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Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

By Better Read

Three jerky socialists talk about books you've probably heard of. With Megan Tusler, Tristan Schweiger, and Katie K.

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Episode 66: The White Album

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left PerspectiveMay 02, 2021

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01:24:17
Episode 109: Babel-17

Episode 109: Babel-17

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 whole Babel thing is about. 


We read the Vintage edition that includes the in-universe short story “Empire Star” and recommend getting your hands on Delaney’s other works like his novel Nova and his 1999 critical work/memoir, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue on New York’s porn theaters of the 1960s and 70s. 


Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.


Nov 12, 202301:17:34
Episode 108: The Monk

Episode 108: The Monk

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 mass, AND DOMMES THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS HIMSELF. It’s trashy as hell, it’s metal af, and we’re talking all the classic gothic themes – sex, desire, critiques of power and patriarchy, and how eighteenth-century Britons are constitutionally incapable of being even slightly normal about the “Romish religion.”


We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Nick Groom, but we kinda recommend the Penguin for the cover art alone, which really gets at the dinosaurism in question (it also has full frontal, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of The Monk). For more on the gothic and Lewis’s place within it, we highly recommend friend-of-the-pod Michael Gamer’s Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, as well as Angela Wright’s chapter on Lewis and Ann Radcliffe in The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Vol. I.


Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.

Oct 22, 202301:32:07
Episode 107: Brave New World

Episode 107: Brave New World

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 this novel is crammed with them. We discuss politics of gender and sexuality, what a leftist critique might amount to here, and why mysticism is tiresome.

 

We read the 2006 Harper Perennial reprint with Huxley’s intro to the 1958 edition called “Brave New World Revisited.” We consulted Raymond Williams’s “Utopia and Science Fiction” from Science Fiction Studies (1978) and recommend it. Honestly, Science Fiction Studies is generally pretty cool.

 

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.

Oct 08, 202301:30:12
Episode 106: CROSSOVER SPECIAL: The Last of the Mohicans (the movie)
Feb 06, 202302:13:54
Episode 105: The Body

Episode 105: The Body

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 Generation. It’s not that bald guy, it’s the kid.

We read the Signet edition. Check out King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) or one of his 65 other novels (seriously) or hundreds of short stories (also seriously) if you are interested in haunted cars, scary sewer clowns, or the various terrors of New England.

*Note to listeners: Megan is off this week. She’ll be back with us next time for The Monk!

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Nov 06, 202201:28:06
Episode 104: The Stepford Wives

Episode 104: The Stepford Wives

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 feminism, and Sir Mix-a-Lot.

We read the 2002 William Morrow reprint with introduction by Peter Straub. Check out Jennifer Rhee’s The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor for more on bots bots bots!

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Oct 30, 202201:23:24
Episode 103: The Man Who Lived Underground

Episode 103: The Man Who Lived Underground

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 version with Wright’s essay “Memories of my Grandmother” and afterward by Wright’s grandson Malcolm Wright. We also consulted the Harper Perennial 1996 reprinting of Eight Men with introduction by Paul Gilroy. We recommend Lauren Michele Jackson’s New Yorker article “What We Want From Richard Wright,” from May 2021 and Bill Mullen’s Tempest article “Richard Wright and the Police State,” from October 2021.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Oct 09, 202201:26:59
Episode 102: The Last of the Mohicans

Episode 102: The Last of the Mohicans

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 (2017) “Indiginous Metaphors in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.” For some fun, we suggest Mark Twain's 1895 gem, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Sep 25, 202201:32:50
Episode 101: Middlemarch, Part 2

Episode 101: Middlemarch, Part 2

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 him because he had one-too-many glasses of sherry before a campaign speech and went Chuck-Grassley-on-Twitter incoherent is among the finest scenes in 19th-century British literature. All landlords are bastards, folks. To finish, we play a delightful game where we debate which Middlemarch character you want running your mutual fund.

We read the Oxford edition, edited by David Carroll with an introduction by Felicia Bonaparte. For an excellent reading of Middlemarch as critical toward mid-19th century liberal ideological assumptions, we highly recommend Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain, which we discuss on the show.

*Note to listeners – we’re taking a short mid-season break, but we’ll be back with new episodes in a couple weeks.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Aug 14, 202201:43:26
Episode 100: Middlemarch, Part 1
Aug 07, 202201:48:44
Episode 99: The Mountain Lion

Episode 99: The Mountain Lion

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 genealogy.

We read the reprinted (and beautiful) NYRB version from 2010. We recommend a recent article by Katie Collins in the Journal of Modern Literature called “‘Her Ruined Head’: Defacement and Disability in Jean Stafford's Life and Fiction.”

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jul 31, 202201:24:18
Episode 98: Murder on the Orient Express

Episode 98: Murder on the Orient Express

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 Belgian. Who knew?

We read the Harper Collins edition (1990) and for more on Agatha Christie, film adaptations of her work, and the class politics behind Christie's popularity check out Eileen Jones's 2021 Jacobin article "The Crime of the Century."

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jul 24, 202201:23:48
Episode 97: Wuthering Heights

Episode 97: Wuthering Heights

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 HAVING THOUGHTS about endogamy and incest.) We talk gender, sexuality, patriarchy, repression that’s kind of not, and racialization, as well as the pressure this novel puts on Victorian “realism.” This is one damp novel, folks. Who knew the Yorkshire moors were so turnt?

We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by John Bugg. For a wonderful and concise reading of Wuthering Heights that explores Brontë’s novel as a critique of normative Victorian epistemology, we highly recommend Nathan K. Hensley’s blog post “The Lapwing’s Feather (Wuthering Heights)”: http://www.nathankhensley.net/blog/the-lapwings-feather-wuthering-heights. There is a ton of great scholarship on Heathcliff as a figure of otherness, but one book we recommend is Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger which discusses many texts but builds part of its analysis by thinking of Wuthering Heights in the context of the Great Famine, ongoing as Wuthering Heights was published.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jul 17, 202201:31:39
Episode 96: Naked Lunch

Episode 96: Naked Lunch

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 Burroughs as Hawthorne was to Melville: helping him keep his sh*t together in order to write a non-insane novel and if he just gave up on this one. We also talk about Olympia Press, which published this along with The Ginger Man and Lolita, and why filthy-minded publishers are necessary.

We read the Grove Press 2013 restored edition. We recommend Jennie Skerl’s writings on Burroughs, particularly the collection William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989. We also recommend Burroughs’s letter collections, published in two volumes by Ecco Press. Check out some of the weird side-projects he did, including collaborations with Kurt Cobain and Laurie Anderson.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jul 10, 202201:36:02
Episode 95: Jews Without Money

Episode 95: Jews Without Money

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 time. We talk about left efforts to recover that history, plus Gold’s moving, hilarious, sad, and often shocking portrait of life in a Jewish tenement.

We read the 1996 Carrol & Graf edition with an introduction by ultra-lib Alfred Kazin. You must read this introduction to, like us, get very mad and so you will understand why we dunk so hard on it. Ah, the end-of-history ‘90s, folks.

For more on Gold, you should definitely check out Benjamin’s outstanding essay in Jacobin, “Mike Gold, the Writer Who Believed Workers Could Speak for Themselves” https://jacobin.com/2021/07/mike-gold-literature-jewish-american-proletariat-red-left. And you should also check out Benjamin’s fantastic book, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War from University of Michigan Press.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Benjamin on Twitter @BL_Balthaser, Tristan @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jul 03, 202201:41:52
Episode 94: Season 5 Wrap-Up

Episode 94: Season 5 Wrap-Up

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, obv., he’s pretty and buoyant what with entirely lacking a brain.) But never fear, we come together and make it to the Celestial City. Of communism.

We’re off for a couple months, comrades, but will see you in the spring for Season 6!

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Mar 06, 202239:15
Episode 93: The Pilgrim's Progress

Episode 93: The Pilgrim's Progress

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 Lust of the Flesh whom we should not have to explain any more about. You get it. Do we find salvation? Does Christian make it to Mount Zion? Is it a good idea to do mixed martial arts with a fish monster who wears bears as shoes? We answer all these questions and talk about genre, allegory, interpretation, and some Puritans who buckled their hats too tight.

We read the Norton edition, with notes and introduction by Cynthia Wall. If you still can’t get enough of Pilgrim’s Progress, we highly recommend Gregory S. Jackson’s article “A Game Theory of Evangelical Fiction” (yes there is a Pilgrim’s Progress board game and yes there are pictures included) and David M. Diamond’s “Sinners and ‘Standers By’: Reading the Characters of Calvinism in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” And check out our Joseph Andrews episode, which David guest hosted!

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Feb 20, 202201:29:38
Episode 92: Inkle and Yarico

Episode 92: Inkle and Yarico

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, the trashiest of trash.) We talk constructions of race, imperial violence, genre, and why this story was read in so many ways in the eighteenth century.

We read from and highly recommend Frank Felsenstein’s English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. For more on Inkle and Yarico and racist European representations of Native people from Columbus through the eighteenth century, we also recommend Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Feb 13, 202201:25:39
Episode 91: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Episode 91: Lady Chatterley's Lover

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 politics, disability, and… coal mining?

We read the Penguin edition with the gross cover and intro by Doris Lessing. We do not recommend that you read this or any other edition, because your brain is much less smooth having not read it. We discuss it on the show and recommend Terry Eagleton’s chapter on Lawrence in The English Novel, because it is genuinely hilarious. We also recommend Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society and The Country and the City, because they both mention Lawrence and we all need more Raymond Williams in our lives.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Feb 06, 202201:27:42
Episode 90: Persuasion

Episode 90: Persuasion

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 a rest stop named for you on the New Jersey Turnpike.

We read the magnificent Oxford edition with notes and introduction by friend-of-the-pod Deidre Shauna Lynch. There’s so much excellent Austen scholarship, but you can start with Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning or another favorite of ours, Claudia L. Johnson’s Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jan 30, 202201:27:38
Episode 89: Mrs. Dalloway

Episode 89: Mrs. Dalloway

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 (Norton) edition with truly marvelous notes and introduction by Merve Emre. We recommend Elizabeth Abel’s Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, because she shares our affection for reading Woolf with Freud.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jan 16, 202201:30:14
Episode 88: The Talented Mr. Ripley

Episode 88: The Talented Mr. Ripley

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 mechanisms, self-making, and queerness. We also consider the ethics of telling people about your European vacations and if you should ever do that.

We read the Vintage edition. We mention it on the episode and recommend Erin Carlston’s book Double Agents, which is about queer fiction and spying in 20th century literature. And we really really insist that you go check out the cluster of essays that Devin and Kimberly Andrews edited for Post45’s Contemporaries series on Nic f*cking Cage.

Find Devin on Twitter @stalecooper and You’re Tall but I’m Standing in Front of You @youretallpod. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Dec 19, 202101:29:46
Episode 87: Pierre, Part 2

Episode 87: Pierre, Part 2

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, Pierre! We will miss you and some of your cousins.

For some reading that is fun and also educational (for real!) check out Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog’s edited collection Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America. We recommend especially John Demos’s essay, “History and the Psychosocial: Reflections on Oedipus and America.”

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Dec 12, 202101:17:60
Episode 86: Pierre, Part 1

Episode 86: Pierre, Part 1

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 playing guitar more than a friend. This makes Pierre’s mom so mad she throws a fork into a painting of herself.

We didn’t make this up. Herman Melville did. Come take a ride with us. We discuss why Melville is so cool, the mom/dad/sister triad, artistic mediation, and the nation.

This is a two-parter, so come back next week to find out how it ends!

We read the Norton Critical Edition edited by Robert S. Levine and Cindy Weinstein. For more on this totally regular book, check out Gillian Brown’s “Anti-sentimentalism and Authorship in Pierre” in Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Dec 05, 202101:28:33
Episode 85: Caleb Williams

Episode 85: Caleb Williams

This week, we bring you the OG ACAB novel, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). We very much stan Godwin, awesome radical, proto-anarchist, Mary Wollstonecraft wifeguy AND Mary Shelley daughterguy. Caleb Williams is about a rich dude who really does mean well, but does that matter? Of course not! It’s structure, structure, structure, so he does murder and then hounds his poor servant (Caleb Williams) all over Britain when his servant finds out about it. We talk Jacobinism, 1790s politics, and Godwin’s utopia of reason. This book rocks so much it almost made Meg an eighteenth-centuryist.

We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Pamela Clemit. For more on Godwin, his politics and fiction, and his connection to other BRtD favorites, check out Clemit’s The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley.

Note to listeners: we’re off next week (blame capitalism, for real). But then we’ll be back with an epic two-parter on Herman Melville’s Pierre!

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Nov 21, 202101:30:14
Episode 84: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Episode 84: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Closing out this year’s Halloween episodes, we have the much-requested Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) by Oscar Wilde. You probably know the story. Magic picture gets old while dude the picture is of stays young, dumb, and, uh, dtf? And smoking lots of opium, for it is late Victorian London, and what else does one do? We talk queerness and sexuality, how aesthetics might actually be liberatory, as well as Wilde’s (very good!) politics and tragic bio. We also dive into Wilde’s literary innovation of the f*ck flower.

We read the Penguin edition with notes and introduction by Robert Mighall, which we highly recommend as it gives you both a sampling of the hilarious freakout by reactionary late-C19th chud reviewers AND the (exceptionally light) edits and expansions Wilde made between the 1890 and 1891 versions in part to “appease” them (read: screw with them even more). For a great recent article on how Dorian Gray subverts Victorian epistemological claims, check out Chiara Ferrari’s “Subversive Aims: Science and Contamination in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray.”

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Nov 14, 202101:24:35
Episode 83: The Case of George Dedlow

Episode 83: The Case of George Dedlow

The next installment in our Halloween fright fest comes from the guy who brought us classics like “the rest cure” and a book called Fat and Blood: It’s Silas Weir Mitchell’s 1866 short story “The Case of George Dedlow.” The noted Philadelphia physician gave us this fine tale of a Civil War doctor(ish) who loses all of his limbs in a series of events so unfortunate you won’t believe people thought it was a true story. And you extra won’t believe that once you hear about the ending.

We chat about epistemology, the mind/body connection, nineteenth-century medicine, photography, the genre of the case, and which one of the Real Housewives is most Christ-like.

We read the version from the 1900 publication The Autobiography of a Quack and the Case of George Dedlow. Go to the Mütter Museum. We recommend checking out Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (2017) by Shauna Devine for further reading.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Nov 07, 202101:31:22
Episode 82: Carrie

Episode 82: Carrie

Friends, it’s our third annual Halloween series! We’re talking about Stephen King’s horror classic Carrie (1974), which is about a teenage girl with telekinesis, which the “scientists” cited in the novel conveniently refer to as “TK.” We discuss King’s uneven canon and its political resonances (lots of liberal stuff, but we obviously deliberately misread.) In typical BRtD manner, we talk about the evils of people who ask, “do you know who my dad is?” For those interested in Brian DePalma’s 1976 movie version, we touch on how it does and doesn’t follow the novel, and how they’re both really good.

We talk about the “female” body, high school social orders, and Skinny Legend Jonathan Edwards. We read the Anchor mass market edition. It’s about a different King novel, but we recommend Adrian Daub’s “Where ‘It’ Was: Rereading Stephen King’s ‘It’ on Its 30th Anniversary” from the LA Review of Books, September 11, 2016.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Oct 31, 202101:22:32
Episode 81: McTeague

Episode 81: McTeague

Hey comrades! We’re back with more swears, random Frankfurt School references, and messy book takes. In our Season 5 opener, UChicago PhD candidate, friend of the pod, and union organizer Josh Stadtner talks with us about Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), which is about an amateur dentist and his obsession with a concertina. We establish that Frank Norris was a frat douche and social Darwinist (yeesh), and that his having written in the late 19th/early 20th century is still not the slightest excuse for this. We talk about the scene in which a lady has some steamy naked times with a pile of money. This really happens in the novel and we did not make it up.

We talk about teeth, money, the terrifying desert, and Freudian forms. We read the Norton Critical Edition with an introduction by Donald Pizer. We recommend you go back to a classic and read Georg Lukács’s 1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?” to bone up on your “is naturalism good?” takes.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Josh on Twitter @joshstadtner, Tristan @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Oct 24, 202101:28:05
Episode 80: Season 4 Wrap-Up

Episode 80: Season 4 Wrap-Up

We are capping off Season 4 with a tribute to next season’s two-parter, Herman Melville’s sister-boinking polycule classic Pierre. We inhabit the mind of Melville and create a Frankenstein Pierre using some old favorites. All we have to do is find a mom with no chill, a theme for our polycule, a “man-child invincible,” a sister to pine after, a forgettable plot device character, and someone to write this bananas-ass book. Plus Jello. You don’t need to know anything about Pierre to have a good time with this unholy creation, but we hope you want to by the end of the episode.

While you’re listening, we suggest you find a recipe for Pretzel Salad, google some pictures of the Phillie Phanatic, and scroll through Joe Gorga’s instagram (@joeygorga) for some nuggets of New Jersey wisdom. You won’t regret any of it.

As you may have guessed, this is our last episode of the season. We'll be back with you in the fall, comrades!

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Aug 15, 202143:52
Episode 79: Wieland

Episode 79: Wieland

This week we are thrilled to bring you Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland. It’s about a guy who gets tricked by a ventriloquist into murdering his family and—we can’t stress this enough—not anybody else. Not another soul was present. There was absolutely no other character involved in this situation. Even to suggest it would be ridiculous. And that’s final. Also, the ventriloquist is a clown who shows up at a stranger’s house demanding milk. There is spontaneous human combustion. Please read this book.

We talked about the gothic, the terrifying continent of Europe, and religion and madness. And we have our own moment of quasi-religious epiphany: this book is early American It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

We read the Norton Critical Edition edited by Bryan Waterman, which includes Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. For more on Wieland, ventriloquism, and so much more, we recommend Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. It’s amazing.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Aug 08, 202101:26:52
Episode 78: Lucy

Episode 78: Lucy

After devoting much of this podcast to the pressing topic of Dads Who Are A**holes (and have failsons), here’s our second back-to-back episode on Moms Who Are A**holes (this time with a success daughter). We love Jamaica Kincaid, and we especially love her 1990 novella Lucy about a young West Indian woman who comes to work as an au pair for clueless bourgie white people in the United States. We’re talking race and colonialism, capital, gender and sexuality, and, yes, mothers. We also plunge into the pressing question: why do rich white sh*theads love claiming to be “Indian” so much?

We read the Ferrar, Straus and Giroux edition. There are two pieces of scholarship we talk about on the show which we highly recommend. For how Lucy explores outsider-ness as a way of disrupting white, bourgeois structures, check out Jennifer J. Nichols’s “‘Poor Visitor’: Mobility as/of Voice in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy” in MELUS. And for more on Lucy’s sexual adventures as strategies of resistance and becoming, see Gary E. Holcomb’s “Travels of a Transnational Slut: Sexual Migration in Kincaid’s Lucy” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Aug 01, 202101:17:60
Episode 77: No-No Boy

Episode 77: No-No Boy

It’s a drizzly day in Seattle in John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), and we’re feeling the mood. No-No Boy is about Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese-American man who refused military service after being drafted from an internment camp and was imprisoned for it. He careens around Seattle and Portland, turning down jobs (always a good instinct) and connecting and disconnecting from his friends and family (including his rather… conspiratorially-minded mother.) We discuss war-era masculinity, citizenship, and racialization. We get into the absolutely wild publication history of this novel, which was (re)found, (re)published, and then published without the estate’s permission.

We read the University of Washington Press edition with forward by Ruth Ozeki, introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada, and afterward by Frank Chin. We recommend King-Kok Cheung’s Articulate Silences as a foundational work in Asian-American literary studies, and Jeffrey Santa Ana’s Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion for a recent study of Asian-American literature/affect studies.

