Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
109 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 months ago - ★★★★★ - 64 ratingsThree jerky socialists talk about books you've probably heard of. With Megan Tusler, Tristan Schweiger, and Katie K.
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Episodes
Episode 109: Babel-17
November 12, 2023 05:00 - 1 hour - 142 MBWe embark on a cosmic journey through Samuel Delany's 1966 sci-fi gem, Babel-17. This novel by the brilliant self-described “boring old Marxist” (the best kind of person!) has it all: a telepathic poet captaining a star ship, naked space parties, a 10-foot-tall cat-man pilot, and a cosmic throuple guiding the way. And let's not forget the discorporate entities—because we all need some more space ghosts in our lives. We get into linguistic philosophy, the category of the human, and what the w...
Episode 108: The Monk
October 22, 2023 04:00 - 1 hour - 127 MBFor Halloween 2023, we bring you one of the craziest novels of all time (or certainly of the eighteenth century). Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is a tale of horny Catholics – men and women, in the clergy and not – sexy nuns, ultraviolence, and, as Katie puts it, “dinosaurism.” See, Satan turns into a pterodactyl to open up a can of whoop-ass on the Monk. Based. Another extremely based thing that happens, this smokin’ lady monk named Matilda turns out to be a wizard, does a full-on black ma...
Episode 107: Brave New World
October 08, 2023 04:00 - 1 hour - 124 MBHi again, nerds: we’re back after a long hiatus with more high school English class reads and some Jungianism on the side! JK about that last one, we would never. We’re talking about Aldous Huxley’s 1932 “science fiction” novel Brave New World, which is about how Fordism is bad (yes) but so is being slutty (what? Why?). Shakespeare is Good. Drinking alcohol is Bad. We sure hope you’re onboard for blanket moral judgments that don’t seem to add up to much in the way of world-building, because ...
Episode 106: CROSSOVER SPECIAL: The Last of the Mohicans (the movie)
February 06, 2023 14:00 - 2 hours - 306 MBFriends, it's the crossover event of the century - we join our comrades at You're Tall but I'm Standing in Front of You (if you don't know their podcast, it's amazing, hilarious, brilliant, and you should subscribe immediately) for a discussion of Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992). It's a film that dares to ask the question, "What if the book didn't totally suck ass?" *Note to listeners -- we've been on a bit of an unplanned hiatus due to various things beyond our control, bu...
Episode 105: The Body
November 06, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 161 MBThere is still plenty of spookiness left in the season! To celebrate, this week we are bringing you Stephen King’s The Body from his 1982 collection Different Seasons, also containing Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil. We talk about poverty and violence in rural America, masculinity, class, epic, and the classic Philadelphia tradition Wing Bowl. We get into the 1986 film adaptation Stand By Me, starring Wil Wheaton, who is also the star of Star Trek: The Next Generatio...
Episode 104: The Stepford Wives
October 30, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 115 MBHappy Halloween, book jerks! Starting our fourth annual spookfest, we’re reading The Stepford Wives, which should actually be called The Stepford Husbands (they’re the scary ones, after all, and credit to Amanda Davis for the appellation). We discuss Ira Levin’s 1972 horror-satire to return to some familiar questions: what are husbands for? Why are neighbors such creeps? If you could make a robot wife, how big would you make her boobs? We reflect on genre, bourgeoisification, liberal feminis...
Episode 103: The Man Who Lived Underground
October 09, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 119 MBWe couldn’t wait to read the new novel-length version of Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, and it absolutely did not disappoint. Published as a short story in 1944, collected in Eight Men in 1961, and finally published as the novel version last year, the book serves as a major touchstone in Wright’s work, negotiating the space between his naturalist “early” work and his philosophical “late” work. We discuss race, religion, space, and style. We read the 2021 Library of America ...
Episode 102: The Last of the Mohicans
September 25, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 128 MBWe are back and bringing you The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 historical novel about stepping on twigs and tricking your friends by following them around in a bear costume. We chat about race, the novel's politics, and how an adult man could get tricked by a bunch of beavers. And the French and Indian War! We read the Penguin Classics version with introduction by Richard Slotkin. For more on this novel, we highly recommend Sarah Rivett’s chapter in Unscripted America (...
