Virtual Memories: Linn Ullmann pt. 1 – Lady with a Dog
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“You can hide writer’s block, but you cannot hide that you have no control over your dog.”
I thought Linn Ullmann and I were going to sit down and record a little conversation about her new novel, The Cold Song (Other Press)
“I wanted to write a love story not about the beginning of love or the end of love, but the middle of love, where it’s broken, and where the harmless little secrets turn out not to be as harmless as you thought.”
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About our Guest
Linn Ullmann is a literary critic and the author of five novels: Before You Sleep
Credits: This episode’s music is Sweetheart Like You by Bob Dylan. The conversation was recorded at the Other Press offices on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
(Counterpoint), but we talked about a lot more in our hour! Listen in to learn how she and her husband began recording literary readings by authors like James Baldwin, Philip Roth, John Updike, William Styron in the ’60s, and how they’ve 
, was nominated for a National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award. Her other novels include 
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; and 
, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She and her husband Harry have launched 
, an inventive and gorgeous retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It’s a fun conversation about our public and private selves, the ways we define evil, the mechanics of storytelling, the luck of human evolution, and more! 
, a work of literary scholarship. He has been a critic and literary historian for nearly a quarter of a century at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, and was formerly the fiction critic for Commentary. He has written for Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals. He is working on a memoir, Life on Planet Cancer, and lives in Columbus, OH, with his wife Naomi and their four children: Dov, Saul, Isaac, and Miriam (“Mimi”). He writes at 
, as well as the lifelong advice she got from Mary Gordon, the ways that writing a book is like building a stained-glass window, why being an orthodox Jew in Memphis wasn’t just like Designing Women with better wigs, and the advantages of being offline for a week when the New York Times publishes your op-ed about getting divorced. 
and 
, which was a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and newspapers including The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, Commentary, Good Housekeeping, and Poets and Writers, and her fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She has been a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, and Visiting Scholar at The Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. She lives in Newton, MA with her three children.
(Harcourt, 2007) about the Greek gods in suburbia. Her essays have appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Huffington Post, and WNYC.com. In 2013, she won a Pushcart Prize and was listed as notable in Best American Essays. Sarah has ghostwritten two erotic novels and assisted on ultramarathoner Scott Jurek’s memoir 
. She was a writer/researcher for CNBC’s boxing coverage of the 2012 Olympics. Before becoming a writer, Sarah was a Golden Gloves boxing champion, chef, and yoga teacher. She volunteers as a strength/conditioning coach for young boxers at the 