*Note to our listeners -- Katie is off this episode. She’ll be back next week.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jul 18, 202101:16:59
Episode 76: Silas Marner

Episode 76: Silas Marner

The Bible says something somewhere about children who are worth their weight in gold. Well, George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) explores what would happen if we took that proverb super literally! (Or figuratively? Mythically! That’s it. Or is this more of a fable? Wait, it’s a realist novel???) Silas Marner is about a linen weaver in the Midlands countryside whom the village folk assume is Gandalf (natch) and who adopts a daughter who mysteriously appears at his door. But, as with everything Eliot wrote, it’s also about, uh, everything -- industrialization, capital, parentage, class, religion and modernity, epistemology, and much much more.

We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Juliette Atkinson. For an excellent discussion of how Silas Marner critiques materialist/financial forms of value, see Mary Poovey’s influential Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. And for a landmark study of how the English novel was shaped by -- and critiqued -- the emergence of the capitalist market, as always, we recommend Deidre Shauna Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning.

*Note to our listeners -- Megan is off this episode. She’ll be back next week.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jul 11, 202101:24:28
Episode 75: The Great Gatsby

Episode 75: The Great Gatsby

If you’re one of those try-hards who read this for the AP Lit test (and we are), you’ll be pleased to see us finally take this one on. This week we have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, which is about extremely non-embarrassing things like throwing enormous parties so your ex-girlfriend will notice you. We talk about Fitzgerald’s accounts of sex and money, gender and sexuality, and Long Island guys who are really transplants so they go particularly hard.

We read the Scribner edition with introduction by Jesmyn Ward. For a wild ride, read Gore Vidal’s “Scott’s Case,” published in the May 1 1980 issue of The New York Review of Books, as it contains some truly wacky bon mots, like “All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars,” which… probably not?

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jul 04, 202101:20:28
Episode 74: Dune

Episode 74: Dune

It is time to ride the worm and ask the eternal question “what’s in the box?” This week we have Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic about a future where drugs have replaced computers, the nuns are magic and scary, money is worm [redacted], and the East India Company rules space. We chat about this book’s politics, and we get into religion, time, and environmentalism. You simply must try the spice. Everything will make sense. Even the terrifying toddlers in grim reaper robes. Fear is the mind killer.

We read the Penguin edition with an afterword by Brian Herbert. Check out Jordan S. Carroll’s excellent piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books “Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s Dune,” which we read excerpts from in this episode.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jun 27, 202101:21:47
Episode 73: The Man of Feeling

Episode 73: The Man of Feeling

If you like feckless boobs who are also giant crysacks (Megan does not), do we have a book for you! Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is a classic sentimental novel with all the trimmings -- a useless protagonist who thinks crying is hot and who can’t stop getting conned by every sharp, coxcomb, and failson in London. It’s a delightfully ridiculous book, one we suspect is very much in on the joke, and we talk discourses of feeling, sentimental critiques of empire and capital, and the funniest sorry sorry we meant saddest death scene in all of eighteenth-century literature.

We read the Oxford edition edited by Brian Vickers with notes and introduction by Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave. There’s a ton of scholarship on sentiment and the related "cult of sensibility," and we highly recommend both Janet Todd’s Sensibility: An Introduction and John Mullan’s Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jun 20, 202101:22:45
Episode 72: Lolita, Part 2

Episode 72: Lolita, Part 2

We close up our discussion of Lolita and try not to reflect too much on what has brought us to this point. We consider what sort of people would read this as a morality play, and what in the actual eff is wrong with them (everything). We talk about the road novel as a genre, the doppelgänger (doing a Freud while simultaneously hating the Good Doctor), what reading “with” a character is like, and why this book makes it so difficult not to talk about word objects as though they’re “people.” Also, Tristan is still feeling pretty bolshy, and we indulge in a fun round of “you might be a Russian novelist if.”