Episode 101: Middlemarch, Part 2
August 14, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 142 MBWe finish our conversation on George Eliot’s 1871-1872 behemoth Middlemarch with an in-depth discussion of the book as an historical novel and the historical contexts of its setting in the early 1830s. We all have different answers to how much we liked-liked reading this massive thing (Tristan is a big fan, Megan and Katie… less so), but we all loved Dorothea, and we did all legitimately love talking about this novel. AND we all agree that the scene where Mr Brooke gets rotten eggs thrown at...
Episode 100: Middlemarch, Part 1
August 07, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 149 MBFor our 100th episode (!!!), it’s only fitting we tackle a Big One. And George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) is certainly that – literally (it’s SO MANY PAGES). Middlemarch tells the stories of several intersecting characters all trying in various ways to find meaning amid the alienation of industrial modernity, and we discuss epistemology, philosophy, gender, class and bourgeoisification, marriage, capital-H History, politics. This kind of is a novel about everything. Also, failsons aboun...
Episode 99: The Mountain Lion
July 31, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 154 MBIt’s a journey Out West with the book jerks–we’re reading Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947)! One of the many under-appreciated women’s novels of the midcentury, this account of Molly and Ralph Fawcett and their bonneted, foofy, bunny rabbit sisters Rachel and Leah moves us into a conversation about childhood, gender, and geography in the US. We also discuss Stafford’s hilariously punchy introduction, in which she apologizes for the book’s ending, as well as embodiment and publication ...
Episode 98: Murder on the Orient Express
July 24, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 153 MBAll aboard! This week we are bringing you a one way ticket...to murder! It's Agatha Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. We talk about stabby eye-talians, big ole mustaches and detective fiction, and bust out some top-tier French accents. You'll feel like you're riding a bicycle built for two past the Eiffel Tower with a scarf made of cheese tied around your neck. Oui oui! This is particularly impressive when you consider that our heroic clue collector Hercule Poirot is Belgia...
Episode 97: Wuthering Heights
July 17, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 126 MBIt has taken your favorite commie book jerks nearly 100 episodes to answer the much-debated question – what is the horniest novel of the British 19th century? Comrades, it’s Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). We absolutely love this brilliant novel about the torrid love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and the mysterious, often sinister, Gothic villain/anti-hero Heathcliff. (Did we mention he’s her adoptive brother? He’s her adoptive brother. It wouldn’t be a Gothic novel if it wasn’t...
Episode 96: Naked Lunch
July 10, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 132 MBYou’ve been asking for it (and by “you” we mean “nobody”), so here’s Naked Lunch (1959)! It’s almost unfair to accuse Burroughs of having written this “high,” because there’s really no version of a Burroughs novel that isn’t about being absurdly high and abject. This nightmare account of heroin, orifices, evil doctors, and grime gets us talking about noveliness and what isn’t a novel, the humor of the grotesque, and the question of literary nihilism. We consider if Allen Ginsberg was to Burr...
Episode 95: Jews Without Money
July 03, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 140 MBTo kick off Season 6, we are joined by comrade, friend-of-the-pod, and Indiana University South Bend associate professor of English Benjamin Balthaser to talk about Mike Gold’s amazing proletarian lit masterpiece, Jews Without Money (1930). If you haven’t heard of this semi-autobiographical novel about growing up on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century, it’s because US reactionaries tried very hard to bury the history of 1930s communist literature – and succeeded for a long ti...
Episode 94: Season 5 Wrap-Up
March 06, 2022 05:00 - 39 minutes - 71.9 MBIn our Season 5 wrap-up, we try to stir up a little controversy amongst Yr Worships’s favorite book commies by rerunning Pilgrim’s Progress as a series of debates about the Greatest Hits (™) from past pods. A fierce argument breaks out over whether we have to lose Tristram Shandy or Ulysses from our boat to make it through the Slough of Despond – until we remember some jackass put a crate of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the hold. Which Season 5 failchild will we use as a life raft? (Pierre, ob...
