Author Amitava Kumar and host Catherine Nichols discuss Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. They talk about the wilderness and the names of plants, the associations of trains and the 19th and 20th centuries in India, Europe and the United States, and the book's rolling, associative prose style. Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and three novels. His novel Immigrant, Montana was a New York Times and New Yorker best book of the year and was selected by President Barack...

Authors Daniel Saldaña París and Wah-Ming Chang join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Juan Rulfo's 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, in its new translation by Douglas J. Weatherford. They talk about the book's unique mixture of modernity and timelessness, the violence and coziness of the book's picture of domestic life, and Rulfo's life as a traveler, reader, and editor. Daniel Saldaña París is the author of three novels—Among Strange Victims, Ramifications, and The Dance and the Wildfire—and a...

Na Zhong and Catherine Nichols discuss Iris Murdoch's 1958 novel The Bell. They discuss Murdoch's characters and the unique ethical quandaries of the book, as well as Murdoch's love of swimming and the size of the bell itself. A native of Chengdu, China, Na Zhong is a fiction writer who now calls New York her home. Her work has been recognized by organizations such as MacDowell and the Center for Fiction. Additionally, she serves as a columnist at China Books Review and is the...

Host Catherine Nichols and author Christine Coulson (One Woman Show, 2023) discuss The Swimmer by John Cheever and The Waltz by Dorothy Parker. Their conversation covers the humor and surrealism of both stories, the precise artistry of both authors' prose, as well as the social context of Cheever's suburbia, Parker's freedom and the constraints that both stories show in mid-20th century America. Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and left...

In this episode, host Catherine Nichols and writer Sally Foreman discuss Zabel Yesayan's enigmatic 1922 novel My Soul in Exile. Yesayan wrote the book after reporting on the genocide of her own Armenian people, shortly before before becoming a Communist. The book is counterintuitively joyful, as Yesayan describes a life in the arts both as a form of exile and a form of homecoming. Sally Foreman is an English writer and researcher living in Jerusalem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

Elisa Gabbert and Michael Joseph Walsh join Catherine Nichols to discuss Rainer Maria Rilke's 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. They talk about the ways the book echoes the life and mind of its author--and how it doesn't, as well as the details of the text: the eeriness of hands and masks, the differences between childhood and adult consciousness, and the appeal of encountering horrors on purpose. Since the book has been translated from the German many times, they compare...

Writer and musician Leeore Schnairsohn and host Catherine Nichols discuss Songs for Drella, the album Lou Reed and John Cale released in 1990 about their friend, mentor and manager Andy Warhol. They talk about the intimacy of artists' imitation of their friends voices, the paradox of Warhol's art, and where the album fits in both Reed's and Cale's career. Leeore Schnairsohn’s fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Painted Bride...

Author Lucy Ferriss and host Catherine Nichols discuss Elizabeth Bowen's 1938 novel The Death of the Heart. They discuss the unique narrator—16-year-old Portia, almost unimaginably innocent and stubborn about refusing to learn the hard lessons of life—and whether her demands are reasonable within the world of the book, or the actual world. Lucy Ferriss is the author of eleven books, including her latest collection, Foreign Climes: Stories, which received the Brighthorse Books Prize; and the...

Host Catherine Nichols discusses Svetlana Alexeivich's 1985 oral history The Unwomanly Face of War with author Megan Buskey. The conversation covers the ways World War II is remembered in Russia versus in the United States, and the feminism of the 1970s that created an audience for a book of this kind--and the topics it can't cover--as well as ways that the experiences of Soviet soldiers in World War II can shed light on the current war in Ukraine. Megan Buskey is the author of Ukraine Is...

In this episode, guest Leeore Schnairsohn joins Isaac Butler and Catherine Nichols to talk about Stefan Zweig's 1943 novella A Chess Story. They talk about the features of the story that seem to belong to the 19th century and to the 20th, and how it resonates with the work of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the web comic "Garfield Minus Garfield." They also discuss the biographical details that may or may not give the story its special haunting quality, and whether it's important to know about...

Book scout Kelly Farber joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Philip Pullman's 1995 novel The Golden Compass, the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy. They discuss the appeal of Pullman's imagined world and his place in both his intellectual and artistic traditions, his connections to C.S. Lewis and Milton, as well as the challenges of adapting this book for movies and television, and finally—what is Dust anyway? Kelly Farber is an international literary scout, owner/proprietor of KF...

Writer Brian Hall joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Ford Madox Ford's 1928 quartet of novels, Parade's End, focusing particularly on the first book, Some Do Not.... Their conversation covers the book's place in Modernist literature, comparisons to the work of E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and particularly its descriptions of World War One: as granular as a soldier's perspective on the field all the way outward to the war's effects on every part of British society. Brian Hall is the...

In this episode, writers Andrea Pitzer (Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World) and Matthew Hunte join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway. They discuss the paired stories of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith and what these two characters bring to one another, the book's private nihilism, its place in both Modernist and Edwardian literature, and the meaning of a party where the host dislikes the guests. Andrea Pitzer is a journalist whose...

Host Catherine Nichols discusses Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 Sex and the Single Girl with guests Briallen Hopper and Samantha Allen, both contributors to the 2022 collection Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic. The conversation covers Brown's class consciousness as well as the perplexing combination of hope and drudgery involved in her advice for living a glamorous, feminine life. While Brown acknowledged before her death that her advice was only for...

In this episode, film critic K. Austin Collins and John Lingan (Homeplace, A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival) join host Catherine Nichols to talk about Christina Stead’s 1940 novel The Man Who Loved Children. They discuss the book's place in American and Australian literature, and its political analysis of the traditional family, as well as its unique use of language to show the characters' psychological warfare on one another. Learn more about your ad choices....

In this episode, writers Sandra Lim and Brian Hall join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Jean Rhys's 1939 novel, Good Morning, Midnight. The novel is about a grieving, impoverished woman wandering through Paris, intermittently hopeful and despairing, The conversation addresses the novel’s artistic and political context and biographical links to Rhys's life, as well as literary depictions of poverty in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the Great Depression. Sandra Lim is the author of...

In this episode, poet and critic Elisa Gabbert (The Unreality of Memory) joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. The book draws from psychology and philosophy to develop a theory of human behaviors motivated by fear of death and the desire to influence the world past an individual's natural life span. Gabbert and Nichols talk about how Becker's ideas look in a modern context of climate change, pandemic and sexual liberation....

In this episode, writer and photographer Adalena Kavanagh and editor Jaime Chu join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Eileen Chang's 1943 novel Love In a Fallen City. Set in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the early days of World War II, it centers on Bai Liusu, a beautiful young woman who has divorced her husband and returned to her traditional Chinese family. They consider her spoiled goods and are trying to marry her off to a widower with five children. At the same time, they are trying to match...

In this episode, musician and editor Rob Weinert-Kendt joins hosts Isaac Butler and Catherine Nichols to discuss the musical "Sunday in the Park with George" with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. The play focuses on the painter Georges Seurat and his common-law wife Dot, in the time when he was painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, but in its second act goes to Seurat's great grandson, also an artist, and his personal crisis. The...

In this episode, writer Luke Epplin joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Leroy "Satchel" Paige's 1948 memoir Pitchin' Man: Satchel Paige's Own Story, written with sportswriter Hal Lebovitz. Paige was a baseball legend and an important figure in the early integration of baseball. He was one of the greatest athletes of his time, but his stardom was also the product of a genius for self-promotion. In the 1940s, this involved cultivating a comical, unthreatening persona that made white...

In this episode writers Alex Higley and Willie Fitzgerald join host Catherine Nichols to talk about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1901 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. The conversation includes discussion of how the figure of Watson is used as a magnifying frame for Holmes's genius and the lasting influence of that narrative device; the overwhelming influence Conan Doyle and Holmes had on the development of the mystery genre, and how this was first Holmes story Doyle wrote after eight years...

Writer Jessica Gross joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Freud's 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents, in which Freud writes about the difficulty of living as an individual in society, and the ways in which society demands we repress our nature and our desires. How has psychoanalysis, and Freud's theories in particular, changed the way we see ourselves and tell our stories? Is the price we pay for living in a society too high, especially when that price includes world wars? Jessica...

In this episode, video game designer Tracy Rae Bowling (The Fight) joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss the history and impact of the 1984 game Tetris—its place in the history of video games, the cultural impact on the late 20th century, and why it's not as popular as it used to be. Tracy Rae Bowling is a writer and video game designer. Their games include The Fight, available to play on itch.io, and The Color of the Moon, in development. Tracy also hosts Gift Horse, a comedy podcast about...

In this episode, guest K. Austin Collins joins hosts Elisa Gabbert and Catherine Nichols to talk about Louise Gluck's 1985 poem "Mock Orange" and through it, her work in general. Some topics are the unfashionable somberness and simplicity of Gluck's work, Gluck's extraordinary personal letter to her friend Brenda Hillman, and Gluck's near-fatal anorexia. Also discussed is Gabbert's recent review of Gluck's most recent collection in the New York Times. K. Austin Collins is a film critic for...