PODCAST · arts
Virtual Memories Show
by Gil Roth
A weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order
Episodes
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Episode 695 – Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
Virtual Memories Show 695: Wallis Wilde-Menozzi “Her poetry — as with most Italian poetry — is dedicated . . . to addressing all that has previously been written as poetry.” She’s been on the show to talk about her essays, novel, and memoir, and now Wallis Wilde-Menozzi gets to talk about...
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Episode 694 – Nate Powell
Virtual Memories Show 694: Nate Powell “I’ve been drawn my whole life to a certain type of mystery: mystery that is not to be solved, but about the state of mystery.” With DIANA (Abrams ComicArts), Nate Powell has completed his “accidental triptych” of Ozark horror & the punk scene. During SPX...
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Episode 693 – Karl Christian Krumpholz
Virtual Memories Show 693: Karl Christian Krumpholz “Whenever an iconic place closes, everyone laments, ‘The neighborhood’s never going to be the same again,’ but whatever replaces it becomes iconic five or ten years later.” With his amazing IN THE CITY comics (self-published), cartoonist Karl...
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Episode 692 – Alison Fensterstock and Michael Tisserand
Virtual Memories Show 692: Alison Fensterstock and Michael Tisserand “New Orleans has come to be defined by this hyper-awareness of its own identity. It’s all music, food, and culture, and it’s Bunny’s generation that started that deep examination of the identity of New Orleans.” Let’s celebrate…
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Episode 691 – Emil Wilson
Virtual Memories Show 691: Emil Wilson “With comics, I think I was looking for an art form that I could devote the most amount of creative skills to, and graphic novels let me do art, let me write, let me do graphic design: different types of skills.” With his fantastic debut graphic novel, THE...
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Episode 690 – Jonathan Ames
Virtual Memories Show 690: Jonathan Ames “My goal is creating that sensation for the reader of having to turn the page. It’s like a kind of music.” Jonathan Ames returns to celebrate his fantastic new crime novel, A PAST WITHOUT PICTURES (Mysterious Press). We talk about his obsession with pulp...
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Episode 689 – Dash Shaw
Virtual Memories Show 689: Dash Shaw “Something not being placeable sticks with me a lot longer, and I think about it a lot more.” With his new book, LIKE SWIMMERS (New York Review Comics), Dash Shaw brings us a supernatural murder mystery set in COVID-era Richmond, VA. We talk about how he uses...
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Episode 688 – Phillip Lopate
Virtual Memories Show 688: Phillip Lopate “The whole history of American prose passed through Irving, then went somewhere else.” Five-Timer Club Alert! Essayist Phillip Lopate rejoins the show as we celebrate his wonderful new book, A WASHINGTON IRVING SKETCH BOOK (Princeton)! We talk about the...
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Episode 687 – Ida Kao
Virtual Memories Show 687: Ida Kao “I can point to a dozen different problems that all meaningfully contributed to why Hampshire is closing now. How all those things accumulated is pretty tragic.” “There are ways to downsize a college, but with Hampshire it felt more like a hollowing-out.” Our...
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Episode 686 – Halstead York
Virtual Memories Show 686: Halstead York “The core Hampshire experience was figuring out how to do things for myself and figuring out how to excite other people about what I wanted to do.” It’s time for the first installment of The Hampshire Tapes! Halstead York (F88) joins the show to talk about...
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Episode 685 – Sarah Minor
Virtual Memories Show 685: Sarah Minor “The panorama is a metaphor for the type of looking or the type of dizziness that early audiences felt. . . . It was like people in the 19th century were experiencing virtual reality for the first time.” With her amazing new book, CAROUSEL: An Essay On…
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Episode 684 – Ali Trotta
Virtual Memories Show 684: Ali Trotta “I think mythology and fairy tales provide a good baseline, because almost everyone has read a subset of those stories, and the symbolism is something most people can reach for and relate to.” With her debut poetry collection, OFFERINGS FOR ORDINARY GODS…
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Episode 683 – R Sikoryak
Virtual Memories Show 683: R Sikoryak “By contrasting the Declaration with the Emancipation Proclamation, I was showing some of the evolution that also happens in the Constitution.” Let’s celebrate (or commemorate) America’s independence with an amazing new double book, DECLARATION ILLUSTRATED /...
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Episode 682 – Katie Skelly
Virtual Memories Show 682: Katie Skelly “I was on twitter and saw someone say, ‘The Weeknd makes music for haunted strip clubs,’ and that idea is something my brain kept coming back to.” After a 12-year Virtual Memories gap, Katie Skelly is back to celebrate her fantastic new graphic novel…
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Episode 681 – Colin Asher
Virtual Memories Show 681: Colin Asher “The creation of culture is what marks us as human beings, and the fact that everybody has that desire connects us to each other.” With his amazing new book, THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: The Secret Prison History of American Music (WW Norton), author Colin Asher...
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Episode 680 – Kate Maruyama and Me
Virtual Memories Show 680: Kate Maruyama and Me BLARDY BLARDY BLARDY During my recent LA weekend, I asked author, pal, and past guest Kate Maruyama if she’d be interested in interviewing me, and for some crazy reason, she said yes! So this time around you get me doing my best not to ask the...
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Episode 679 – Heather Cass White
Virtual Memories Show 679: Heather Cass White “This was the most fun I ever had making a book. I got to sit on the attic floor, going though Harold’s papers and books, and there were a lot of surprises.” “A letter is a joy of Earth — It is denied the Gods —,” sez Emily Dickinson (#1672), and THE...
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Episode 678 – Paul Gravett
Virtual Memories Show 678: Paul Gravett “We’re so used to organizing society by male/female and other binaries and age, and so many things that slot you into places, and comics perfectly avoid those things. They’re a maverick medium or art form that’s never been respected.” Happy Pride! Let’s get...
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Episode 677 – Luis Mendo
Virtual Memories Show 677: Luis Mendo “Mundo Mendo is like the world of Mendo. It’s my world, and you need a spaceship to arrive here.” Welcome to Mundo Mendo! I visited artist and writer Luis Mendo in Karuizawa, Japan for a wide-ranging conversation about art, creativity, community and more. We...
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Episode 676 – Benoit Denizet-Lewis
Virtual Memories Show 676: Benoit Denizet-Lewis “We choose our identities based on what’s available, and those choices are not just about what is true for ourselves. We take on identities because we need a purpose.” Can people change? How continuous is identity? With YOU’VE CHANGED: The Promise…
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Episode 675 – Clare Carlisle
Virtual Memories Show 675: Clare Carlisle “I was interested in that relationship between philosophy and art, between philosophy and life-writing, philosophy and narrative form: it’s really at the heart of this project.” Philosopher and biographer Clare Carlisle converses & communes with me over…
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Episode 674 – Josh Alan Friedman
Virtual Memories Show 674: Josh Alan Friedman “All of my best friends were sent away to reform school. I kept the letters they sent me, and they’re in the book.” Pull up a chair, enjoy a kasha varnishke, and listen to me and Josh Alan Friedman talk about his kaleidoscopic novel, ALL ROADS LEAD TO...
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Episode 673 – Andrew Durbin
Virtual Memories Show 673: Andrew Durbin “I think we live in an era that is so deprived of authenticity, where people can’t live the lives Peter and Paul did, and so many young people are desperate to do that: to live in a cheap neighborhood and make art.” With THE WONDERFUL WORLD THAT ALMOST…
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Episode 672 – Dean Haspiel and Doug Latino
Virtual Memories Show 672: Dean Haspiel and Doug Latino With REAL LIFE COMIX: ONLY IN NEW YORK (Cosmic Lion Productions), editors Dean Haspiel and Doug Latino bring together 66 fantastic cartoonists and writers to tell 51 autobiographical comic stories about NYC . . . and I’m among them! We got...
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Episode 671 – Rachel Tzvia Back
Virtual Memories Show 671: Rachel Tzvia Back “Persephone lives in the land of the dead for half a year, every year. Emotionally, psychologically, how does a living girl end up in the land of the dead? And that’s what depression feels like.” With The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir (Wesleyan…
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Episode 670 – Sven Birkerts
Virtual Memories Show 670: Sven Birkerts Essayist Sven Birkerts, one of my favorite past pod-guests, welcomes me back to the mic for a conversation about writing, art, mortality, resistance, technology, and selling rare books! We talk about what he’s learned about writing from his Substack...
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Episode 669 – Indefinite Hiatus
Virtual Memories Show 669: Indefinite Hiatus For his 2025 year-end wrap-up, Gil’s putting The Virtual Memories Show podcast & newsletter on hiatus (!): talk about your crazy New Year’s resolutions! He talks about how he recognized It Was Time For A Break, whether or not this podcast is what gives...
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Episode 668 – The Guest List 2025
Virtual Memories Show: The Guest List 2025 It’s time for our year-end Virtual Memories Show tradition, now celebrating its thirteenth anniversary: The Guest List! I reached out to 2025’s pod-guests and asked them about the favorite book(s) they read in the past year, as well as the books or…
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Episode 667 – Jonathan Sandler
Virtual Memories Show 667: Jonathan Sandler Let’s close out 2025 with graphic memoirist and comics journalist Jonathan Sandler! We talk about his childhood secret origin in comics, the comics course in 2017 that brought him back to the form, the process of turning his grandfather’s WWII memoir…
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Episode 666 – Morten Hoi Jensen
Virtual Memories Show 666: Morten Høi Jensen “Part of what The Magic Mountain is about is the sense of having lived through a really major rupture in time, of living through a moment in which an old order is falling apart. And that’s the way in which it most speaks to our time.” With THE MASTER…
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Episode 665 – Prue Shaw
Virtual Memories Show 665: Prue Shaw “I felt again incredulity that one person could have produced this poem.” With her amazing new book, DANTE: THE ESSENTIAL COMMEDIA (Liveright), scholar Prue Shaw brings us a canto-by-canto journey through Dante’s masterwork, interweaving translated verses with...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Virtual Memories Show have?
Virtual Memories Show currently has 31 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Virtual Memories Show about?
A weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order
How often does Virtual Memories Show release new episodes?
Virtual Memories Show has 31 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Virtual Memories Show?
You can listen to Virtual Memories Show on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Virtual Memories Show?
Virtual Memories Show is created and hosted by Gil Roth.
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