Episode 93: The Pilgrim's Progress
February 20, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 123 MBYou all demanded it, so we delivered! Delivered you from evil. Today we have The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) otherwise known as John Bunyan’s Excellent Ambien Adventure. It’s about his dream of a Christian named Christian who sets off on a little journey to the Celestial City where the grass is green and the girls are into religious allegory. We follow our hero with his backpack full of sin as he meets wingmen like Faithful who is full of faith, a guy named Help who helps him, and a woman name...
Episode 92: Inkle and Yarico
February 13, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 118 MBToday in “men are trash,” and enslaving, colonialist white men are the trashiest of trash, we bring you Sir Richard Steele’s 1711 Spectator retelling of the “Inkle and Yarico” story. For 150 years, versions of Inkle and Yarico were among the most famous narratives of British colonialism in the Americas, and we discuss a few of the most important examples. It’s a story in which an English merchant is saved by a Native woman, gets her pregnant, and promptly sells her into slavery. (As we said,...
Episode 91: Lady Chatterley's Lover
February 06, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 161 MBEven we, three very experienced Book Jerks, weren’t really prepared for the nightmare that was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, aka Dicks out for Fash. One of us is Bolshier than ever, another has a distracted but still Polish mind, and the third is just a broken woman. We hope that you have your loins thoroughly girded, because this episode is sure to punch you right in those same loins. If you have haunches, watch out for punches to those too. We talk unsexy sex, Lawrence’s revolting fascist polit...
Episode 90: Persuasion
January 30, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 120 MBIf you like dunking on useless aristocrats, novels brimming with the psychological tension of unfulfilled desire, and ships, have we got a great one for you! Persuasion (1818) is Jane Austen’s last completed novel, and as it involves boats, it is obviously Tristan’s favorite. We talk changing class forms, the novel’s interest in bodies and time, and capital-H History as both a lens onto the personal and the national/global. Katie also tells us what the U.S. version of a knighthood is – havin...
Episode 89: Mrs. Dalloway
January 16, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 165 MBModernist grouch, Bloomsbury group member, Freud-to-tea-haver, and Great Novelist Virginia Woolf takes center stage in our discussion of Mrs. Dalloway (1925). We recommend this book if you like books or good writing, and we discuss interwar anxiety, shell shock, gender trouble, and class. This episode also features some discussion of real nerd shit, including Viennese playwright/libertine Arthur Schnitzler and many, many Star Trek opinions. Many. Even for us. We read the new Liveright (Nort...
Episode 88: The Talented Mr. Ripley
December 19, 2021 05:00 - 1 hour - 83.1 MBFriend, comrade, fellow podcaster, and University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate Devin Daniels joins us to discuss Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)! Devin is the co-host of You’re Tall but I’m Standing in Front of You, and he’s with us for a fun romp about an ordinary guy who likes maps and trips to Italy and is in no way weird or sinister. He is not a confidence man in any way and definitely doesn’t kill people with ashtrays. We discuss gender construction, surveillance ...
Episode 87: Pierre, Part 2
December 12, 2021 05:00 - 1 hour - 107 MBWrapping up our two-parter on Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852), we talk about religion, the mind bending plot, what Melville was doing with these characters, writing and publishing, and a splash of Transcendentalism. We also consider the eternal question: what are ladies for? Tristan delivers a discourse on sea clocks and why sailors used to just have to go on vibes to know where they were. And stay tuned for the game, when you’ll find out how many elephants your hair can hold up. Farewell, ...
Episode 86: Pierre, Part 1
December 05, 2021 05:00 - 1 hour - 122 MBThis week we are bringing you what the people want, and have always wanted, Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852)! Wait, you don’t want to read a book about a guy who breaks up with his mom for his sister? But you haven’t even heard about his dad yet! Technically it’s more of a painting of his dad, but the painting has a mischievous stare that lets you know it’s very into French ladies. And that’s how Pierre got a secret sister. He likes her more than a friend. She likes hiding in her hair and pla...
