Story Made Project

10/15/2026

This week we visit with Brooke Ch*****ne in Northport, Alabama. Brooke Ch*****ne is the author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy, a silver medalist in Southern Nonfiction at the 2024 IPPY Awards. She is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowshi...

10/07/2026

I can’t believe this was my first Books on the Bed visit to Alabama, but I’m sure glad it was Brooke Ch*****ne who brought me back to where it all began. But make no mistake — Brooke is a child of New Orleans and that was where this conversation started and ended. Her book NOLA FACE is not only a no skips essay collection full of real s**t on love, lying, and the pursuit of bugginess, and of course legendary stories about her Lala, it also exposed my general ignorance of New Orleans and changed the way I look at, learn about, and talk about the city (Literally, I spent hours reading about its 300-year geographical history). It also validated my theory that along with reading and hiking, cussing is a vital therapy for me to be a good person.

Brooke is exactly as cool and smart as I imagined, and I wish we could’ve spent an entire day talking about books and writing and everything else. I can’t wait to share our conversation with you very soon!

Also, I got to spend the morning at Ernest & Hadley Books and copped a couple books, broke bread with my fellow booksellers, and marveled at the awesomeness of our mutual friend Tessa Fontaine

I found myself thinking once again: If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

09/24/2026

NEW EPISODE! 🎧

BOOKS ON THE BED with Elizabeth Zaleski 📚

Listen to us talk all about Elizabeth’s superb six BOTBs + her exceptional debut book THE TROUBLE WITH LOVING POETS AND OTHER ESSAYS ON FAILURE, the beauty and absurdity of our doomed efforts, the importance of writing honestly, where to turn when you stop believing in God, why every child should study linguistics (and logic), how growing up in a Mennonite community shaped her life, celebration and skepticism of the humanities, Gloria Naylor reminding us what the point of writing really is, a reading from the best paragraph Elizabeth has ever written, and much more. Go listen now!!

Elizabeth’s Books on the Bed 📚

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

(Interlude) The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

Language Myths (edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill)

We Learn Nothing: Essays by Tim Kreider

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

09/24/2026

This week we visit with Elizabeth Zaleski in Northeast Ohio. Elizabeth Zaleski is the author of The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure, now available from Belt Publishing. Elizabeth grew up in rural northeast Ohio, in Amish country. After living and traveling all over the US, she....

09/22/2026

09/10/2026

Elizabeth Zaleski wrote one of the best essay collections you probably haven’t read. The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure is a delightful, hilarious, and sometimes bleak set of stories about trying really hard and failing, hoping for some great moment of transcendence or clarity and never getting it, attempting to find meaning in everything and realizing that everything might actual mean nothing at all. Despite all of the doomed efforts of our fellow humans, Elizabeth shows us it’s still worth it to keep trying and failing and trying again to be good, learn lots, and laugh at how absurd it is to be alive. You’ll also learn way more about linguistics and sea turtles and the surprising athletic prowess of Mennonites than you could’ve ever imagined.

I spent a beautiful day roaming through the communities of Northeast Ohio that raised Elizabeth and talking about some incredible books with her. I can’t wait to share our BOTB conversation with y’all later this month!

Big shout out to Belt Publishing for continuously publishing awesome books. If you aren’t familiar with their catalog, Elizabeth’s books is a great place to start.

08/27/2026

NEW EPISODE! 🎧

BOOKS ON THE BED with Joanna Pearson 📚

Listen to us talk all about Joanna’s delightful (and devilish) BOTB selections + transforming from poet to short story virtuoso, the incantatory magic of the short story, being a reluctant debutante, plenitude in the literary world and *not* playing it cool about what you love, a book that inspired Joanna to write fiction, writers who are precise and notice everything, an interlude for the ages about a children’s book from which all ideas spring, and much more. Go listen now!!

Joanna’s Books on the Bed 📚

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee

Collected Stories by Shirley Hazzard (Edited by Brigitta Olubas; Foreword by Zoë Heller)

A Lucky Man: Stories by Jamel Brinkley

(Interlude) Jenny, The Halloween Spy by Lillie Patterson

After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

08/27/2026

This week we visit with Joanna Pearson in Carrboro, NC. Joanna Pearson’s newest book, MORE HAPPY LOVE, a story collection, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in May 2027, and her second novel, JUSTINE, (currently in progress!) will be published by Bloomsbury thereafter. Her debut novel, BRIGHT AND TEN...

08/13/2026

I met Joanna Pearson so briefly last year that you couldn’t blame either of us for not remembering the encounter. A damn shame for me forgetting, though, because it took a whole year for me to wake up to her brilliance! With the guidance of the moon and the stars, and Elisa Faison and Alice Martin saying READ HER BOOKS YOU FOOL, I finally heeded the call and found one of my favorite authors and a new friend.

I am not only a defender of the short story, but could be the United States Ambassador for the form, and Joanna is a damn fine short story writer (16th greatest with a debut book post-2000, according to sources). She knows how to exalt the magical and mystical in the mundane and leave you all sorts of twisted up inside when a story is finished. But she also helps you see more finely what’s been in front of you all along, beautiful or ugly as things are. There’s a hidden knowledge to find in every story.

So I need you to pass word thusly: read Joanna’s books now, tell everyone you know to read them, and then get ready for her new masterpiece to drop next year. After almost two months without a Books on the Bed visit, this was just what the doctor ordered to start my fall expeditions. I can’t wait to share it with you very soon!

07/23/2026

NEW EPISODE! 🎧 BOOKS ON THE BED with Lily Meyer 📚

Listen to us talk all about Lily’s splendid BOTB selections + her new novel THE END OF ROMANCE, American Jewishness and counting yourself in, the strange delight of Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s LITTLE BIRD and Lily’s translation story, the translator’s right the love her work, Washington D.C.’s awesome art history, the honor and stress of driving Edward P. Jones, and much more. Go listen now!!

Lily’s Books on the Bed 📚
Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nemesis by Philip Roth

Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel

Lost in the City: Stories by Edward P. Jones

Soldados la Salamina by Javier Cercas

More Taste Than Time by Abby Mandel