All Episodes

S4 Ep98: Course of the Heart is honest, even if we're not sure what it's honest about

S4 Ep97: Inconsistent Return on Authorial Indulgence, with JG Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition"

S4 Ep96: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath: Maybe It's Sanctimonious, but It's Still a Masterpiece

S4 Ep94: Yesteryear misunderstands and misuses the tools of fiction

S4 Ep95: "The Trial" by Kafka - Find the David Wyllie Translation!

S4 Ep93: Michel de Montaigne's Antiquated Essays

S4 Ep92: John Updike's Couples is a work of cold, amoral beauty

S4 Ep91: Pure and Bureaucratic Horror - Part 3 of Bolanyo's "2666"

S4 Ep90: Ritual Narrative Intermedio this side of the Heart of Darkness; Part 2 of "2666"

S4 Ep89: The Mundanity of True Human Horror: Section 1 of Roberto Bolaño's Opus, "2666"

S4 Ep88: A Journal of the Plague Year: An Interesting Historical Artifact

S4 Ep87: The hollowness of surface satisfactions in Latronico's perfectly adequate Perfection

S4 Ep86: The Catharsis of Chaotic, Perpetual Suffering in Phil Tippet's "Mad God"

S4 Ep85: What Even Is Genre Anyway?: Discussing U. K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness

S4 Ep84: Bleak House, Coming up for Air, and the demise of the English literary tradition

S4 Ep83: kew. rhone. and the uses of obscure art

S4 Ep82: Pynchon's "Inherent Vice" and Paul Thomas Anderson's film adaptation: A most delightful multimodal pair

S4 Ep81: Two Say Nay, One Says Yea to Ian McEwan's Atonement

S4 Ep80: The perils of satire in the newsletters of Sam Kriss and Naomi Kanakia

S4 Ep79: Disappointment with Patricia Lockwood's "Will there ever be another you?"

S4 Ep78: Orwell's Acerbic Ambivalence: A Discussion of Homage to Catalonia

S4 Ep77: Are Naked Lunch and The Shrouds the secret twins of the Cronenberg filmography? (Plus Violet Lucca's Clinical Trials)

S4 Ep76: On Shakespeare's "Macbeth," and the Polanski and Cohen Film Treatments

S4 Ep75: Post Office, Charles Bukowski's Terrible Debut Novel

S4 Ep74: Unworld and the problem of literary science-fiction

S4 Ep73: Comedic Tones and Tragic Times in Otessa Moshfegh's "Lapvona"

S4 Ep72: Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf: A Perfect Novel

S4 Ep71: In Ascension and the perils of a needless re-reading

S4 Ep70: Beautiful Emptiness in Samantha Harvey's "Orbital"

S4 Ep69: Albert Camus' Exile and the Kingdom

S4 Ep68: How Bruce Wagner's brave and lazy The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories suffered and benefited from the culture wars

S4 Ep67: The Fun but Empty Calories of Danielewski's House of Leaves

S4 Ep66: Are Aesthetic Properties Real? (With a Discussion of the Film LFO)

S4 Ep65: What is the illusion in The Book of Illusions?

S4 Ep64: RIP David Lynch - On "Eraserhead," "Lost Highway," "Inland Empire," and "Catching the Big Fish"

S4 Ep63: A Storm Painted on a Low Ceiling in Glen Slater's "Jung vs Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age"

S4 Ep62: Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night: Thematic Complexity, Aesthetic Simplicity

S4 Ep61: Dean Koontz, Robin Cook, and Others: What is Bad Writing?

