Reading Around the Margins

Miranda Mellis joins Naomi for a discussion that indexes Michael Eigen’s book The Psychoanalytic Mystic. They discuss the resonance between annotation and free association; the experience of narrating oneself in analysis, losing the thread, doubling back, and having one’s speech be received by the other; the index as a branching form, a poem of the subjective reader; writing as social practice through collective annotation...

Naomi is out on tour, so she will be back in two weeks with a new, full episode in conversation with Miranda Mellis, author of Crocosmia from Nightboat Books. And, as it happens, Miranda is on tour, too. Click here for a full list of her upcoming stops.

Naomi's next stops are Clio's Books in Oakland, CA on Friday, October 17th with the poet and psychoanalyst Alice Jones and Third Place Books - Ravenna in Seattle, WA on Frid...

Briana Parker, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Lofty Pigeon Books, joins Naomi for a discussion that begins in her thoroughly annotated copy of Ulysses from a high school English class (shouts out to Richard Roundy, Briana’s English teacher and now regular at Lofty Pigeon!) and meanders through the many worlds Briana has occupied and built in New York City — from growing up in Sheepshead Bay, to the Union Square Barnes & Noble,...

To celebrate the release of Naomi's Marginalia: an autobiography, we have a bit of a role reversal in this episode. Michael Wheaton, publisher of Autofocus Books, joins us today and takes over the host chair as he chats with Naomi about Marginalia, the kind of book it turned out to be, “project” books, the idea of a book as container, and how the process of creating it altered her practice of marginalia today. This is a de...

Bookseller Liz Freeman joins Naomi for a conversation about Liz’s marginalia in books by David Wojnarowicz, William Gaddis, and Kathryn Scanlan; the soundtrack playing alongside this marginalia, from Joni Mitchell and the Melvins to Frank Sinatra’s “bipolar big band hits”; her approach to making thoughtful recommendations for readers visiting the store; and more.

Liz Freeman is a writer, artist and careerbookseller. She is ...

Writer and professor Hilary Leichter joins Naomi for a discussion about books that conjure many different realities; how the reader is made culpable to the events of a text by what they hold and create in their mind, in the gap between what’s stated and what’s implied; how teaching a book you have complex feelings about can enrich the teaching experience; inheriting large libraries; and what happened to that one box of boo...

Writer, teacher, and psychoanalytic candidate Claire Donato joins Naomi for a discussion on the convergences between psychoanalytic process and writing, reading, editing, and teaching. They discuss the capacious rigors of a reading practice, the remixing and revising of our writing and the stories we tell about our lives, and the shock of a book project emerging from one's analysis.

Claire Donato is the author of t...

Writer and professor Sara Levine joins Naomi for a conversation on Toni Morrison's Sula, in which they discuss tracking prepositions, the use of vowel sounds in influencing readerly movement, lobbies, and the traces of different readings in oft-re-read books.

To pre-order Naomi's new title, Marginalia: an autobiography, from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Sara Levine is the author of the novel Treasure Island!!! and the...

Writer and publisher Deborah Shapiro joins Naomi in a conversation on The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. From that starting point, they discuss the desire to create, underlining versus annotating, and the importance of lamps, physical and metaphorical.

To preorder Naomi's new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Deborah Shapiro is the author of the novels The Sun in Your Eyes (2016, a Ne...

Episode 3: “Rebecca van Laer on Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and theorizing one’s own writings on love”

Naomi is joined by the writer Rebecca van Laer. They discuss Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, writing as self-annotation, how to Pale Fire oneself, and more.

To preorder Naomi’s new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Rebecca van Laer is a writer based in the Hudson V...

In this second episode of Reading Around the Margins, Naomi is joined by Claire Foster, a reader, writer, and literary translator from French. In what is truly a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss, Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes, projects inspired by the act of underlining, and more.

To preorder Naomi’s new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

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Episode 1: “Marina Blitshteyn on Theory, A Sunday”

In this first episode of Reading Around the Margins, Naomi is joined by the writer Marina Blitshteyn. They discuss the, perhaps unexpected to Marina, marginalia Marina added to her copy of Theory, A Sunday from Belladonna Press. Their conversation explores books as bodies, how trauma lives in the body, how our selves resurface and reemerge through reading and deep perio...