Episode 85: Caleb Williams
November 21, 2021 05:00 - 1 hour - 165 MBThis week, we bring you the OG ACAB novel, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). We very much stan Godwin, awesome radical, proto-anarchist, Mary Wollstonecraft wifeguy AND Mary Shelley daughterguy. Caleb Williams is about a rich dude who really does mean well, but does that matter? Of course not! It’s structure, structure, structure, so he does murder and then hounds his poor servant (Caleb Williams) all over Britain when his servant finds out about it. We talk Jacobinism, 1790s politics,...
Episode 84: The Picture of Dorian Gray
November 14, 2021 05:00 - 1 hour - 116 MBClosing out this year’s Halloween episodes, we have the much-requested Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) by Oscar Wilde. You probably know the story. Magic picture gets old while dude the picture is of stays young, dumb, and, uh, dtf? And smoking lots of opium, for it is late Victorian London, and what else does one do? We talk queerness and sexuality, how aesthetics might actually be liberatory, as well as Wilde’s (very good!) politics and tragic bio. We also dive into Wilde’s literary innov...
Episode 83: The Case of George Dedlow
November 07, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 167 MBThe next installment in our Halloween fright fest comes from the guy who brought us classics like “the rest cure” and a book called Fat and Blood: It’s Silas Weir Mitchell’s 1866 short story “The Case of George Dedlow.” The noted Philadelphia physician gave us this fine tale of a Civil War doctor(ish) who loses all of his limbs in a series of events so unfortunate you won’t believe people thought it was a true story. And you extra won’t believe that once you hear about the ending. We chat a...
Episode 82: Carrie
October 31, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 113 MBFriends, it’s our third annual Halloween series! We’re talking about Stephen King’s horror classic Carrie (1974), which is about a teenage girl with telekinesis, which the “scientists” cited in the novel conveniently refer to as “TK.” We discuss King’s uneven canon and its political resonances (lots of liberal stuff, but we obviously deliberately misread.) In typical BRtD manner, we talk about the evils of people who ask, “do you know who my dad is?” For those interested in Brian DePalma’s 1...
Episode 81: McTeague
October 24, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 161 MBHey comrades! We’re back with more swears, random Frankfurt School references, and messy book takes. In our Season 5 opener, UChicago PhD candidate, friend of the pod, and union organizer Josh Stadtner talks with us about Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), which is about an amateur dentist and his obsession with a concertina. We establish that Frank Norris was a frat douche and social Darwinist (yeesh), and that his having written in the late 19th/early 20th century is still not the slightest e...
Episode 80: Season 4 Wrap-Up
August 15, 2021 04:00 - 43 minutes - 80.3 MBWe are capping off Season 4 with a tribute to next season’s two-parter, Herman Melville’s sister-boinking polycule classic Pierre. We inhabit the mind of Melville and create a Frankenstein Pierre using some old favorites. All we have to do is find a mom with no chill, a theme for our polycule, a “man-child invincible,” a sister to pine after, a forgettable plot device character, and someone to write this bananas-ass book. Plus Jello. You don’t need to know anything about Pierre to have a goo...
Episode 79: Wieland
August 08, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 119 MBThis week we are thrilled to bring you Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland. It’s about a guy who gets tricked by a ventriloquist into murdering his family and—we can’t stress this enough—not anybody else. Not another soul was present. There was absolutely no other character involved in this situation. Even to suggest it would be ridiculous. And that’s final. Also, the ventriloquist is a clown who shows up at a stranger’s house demanding milk. There is spontaneous human combustion. Pl...
Episode 78: Lucy
August 01, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 107 MBAfter devoting much of this podcast to the pressing topic of Dads Who Are A**holes (and have failsons), here’s our second back-to-back episode on Moms Who Are A**holes (this time with a success daughter). We love Jamaica Kincaid, and we especially love her 1990 novella Lucy about a young West Indian woman who comes to work as an au pair for clueless bourgie white people in the United States. We’re talking race and colonialism, capital, gender and sexuality, and, yes, mothers. We also plunge ...
Episode 77: No-No Boy
July 18, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 141 MBIt’s a drizzly day in Seattle in John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), and we’re feeling the mood. No-No Boy is about Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese-American man who refused military service after being drafted from an internment camp and was imprisoned for it. He careens around Seattle and Portland, turning down jobs (always a good instinct) and connecting and disconnecting from his friends and family (including his rather… conspiratorially-minded mother.) We discuss war-era masculinity, citizenship, a...
