For our final episode of our first season, Naomi is joined by fellow Annie Ernaux enthusiast Jeannie Vanasco for an in-depth discussion on immersion in the reading process, the un-self-consciousness of writing memoir, the question of whether there is a divide between the craft and the personal, and how we make choices about what to leave out when and why. For the Annie Ernaux fans out there, Naomi and Jeannie look closely at Jeannie's marginalia in her copies of Shame and The Other Girl and their influence on Jeannie's work, particularly The Glass Eye. Shout-out to Seven Stories Press, Ernaux's American publisher -- we're repping your Annie Ernaux hats and shirts and hope you'll make more of them ;)

Author Bio: Jeannie Vanasco is the author of A Silent Treatment, which was named a best book of 2025 by NPR and a best nonfiction book of 2025 by Electric Literature. Her other memoirs include Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University. Her fourth book is under contract with Tin House, publisher of her other memoirs.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, Interabang Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Naomi is joined by bookseller and podcaster Lori Feathers to discuss her reading of The Hunger of Women by Marosia Castaldi, translated by Jamie Richards (And Other Stories, 2023). They explore the impact of this rhythmic, hypnotic prose, the embedded references to books from other cultures, and the lineage of ‘abundant’ books that drives so much of Lori’s reading.

Reading List:

Miss Mackintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young

Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

Lori Feathers is a writer and podcaster in Dallas, Texas, and a co-owner/founder of Interabang Books where she is the store’s book buyer. She is creator of “The Big Book Project” on Substack, and co-hosts the critically acclaimed books podcast, “Across the Pond.” Lori is founding Chair of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, US and Canada, a prize honoring the work of small publishers, and co-founder of the Inside Literary Prize for incarcerated persons. For six years she served on the elected board of the National Book Critics Circle. Her writing can be found at Literary Hub, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Southwest Review.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, Interabang Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.

Naomi is joined by Lauren Elkin for a conversation on the permission-giving qualities of Georges Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, how reading Perec made her into a writer, and what it's like to re-see the world in the way he encourages us to do. Weaving through Elkin's own experiments in seeing with her book No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus and the ways we live in and through our homes with her novel Scaffolding, we land in her current home in London where her accumulated stacks of books are grouped by subject, and we get a taste of how a new stack is building toward a particular new project.

Reading List

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Georges Perec

The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen

The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Jane Gallop

Lauren Elkin is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including Scaffolding, Art Monsters, and Flâneuse. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. An award-winning translator, she lives between Paris and London.

Marginalia: an autobiography is out now! Order it from Autofocus Books or your favorite, cool bookstore (like Unnameable Books, Book Club Bar, Exile in Bookville, Literati, Third Place Books, Skunk Cabbage Books, and more)! Subscribe to her Substack, Process Notes, for further thoughts and reflections.