Editors Dayna Tortorici and Mark Krotov join Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about 20 years of the magazine n+1, as well as their new anthology The Intellectual Situation: The Best of n+1’s Second Decade. The book collects n+1 essays, short stories, and reviews from the last ten years, covering the rise of Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism, the George Floyd protests, #MeToo, and the Covid pandemic. The guests discuss the ins and outs of running a small magazine, the current media landscape, their commitment to formal experimentation and political discourse, and their vision for the future of print.
Also, Yasmin Zaher, author of The Coin, returns top recommend The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrere.

Kate Wolf speaks with writer and journalist Yasmin Zaher about her debut novel, The Coin. An allegorical tale of alienation, loneliness, and repulsion, the book follows a Palestinian woman who’s recently fulfilled her family’s dream of moving to America. In New York, working as a middle school teacher, she finds herself disillusioned with the filth of the city and its poverty. She’s beset with a deep unease at her own body and haunted by memories, especially that of a coin—a shekel—she swallowed on a car ride as a child just moments before a horrible accident. Estranged from the few people she knows in the city, her behavior becomes increasingly unhinged and bizarre in ways that complicate standard stories of immigration, and instead imagine the path of a character who sees through America’s promise and realizes she has nothing to lose.
Also, Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking, returns to recommend three books and one magazine: The Plague Edition of Konch Magazine edited by Ishmael Reed and Tennessee Reed’s; Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings edited by Michael Kelly and Monique Roelofs; James: a Novel by Percival Everett; and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith.

Eric Newman is joined by historian Nell Irvin Painter to discuss I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays, a compendium of Painter's writing about art, politics, and race across nearly four decades. The wide-ranging discussion moves from how researching Sojourner Truth inspired Painter to get her MFA in visual art, to the struggle over what can be taught and known about American history, to the ways modern information technology impacts our experience of the present and its echoes in the past, and to how we might navigate a bleak present in which fascism seems newly on the march.
Also, Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, returns to recommend Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv.