Yvette Benavides

6 days ago | tpr.org | Yvette Benavides

When the novel The Imagined Life opens, Steven Mills is recalling something that happened when he was an adolescent. On the surface, it was something fairly mundane. Steven witnesses his parents—and their behavior isn’t that unexpected or unusual. They are drinking by the pool with their friends. They jump in the pool. Music plays. Classic movies are projected on a screen. The partygoers are loud and seem to be enjoying themselves. But then one day, Steven sees something through the window of his room.

1 week ago | tpr.org | Yvette Benavides

Potions. Part poem. Part fiction. There are 75 potions in this Book of Potions. So what are they, these genre-bending vignettes? When you go in to read them, you’ll fall right in, and it really won’t matter what you call them. Let’s call them potions. They are like prose poems, like narratives that move with speed and urgency, with candor and metaphor. The speaker most times is a woman navigating the things that come in the middle of life. She isn’t young, but she isn’t old.

2 weeks ago | tpr.org | Yvette Benavides

The setting is Three Rivers, Texas. The year is 2038. An industrialist named Pablo Henry Crick is the mayor of the town that’s become a surreal wasteland where reading books is against the law and the women work as indentured laborers at a fish cannery. The atmosphere is poisoned. The people are poor and under the thumb of Crick—who only gets rich in all of this. Neftalí is the last of the literate citizens in the town. She hides books and she reads books.

3 weeks ago | tpr.org | Yvette Benavides

In Sameer Pandya's latest novel, Our Beautiful Boys, Vikram Shastri is a good kid. He makes good grades and listens to his parents. They live in a nice neighborhood in Southern California. He plans to go to a good college. He has a chance to join his high school football team. We learn about his friends—MJ and Diego—and about the boys’ parents and their family lives. They are hard-working and well-intentioned. They love their sons. However, they have secrets, too. And then, things start to change.

3 weeks ago | tpr.org | Yvette Benavides

Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides welcome the inimitable ZZ Packer—to discuss the sublime story by James Alan McPherson, “Gold Coast.”ZZ Packer and Peter Orner were both students of James Alan McPherson during their time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. ZZ Packer has written about the profound influence that James Alan McPherson has had on her.