Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Robin Coste Lewis about her new poetry collection, Archive of Desire. The four part collection emerged out of a collaboration with other artists commissioned by the Onassis Foundation to celebrate the 160th birthday of poet Constantin Cavafy, exploring Lewis's encounters with Cavafy's life, work, and sexual history. Lewis discusses her experience poring over the materials from Cavafy's archives in Athens, how his poetry still speaks to us so profoundly more than a century later, and their queer kinship.

Eric Newman speaks to Brandon Taylor about his latest novel, Minor Black Figures. It centers on Wyeth, a Black artist in his thirties wrestling with creative stagnation and the pressures of sudden fame after some of his paintings unexpectedly go viral. As he resists the temptation to produce the sort of identity-based art the market seems to want, Wyeth engages in recovering the life and career of a forgotten Black artist from the 1970s. He also finds himself entangled in a romance with a former seminarian whose views on art and faith challenge and inspire him amid the humid swirl of summer in New York. Taylor discusses the novel's origins, the white gaze and the struggles faced by Black artists, and how to write a good sex scene. 

This week we are listening back to an episode from earlier this year. Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with Sarah Schulman about her latest book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. With a focus on practical politics, Schulman explores both how we imagine solidarity and what the work of solidarity requires. Rather than a horizontal movement, the book focuses on the ways achieving today’s most pressing political goals—from Palestine’s self-determination to immigration reform and protecting LBGTQ rights—requires working across various levels of individual privilege and power. With both historical and present day examples, Schulman presents a clear-eyed, long-term vision of a life in activism, laying out stumbling blocks and failures alongside meaningful progress, and the steps it takes to get there.

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman speak with Angela Flournoy about her novel, The Wilderness. Moving back and forth from the early 2000s to the present, the novel looks at the stories of five women living in New York and Los Angeles, capturing the mess and power of their deep, complicated friendships as they navigate love, motherhood, careers, and everything in between. Angela discusses how she developed these characters, how she works with scenes and dialog, and why she wanted to write about Black female friendship.