Episode 76: Silas Marner
July 11, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 155 MBThe Bible says something somewhere about children who are worth their weight in gold. Well, George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) explores what would happen if we took that proverb super literally! (Or figuratively? Mythically! That’s it. Or is this more of a fable? Wait, it’s a realist novel???) Silas Marner is about a linen weaver in the Midlands countryside whom the village folk assume is Gandalf (natch) and who adopts a daughter who mysteriously appears at his door. But, as with everything ...
Episode 75: The Great Gatsby
July 04, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBIf you’re one of those try-hards who read this for the AP Lit test (and we are), you’ll be pleased to see us finally take this one on. This week we have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, which is about extremely non-embarrassing things like throwing enormous parties so your ex-girlfriend will notice you. We talk about Fitzgerald’s accounts of sex and money, gender and sexuality, and Long Island guys who are really transplants so they go particularly hard. We read the Scribn...
Episode 74: Dune
June 27, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 150 MBIt is time to ride the worm and ask the eternal question “what’s in the box?” This week we have Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic about a future where drugs have replaced computers, the nuns are magic and scary, money is worm [redacted], and the East India Company rules space. We chat about this book’s politics, and we get into religion, time, and environmentalism. You simply must try the spice. Everything will make sense. Even the terrifying toddlers in grim reaper robes. Fear is the mind...
Episode 73: The Man of Feeling
June 20, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 114 MBIf you like feckless boobs who are also giant crysacks (Megan does not), do we have a book for you! Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is a classic sentimental novel with all the trimmings -- a useless protagonist who thinks crying is hot and who can’t stop getting conned by every sharp, coxcomb, and failson in London. It’s a delightfully ridiculous book, one we suspect is very much in on the joke, and we talk discourses of feeling, sentimental critiques of empire and capital, and t...
Episode 72: Lolita, Part 2
June 13, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 77.7 MBWe close up our discussion of Lolita and try not to reflect too much on what has brought us to this point. We consider what sort of people would read this as a morality play, and what in the actual eff is wrong with them (everything). We talk about the road novel as a genre, the doppelgänger (doing a Freud while simultaneously hating the Good Doctor), what reading “with” a character is like, and why this book makes it so difficult not to talk about word objects as though they’re “people.” Al...
Episode 71: Lolita, Part 1
June 06, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 70.5 MBOur Season Four two-parter is on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and there’s some truly gruesome material here. If you’ve ever wondered where a Vulgar Marxist and an As*hole with Fussy Modernist Aesthetics might diverge in opinion, it’s over this one. We talk about noveliness, comedy, being a reader (bad and good), and the book’s review genealogy. We roll our eyes over blunt commentary (Blanche Schwartzman, really) and nonstop Edgar Allen Poe references. We read the Alfred Appel, Jr. Anno...
Episode 70: Black No More
May 30, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 119 MBFriend of the pod, cultural critic, and Northwestern University professor of African American literature Lauren Michele Jackson joins us for our discussion of George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931). If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to read a wacky-ass novel written by a socialist-turned-right-wing nut, have we got the one for you. Schuyler’s novel takes up the story of what might happen if there were a machine that turned black people white (extra-white, in fact) and how various social...
Episode 69: Of One Blood
May 23, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 131 MBGot a sister? Are you SURE you don’t have a sister? Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902-1903) explores this important question along with mesmerism, race, the legacy of American slavery, colonialism and imperialism in Africa, and--somehow--much more. In this episode we simply marvel at the adventures of our protagonist, doctor, anti-colonialist Indiana Jones, enemy of big cats, and king of the ancient Ethopian secret city of Telassar. This novel blew our minds, knocked our socks off, while ...
Episode 68: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
May 16, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 114 MBAre you on the bus or off it, man? The book commies, dear listener, are decidedly off it. Or rather, we’re punching, clawing, screaming, and fighting our way out of this goddamn thing, past balls-trippin’ Ken Kesey, speed-addled Neal Cassady, the rest of the Merry Pranksters, and the 400+ freaking pages Tom Wolfe decided to write about them. It’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) this week, and we’re wrapping up our convo on the New Journalism and talking the counterculture’s reactionar...
