We 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...

For 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...

Hi 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...

Friends, 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, but...

There 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...

Happy 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...

We 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...

We 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...

We 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...

For 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...

It’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...

All 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...

It 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...

You’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...

To 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...

In 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,...

You 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 named...

Today 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,...

Even 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...

If 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 – having...

Modernist 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...

Friend, 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...

Wrapping 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,...

This 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...