utopian horizons; whether we are getting granular on the level of craft and form or looking more broadly at the role of art and artists, the question of how our writing can lend itself toward conjuring an elsewhere and otherwise is, I think, the animating force behind it all.
Jordy’s provocative choices in his latest novel Night Night Fawn bring these questions urgently to the fore as it centers and is narrated by someone whose worldview Jordy strongly opposes. Night Night Fawn is an opioid-addled, deathbed rant by one Barbara Rosenberg, a transphobic Zionist woman modeled after Jordy’s own mother. Barbara holds court not only on her life’s disappointments, but on Marxism and gender delivered through her cracked lens. All while her greatest disappointment, her transgender son, who may or may not want to kill her, visits her at her bedside. What opportunities, challenges and dangers does this approach create for a writer with revolutionary aims? How can looking back at originary violences, within a family or a nation or an ideology, be a liberatory act? And when confronting structural or familial violence, what is the role of humor and satire? Perhaps it is best summed up by Book Page in its starred review when they say Night Night Fawn is “comedic fiction as political firepower.” Don't miss this one! Link in my bio
#jordyrosenberg #nightnightfawn #confessionsofthefox
The most listened to BTC episodes of 2025 (in no particular order): Olga Ravn, Omar El Akkad, Madeleine Thien, adrienne maree brown, Robert Macfarlane, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
When Cynthia Cruz describes Joan Naviyuk Kane’s latest collection as a series of poems that “both shows and enacts how a self is brought to being through the abyss,” I think of Kane’s own words about poetry: as “a place of refuge and possibility, a generative space. Not a space of loss, but contingence.” What is a home in the face of dispossession? Inheritance in the face of rupture and colonial erasure? And what is the role of language on behalf of continuity and continuation? We explore all of these questions and much more, both generally, but also quite granularly within the context of the indigenous circumpolar North.
link in bio!
#joannaviyukkane
Today’s episode is a classic from the archives, a conversation from 2019 with Brandon Shimoda about his book The Grave on the Wall. While the book centers on an exploration of Shimoda’s grandfather’s internment at Fort Missoula during World War II, it is really an interrogation of America that extends both directions in time from that moment. Forts such as these, that imprisoned Japanese and Japanese-Americans during the war, were also previously used to fight the Indian wars that established white dominance over Native lands, and are now today being used as detention centers/concentration camps for the refugees and immigrants from our southern border. The Grave on the Wall is also an engagement with photography and (mis)representation, memory and memorialization and asks the question of what it means to memorialize something that is ongoing, that has never ended.
link in the bio!
#brandonshimoda #thegraveonthewall
#citylightsbooks
What if we were to take seriously that we, as humans, aren’t the sole authors of our world, that there are other intelligences at play, that we are only one of many agents of change and transformation, and that “we” aren’t even entirely ourselves given that “we” are composed of many “others,” many strangers that nevertheless make up what we call a “self”—what would a philosophy and politics emerging from this look like, one where we weren’t the center or central agent of the story? And what would we do if we discovered that the way we’ve been responding to the things we want to change—colonialism, racism, fascism, environmental devastation, and more—what if something about the way we oppose these forces actually reinscribes them, where the very way we are responding to the crisis becomes part of the crisis? We explore these animating philosophical questions of Báyò Akómoláfé today and take them also into the realm of words— from what it means when Báyò says “poetry precedes language” to how to tell stories while recognizing, in their remarkable power, their danger and limitations. We talk koans and tricksters, monsters and fugitives, shifting shape, following cracks, making sanctuary and much more.
link in bio!
#bayoakomolafe #selah #ayinpress
When, being interviewed long ago, I mentioned Michael as a polestar, an inspiration for me, he called me out of the blue (I still have his message saved) & for hours shared stories, wisdom & advice with me. Sebald, Morrison, Sontag, Paley, he interviewed so many of our touchstone writers. Perhaps my favorite is his long encounter with John Berger at Berger's kitchen table in rural France (the two part video can be found on YouTube and is not to be missed). You can see Berger's delight in having such an interviewer, such a human before him. May your memory be a blessing Michael Silverblatt. It already is