Episode 67: The Journalist and the Murderer
May 09, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 129 MBFriend of the pod Sebastian Stockman joins us for the second episode in our three-part series on The New Journalism. Sub is a teaching professor in English at Northeastern University, and a journalist and essayist. We discuss Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), a book about another book -- Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision, for which the subject (convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald) sued McGinniss for fraud. We take up the whole idea of the “nonfiction novel,” Malcolm’s inter...
Episode 66: The White Album
May 02, 2021 04:00 - 1 hour - 116 MBDID YOU MISS US? Reading with Reds returns for Season Four, and we’re talking about Joan Didion’s The White Album as the first of a three-part series on The New Journalism. We discuss Didion’s recording and perception of the 1960s, non-fiction writing and style, reactionary politics, and why you have to take a bottle of bourbon on all your travels. Remember to email us with suggestions for institutions that we should for real abolish, like for real for real. We read the Farrar, Strauss, and...
Episode 65: Season 3 Wrap-Up
January 17, 2021 05:00 - 51 minutes - 95.2 MBJoin us as we revisit some of our favorite fail-lords of the season and conduct a highly scientific and professional grading meeting! We discuss the dastardly deeds of professors and shrubbery as we take a look back at Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) to determine final grades for “Evil STEM 207.” Then we get into Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) to find out whether "blood dad" or "tall nephew" is at the top of the fail-class in “Spooky Real Estate 305....
Episode 64: Absalom, Absalom!
January 10, 2021 05:00 - 1 hour - 120 MBIf you’ve been listening to Better Read for a bit, you’re probably aware that Megan’s favorite genre of novel is "brother hearts sister but in a distressing sex way." In that vein, we present one of the absolute classics of the genre, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, which is 300 pages but feels longer. A lot longer. The novel features an upwardly-downwardly mobile Scots-Irish bigamist and his children, both “legitimate” and “illegitimate,” and the problem of racial panic in the 19th-ce...
Episode 63: The Wild Irish Girl
January 03, 2021 05:00 - 1 hour - 145 MBIn keeping with Better Read than Dead’s mission of bringing you literature’s greatest failsons -- and Tristan’s favorite genre of novel, “feckless boob goes on a trip” -- may we present Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and its hero, Horatio M. (We assume he just forgot the rest of his last name.) Horatio is an English aristocrat whose dad exiles him to Ireland in penance for his failsonery, but he soon becomes quite horny for both a harp-playing Irish princess and for Ireland itsel...
Episode 62: A Christmas Memory
December 27, 2020 05:00 - 1 hour - 140 MBIf you need some salty tears in your fruitcake, have we got the one for you. We’re talking about Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” originally published in Mademoiselle in 1956. It’s his semi-autobiographical short story about a young boy’s friendship with his way-older cousin in 1930s Alabama and their alienation from the rest of the adults in the family, something that most of us can relate to. We talk about writing childhood, outsiderness, and the troubles with reading autobiography. ...
Episode 61: A Child's Christmas in Wales
December 20, 2020 05:00 - 1 hour - 137 MBHo ho ho! Or in Welsh, cywnwn cywnwn cywnwn! (Probably. Or definitely not, we don’t speak Welsh). For the first of two Christmas episodes this year, we’re getting all poetic-like -- or rather, prose fiction that follows TONS of poetic conventions -- with Dylan Thomas’s 1952 A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Whether you love Christmas or hate it, this is a beautiful and hilarious piece, and a lot more complex than its surface nostalgia would indicate. We talk mythic vs. historical time, the natio...
Episode 60: The Screwtape Letters
December 13, 2020 05:00 - 1 hour - 146 MBThis week we descend into the bowels of hell to bring you C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (1942), a Christian epistolary novel about what happens when your demon uncle is also your boss and you’re both very concerned with meeting the Dark Lord’s soul quota for professional reasons. We talk about religion, Anglicanism, Lewis’s politics (confusing!), and Eton’s satellite campus in the underworld. We also discuss the two surest paths to damnation: saying “after you, my dear” too much and com...