First Pages Readings Podcast

In this episode a few pages of the following books will be read:

1. Alligator & other stories by Dima Alzayat (pub. 2020)
2. Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore (pub. 2021; English translation pub. 2024)
3. The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories by Nikolay Gogol, translated by Ronald Wilks (translations pub: 1972; revised for Penguin Classics 2005)

In the episode, a few pages of the following books will be read:

1. The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir by E.J. Koh
2. Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts by Jessica J. Lee
3. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar

In this episode, a few pages of the following books will be read:

1. Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore
2. What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad
3. Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker
4. My Friends by Hisham Matar

In this episode, a few pages of the following books will be read:

1. Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea, A Memoir by Hannah Stowe
2. Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water by Kathleen Dean Moore
3. Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey through Britian by Roger Deakin

In this episode, a few pages of the following books will be read:

1. The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
2. Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem
3. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories by Margaret Drabble
4. Ladies' Lunch and other stories by Lore Segal

In this episode, a few pages from the following books will be read:

1. How To Pronounce Knife: Stories by Souvankham Thammavongsa
2. Where The Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton
3. The Love Object: Selected Stories by Edna O'Brien

In this episode, a few pages from the following books will be read:

1. Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Ted Goossen
2. Aetherial Worlds: Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated by Anya Migdal
3. White Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link

In this episode, a few pages of the following books will be read:

1. Elsewhere, Home, by Leila Aboulela
2. The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories, by Yukiko Motoya, translated by Asa Yoneda
3. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories, by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell

In this episode. a few pages of the following memoirs will be read:

1. The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster
2. Country Girl by Edna O'Brien
3. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life by J.M. Coetzee

In this episode, a few pages of the following books will be read:

1. Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk
2. When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola, translated by Mara Faye Lethem
3. Sparks Like Stars by Nadia Hashimi

In this episode, a few pages of the following books will be read:

1. A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees by Helen Jukes
2. Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World by Kathleen Dean Moore
3. Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez

In today's episode, three poems will be read from:

1. Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo
2. This Is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander
3. The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris

In this episode, the first few pages of three YA books will be read:

1. Wild Dreamers by Margarita Engle
2. Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed by Dashka Slater
3. Down And Across by Arvin Ahmadi

In this episode, the first pages of three novels will be read.

1. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
2. Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky
3. Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza, translated by Thomas Bunstead

1. The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert, A Memoir by Shugri Said Salh
2. The Pianist From Syria: A Memoir by Aeham Ahmad, as told to Sandra Hetzl and Ariel Hauptmeier, translated by Emanuel Bergmann
3. A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon

In this episode the first pages of three poetry books will be read:

1. True Life by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh
2. Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear by Mosab Abu Toha
3. Taking the Arrow out of the Heart by Alice Walker

In this episode, the first pages of three Middle Grade STEM books will be read:

1. Clues to the Universe by Christina Li
2. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Joy McCullough
3. Girls Who Code: The Friendship Code by Stacia Deutsch

In this episode, the first pages of three non-fiction books will be read:

1. Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina
2. The Lightless Sky by Gulwali Passarlay with Nadene Ghouri
3.  Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh

In this episode, the first page of three memoirs will be read:

1. The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria by Alia Malek
2. Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood by Joachim Fest, translated by Martin Chalmers
3. Funny In Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas