When we think about literature, the last thing that comes to mind is the celebrity interview. Yet in the hands of the journalist Gay Talese, the lives of the famous are laid bear with all the insight, rhetorical verve, beauty, and tragedy of the best of short stories. Join our wayward host as basks in the glory of the most minute and piercing descriptions ever written of the famous. Frank Sinatra has a Cold on This American Life: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/574/sinatras-100th-birthday

Once upon a time, more than a thousand years ago, there lived a poet in China named Bai Juyi (sometimes called Po Chu-I). Unlike most poets, however, Bai wasn’t just a poet: he was also a politician, a scholar-bureaucrat tasked with helping to guide China through a moment of immense social, military, and economic crisis. Did he succeed in this endeavor? No. He failed dramatically. But his and his country’s failure gave the world some of the most honest, most efficiently beautiful poetry ever...

Notes: For those interested in Kim Yideum, here is a link to poetry reading she gave with her translator Jiyoon Lee. The audio quality is not great, but the reading is still pretty joyous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T78sITp2ebw For questions, comments, and concerns please email Bryant at [email protected]

Have you ever read a poem and then, without even realizing it, discover that it has implanted itself in your mind forever? For the last twelve years, there has hardly been a month where I haven’t thought at least twice about a single haiku written by Richard Wright in the last months before his death. Somber and yet joyous, imprisoning and yet liberating, its word and image have become a permanent part of who I am as a person. In this episode, I explore that poem, it’s troubled author, and...

On November 25th, 1970, the leading East Asian contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature tried to overthrow the Japanese government in a dramatic coup d'état. Failing at this, he then committed suicide via a combination of disembowelment and beheading. For more than fifty years, Yukio Mishima's life and death have defined Japanese literature. But what about the actual writing? What made this man so magnetic? So popular? So powerful? So determined to die in the most ostentatious way...

What makes the "genius writer" actually a genius? What does it even mean to be a "genius"? How does genius manifest itself on the page? When I think of these questions, a writer comes to mind: the Brazilian novelist, housewife, and national hero Clarice Lispector. Never was a writer more audacious, never was a writer more mindbogglingly strange. To understand her and genius itself, all we need to do is look at one single short story, Report on the Thing, about a woman deep in a metaphysical...

When we talk about James Baldwin, we always talk about him in terms of America's racial politics. But Baldwin was more than just America's greatest racial pundit--he was one of America's finest novelists. In this episode, we examine his first novel: Go Tell It on the Mountain, the story of a young black boy trying to survive under the crushing weight of his father's draconian vision of Christianity. Both brilliant and beautiful, the novel tries to get at the heart of a question perhaps even...

Lu Xun was China's first great modern writer. He invented the Chinese short story. He revolutionized the Chinese language. He diagnosed the vast array of social and spiritual problems that had led China, in the early 20th century, to the brink of ruin. Above ad beyond all of his innumerable essays and stories, the Real Story of Ah-Q is widely regarded to be Lu Xun's finest work. Set during the dying days of the Qing Dynasty, the Real Story of Ah-Q tells of the numerous victories, triumphs,...

Somewhere deep in Korea, a woman decides to become a vegetarian and thereby ruins the lives of everyone around her. Her husband's career is ruined. Her sister's marriage is ruined. Even her own life ultimately ends up annihilated. Why? Because there is nothing more evil in the world than difference. A caustic sledgehammer to the face. The winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

We begin small--with a single short story by Latin America's greatest 21st century novelist, Roberto Bolaño. Consisting solely of a monologue half-spoken and half-screamed at us by a cartel hitman born into the Colombian underground porn industry, "The Prefiguration Lalo Cura" forces us to reconsider the place of pornography within the pantheon of art, to think carefully about what it is exactly that allows some movies to be transformed into films, and gaze deeply into the realization that...

In this short episode, our host, interlocutor, and all around bookish nerd, Bryant Davis, introduces his podcast's hopes, dreams, and ambitions. What are those hopes, dreams, and ambitions? To provide the podcast listening world with a death-defyingly intelligent and (hopefully) entertaining discussion of all the wonderful little clumps of words we call literature.