Little Atoms

Simon Garfield is the author of seventeen acclaimed books of non-fiction including Timekeepers, A Notable Woman (as editor), To the Letter, On the Map, Just My Type and Mauve. His study of AIDS in Britain, The End of Innocence, won the Somerset Maugham prize. His latest book is In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. His latest book is the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Weymouth's work has been published by a wide variety of outlets including the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New Internationalist. His interest in the relationship between humans and the world around them has led him to write on issues of climate change and environmentalism, and most recently, to the Yukon river and the stories of the communities living on its banks. He lives on a 100-year-old Dutch barge on the River Lea in London. His first book, Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thea Lim’s novel An Ocean of Minutes is out now from Quercus/Hachette in the UK, Viking/Penguin Random House in Canada, and Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster in the US. Her writing has been published by the Paris Review, the Guardian, Salon, the National Post, LitHub, Electric Literature, the Millions, the Southampton Review, GRIST and others. She has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work, including artists’ grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Her novella The Same Woman was released by Invisible Publishing in 2007. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and she previously served as nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast. She grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto, where she is a professor of creative writing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To see in the New Year, here's a repeat of our Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh from August. Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For Christmas Day, here's a repeat of our interview from June 2018 with Adam Kay. Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and writer for TV and film, including Mitchell & Webb and Very British Problems. He previously worked as a junior doctor, detailing his funny and sad experiences in his first book This Is Going To Hurt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Frye is a professor and historian, whose research has taken him around the world and involved him in numerous archaeological digs since receiving his PhD from Duke University. He has published extensively in international academic journals. He is the author of Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood & Brick. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jeff Jackson is the author of Mira Corpora, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Vice, and The Collagist, and five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award–winning Collapsable Giraffe theater company in New York City. His latest novel is Destroy All Monsters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Padraig Reidy talks to Paul Ewen. Paul Ewen is a New Zealand writer based in south London. His work has appeared in the British Council's New Writing anthology, the Guardian, the TES, Tank, and Five Dials. Paul's first novel, Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2014. It went on to appear on numerous Books Of The Year lists, won a Society of Authors McKitterick Prize, and was described as "inspired" by the Sunday Times, whose reviewer also called it "a brilliant, deranged new comic creation... the funniest book I've read in years." Paul is now the author of Francis Plug: Writer in Residence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

R. O. Kwon is the author of the novel The Incendiaries. Her writing is published in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Time, Noon, Electric Literature, Playboy, and elsewhere. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Omi International, the Steinbeck Center, and the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony. Born in South Korea, she has lived most of her life in the United States.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.