Reading Writers

In the Season 3 finale, Jo sells Charlotte on Alan Warner’s “amazingly textured” Movern Callar, which leads the hosts to reflect on some of the season’s recurring themes. They’re then joined by the radically reflective William C. Anderson, who explains how the Buddhism transmitted in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen Battles, a commentary on the teachings of Master Linji, informed his political development.William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, Alabama. His work has appeared in The Guardian, MTV, British Journal of Photography, Logic(s) Magazine, and Prism, where he’s a monthly columnist. He is the author of The Nation on No Map (AK Press 2021) and co-author of  As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018). He’s also the co-founder of Offshoot Journal and provides creative direction as a producer of the Black Autonomy Podcast. His writings have been included in the anthologies, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket 2016) and No Selves to Defend (Mariame Kaba 2014). Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte puzzles over who exactly wrote Brighton Rock before Jo shares a newfound fascination with big machines, spurred in part by Don Gillmor’s On Oil. A conversation with the preternaturally wise Rayne Fisher-Quann starts with Iris Owens' After Claude, then opens up into a rousing feminist seminar on Margery Kempe, sexual obsession, and women’s humor of past and present. Rayne Fisher-Quann is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her blog is called Internet Princess, and her first book, COMPLEX FEMALE CHARACTER, is forthcoming from Knopf. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest and book coverage requests! Books discussed on all seasons of the podcast are aggregated here on Bookshop. Questions and comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Outro music by Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free, and her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo and Charlotte turn their attention to Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s mindblowing A Personal Matter and Troubled Lands: Stories of Mexico and Cuba, a collection translated by Langston Hughes, before they’re joined by Gothic-literature-loving writer-of-all-modes Nicholas Russell, who puts the spotlight on Algernon Blackwood’s unsettling preoccupation with mysterious forces in the natural world. Nicholas Russell is a writer and critic from Las Vegas. His work has been featured inMcSweeney's, The Baffler, Conjunctions, The Nation, and Orion, among other publications. He's a long time bookseller, a contributing writer at Defector, and managing editor at Still Alive magazine. His debut novel Observer will be published by Ecco at HarperCollins on September 15th. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest and book coverage requests! Books discussed on all seasons of the podcast are aggregated here on Bookshop. Questions and comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Outro music by Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free, and her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte and Jo go deep on jealousy, self-hatred, and vulnerability in a conversation that touches on A Separate Peace, The Go-Between, Beowulf, and more. Then the canny and intrepid Maya Binyam joins for a discussion about the category of little girlhood, ambiguity in fiction, and female desire.Maya Binyam is the author of Hangman. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is a 2025 - 2026 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest and book coverage requests! Books discussed on all seasons of the podcast are aggregated here on Bookshop. Questions and comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Outro music by Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free, and her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo takes us on a whirlwind tour of their recent reading, including Mary Helen Washington’s Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life, and Charlotte explains why Susanna Moore’s In the Cut is one of the most thrilling novels she’s ever encountered. Then, the profoundly thoughtful Jamie Hood joins to explore the many boyfriends and political disappointments of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Jamie Hood is the author, most recently, of Trauma Plot: A Life, the hybrid pandemic diary how to be a good girl, the semi-monthly, Proust-infused newsletter, regards, marcel, and a book of love poems, forthcoming in 2026. She has written extensively on books, feminism, #MeToo, and other political matters for many publications, some of them even prestigious. She lives in Brooklyn.Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest and book coverage requests! Questions and comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Outro music by Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free, and her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte and Jo revisit Rebecca Novack’s Murder Bimbo before taking a quick tour of the Russian Civil War and comrade crushes through Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How The Steel Was Tempered. They’re then joined by the scintillating Brittany Newell, who meditates on contemporary fiction, cities at night, and Samuel R. Delany's indelible Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Also discussed in this episode: Emma Cline’s The Guest and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection.Brittany Newell is a writer and performer living in San Francisco. Her debut novel Oola was published in 2017 at the age of 21 in the US, UK, and Germany. You can find her written work in Granta, n+1, McSweeney's, The New York Times, and others. Her second novel Soft Core was published by FSG in February 2025 in the US, UK, and France. She is at work on a third novel about love addiction, emotional vampires, and cannibalism. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At last, the audio from December's Bookforum x Reading Writers live holiday event! The justly celebrated novelist Stephanie Wambugu joins Charlotte and Jo to talk about the controversial and inescapable Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico.Stephanie Wambugu is the author of the novel Lonely Crowds. Her work has appeared in The Drift, The Nation, Granta, Frieze, Bookforum. She lives and works in New York. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The hosts discuss Stephanie Wambugu’s justly-hyped novel Lonely Crowds before they’re joined by Noah Kulwin, an avowed Macdonaldhead who details the pleasures of private eye fiction through 1966’s Black Money. Noah Kulwin is a writer based in New York City. He is also the co-host of the podcast Blowback, a history program about American empire. He has written for a wide variety of publications, but more recently can be found in The Baffler, The Intercept, Screen Slate and Protean. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte and Jo spring into the new year with a conversation about ancient poetry: Beowulf, The Iliad, and Dante’s Inferno as translated by Mark Musa, Mary Jo Bang, and Danny Lavery. They’re then joined by the wise and wonderful Hanif Abdurraqib who—after sharing a scoop about what series of book he reads every year (!)—reflects on the formative impacts of his encounter with Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place. Other titles discussed: Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Bebe Moore Campbells’ Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain. Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.Danny Lavery’s translations of The Inferno can be found here.Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this host-only bonus episode, Charlotte and Jo discuss some of their most memorable reads of 2025. Authors discussed include Arthur C. Clarke, Shon Faye, Sarah Schulman, Ai Yazawa, Marjane Satrapi, Ariana Reines, Kyung-Ran Jo, and more.Please consider supporting us on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.