S4 Ep60: AI, Writing, and Literature (with a bit of film thrown in)

S4 Ep59: Uneven Greatness in Melville's Billy Budd and Piazza Tales

S4 Ep58: Apocalyptic Conspiracies: Theodore Roszak's Flicker

S4 Ep57: Omensetter's Luck and the Demise of Hard Fiction

S4 Ep56: Somewhat disappointed by, but still finding enchantment in, Mikhail Bulgakov's almost-100-year-old novel: The Master and Margarita

S4 Ep55: Sayaka Murata's Earthlings Is One-Dimensional

S4 Ep54: Pacing and Tragedy in Mary Shelley's The Last Man

S4 Ep53: Gelatinous Eggs and Dead Anti-Worlds: The Mystery of Stanisław Lem's His Master's Voice

S4 Ep52: Despicability and Empathy in Patrick Barney's Gusano

S4 Ep51: Accepting the mushiness of Jeff Vandermeer's Acceptance

S4 Ep50: Transparent Satire and Opaque Plotting in Jeff Vandermeer's Authority

S4 Ep50: Inverted Emotional Polarities in the two Annihilations

S4 Ep49: Part 3 of DeLillo's Underworld

S4 Ep48: DeLillo's Underworld, part 2 and Patrick Barney's new novel, Gusano

S4 Ep47: Enjoying the Longest DeLillo - Underworld - Part 1

S4 Ep46: The Opacity of Violence: Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun

S4 Ep45: The boundary between golden myth and secret history in Don DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall

S4 Ep43: Mysteries of connection and communication in Katie Kitamura's Intimacies

S4 Ep44: The Joy and Frustration in Not Going Too Deep Into the Details of Nabokov's Pale Fire

S4 Ep42: Sandra Newman's Julia, and George Orwell's 1984

S4 Ep41: Power, abuse, and doubled families in Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen

S4 Ep39: The Garden of Seven Twilights and the Postmodern Mega-Novel

S4 Ep40: The Complexity of Stasis in Lexi Freiman's The Book of Ayn

S4 Ep38: David Nikki Crouse's I'm Here: Alaska Stories

S4 Ep37: Ben Okri's The Famished Road and the worst tendencies of magical realism

S4 Ep36: The Future of Literacy and Vernor Vinge's Novel, Rainbows End

S4 Ep35: Literary Olives and the Distortions of the Moment in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2

S4 Ep34: Is it ethically okay to enjoy the work of monstrous artists?

S4 Ep33: Truth, Morals, and Intention in Literature: Aristotle's Poetics and More

S4 Ep32: Cultural Insensitivity and Beautiful Language in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory

S4 Ep30: Interpolations and Internal States in Checkout 19

S4 Ep31: The Art of Making Meaninglessness Comforting in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

S4 Ep29: Moral Ambiguity and Magical Fetishism in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge

S4 Ep28: Female Perspectives and the Weight of Submission in The Unbearable Lightness of Being

S4 Ep27: What the hell is happening in our heads in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

S4 Ep26: Empathy and Indeterminacy in Russell Banks' Lost Memory of Skin

S4 Ep25: On Quantum Theory and Social Justice in Namwali Serpell's The Furrows

S4 Ep24: Humor, Madness, and Existential Dread in Cormac McCarthy's newest duology: The Passenger and Stella Maris

S4 Ep23: Erotic Grotesqueries in The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire

S4 Ep22: Uncanny Perspectives on Art and Love in Robert Aickman's Painted Devils

S4 Ep21: Authenticity in Drew Hayden Taylor's AlterNatives

S4 Ep20: Being Mixed and Being American: Jean Toomer's Cane

S4 Ep19: On Irresolution and Indeterminacy in Dana Spiotta's Wayward

S4 Ep18: Heinrich Böll's Billiards at Half Past Nine

S4 Ep17: Psychological Dread in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca

S4 Ep16: Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World

S4 Ep15: Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End

S4 Ep14: Michael Flynn's Eifelheim

S4 Ep13: Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge

S4 Ep12: Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler

S4 Ep11: Human and Nonhuman Minds in Paul Auster's Timbuktu and Olaf Stapledon's Sirius

S4 Ep10: Tanya Tagaq's Split Tooth

S4 Ep9: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser

S4 Ep8: Natalie Kusz's Road song

S4 Ep7: Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This

S4 Ep6: Graham Swift's Waterland

S4 Ep5: George Orwell's Coming Up For Air

S4 Ep4: J.G. Ballard's High Rise and the Dystopia of Modernity

S4 Ep3: Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis

S4 Ep2: Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly

S4 Ep1: Can Xue's Love in the New Millennium

S3 Ep15: On Michael Crichton's Sphere