We read the Alfred Appel, Jr. Annotated Lolita published by Vintage. As before, we’re kinda not into Nabokov criticism, so either go watch the Kubrick movie (really good! veeeeerrrry different) and have a Kubrick-fest, or read some of Nabokov’s other books—Ada if you’re a word pervert, The Defense if you’re a chess pervert, or Pnin if you’re an academic and therefore every kind of pervert.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jun 13, 202101:23:59
Episode 71: Lolita, Part 1
Jun 06, 202101:16:10
Episode 70: Black No More

Episode 70: Black No More

Friend of the pod, cultural critic, and Northwestern University professor of African American literature Lauren Michele Jackson joins us for our discussion of George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931). If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to read a wacky-ass novel written by a socialist-turned-right-wing nut, have we got the one for you. Schuyler’s novel takes up the story of what might happen if there were a machine that turned black people white (extra-white, in fact) and how various social and political actors would handle it. Spoiler: the KKK doesn’t handle it great. We discuss the terms/objects of satire and whether Schuyler was mostly just being a dick when he wrote this, the notion of the “grift” or confidence scheme, and how the novel puts pressure on “race” as a series of concepts.

We read the Penguin edition with an introduction by Danzy Senna. For more context on Schuyler and his contentious relationship with other black writers of the 1920s and ‘30s, you can read Schuyler’s essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” and Langston Hughes’s response, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” And, of course, we highly recommend Lauren’s White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue… and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation, published by Beacon Press.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Lauren on Twitter @proseb4bros, Tristan @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

May 30, 202101:26:24
Episode 69: Of One Blood

Episode 69: Of One Blood

Got a sister? Are you SURE you don’t have a sister? Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902-1903) explores this important question along with mesmerism, race, the legacy of American slavery, colonialism and imperialism in Africa, and--somehow--much more. In this episode we simply marvel at the adventures of our protagonist, doctor, anti-colonialist Indiana Jones, enemy of big cats, and king of the ancient Ethopian secret city of Telassar. This novel blew our minds, knocked our socks off, while keeping our pants secured in an upright position. Because you never know who your sister might be.

We read the edition from The Givens Collection with an introduction by Deborah E. McDowell. For more on Hopkins’s amazing work check out Dana Luciano’s “Passing Shadows: Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of one Blood” in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian’s Loss: the Politics of Mourning (2002). And if you’d like to learn more about the wild world of mesmerism, we recommend Emily Ogden’s Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (2018).

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

May 23, 202101:11:36
Episode 68: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Episode 68: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Are you on the bus or off it, man? The book commies, dear listener, are decidedly off it. Or rather, we’re punching, clawing, screaming, and fighting our way out of this goddamn thing, past balls-trippin’ Ken Kesey, speed-addled Neal Cassady, the rest of the Merry Pranksters, and the 400+ freaking pages Tom Wolfe decided to write about them. It’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) this week, and we’re wrapping up our convo on the New Journalism and talking the counterculture’s reactionary side, how saying “f*ck it” actually isn’t a politic, man, and the psychology of going through one’s professional life wearing an all-white three-piece suit.

We read the Picador USA edition. Wolfe thought he basically invented New Journalism, and he did coin the term in the 1973 anthology called The New Journalism. You can check that out for more from Wolfe and our old pals Didion, Capote, McGinniss, and other people we might get around to talking about on the show someday. If you don’t want to read Acid Test, or at least want a skimming aid, just watch Magic Trip, the 2011 (heavily edited) release of the film from the Pranksters’ 1964 escapades. Cassady is very high.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

May 16, 202101:22:60
Episode 67: The Journalist and the Murderer

Episode 67: The Journalist and the Murderer

Friend of the pod Sebastian Stockman joins us for the second episode in our three-part series on The New Journalism. Sub is a teaching professor in English at Northeastern University, and a journalist and essayist. We discuss Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), a book about another book -- Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision, for which the subject (convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald) sued McGinniss for fraud. We take up the whole idea of the “nonfiction novel,” Malcolm’s interest in psychoanalysis as a lens for thinking about the journalist-subject relationship, and the ethics of writing about real people. Tristan also gets to dunk on William F Buckley (his favorite thing), and Sub shares some tips on good work habits via Tom Wolfe -- we’ll get to him next week.

We read the Vintage edition. For more Malcolm, you can read In the Freud Archives, which Sub talks about on the show. That book spawned its own famous lawsuit, an experience Malcolm discusses in The Journalist and the Murderer and which, in part, frames her discussion of the McGinniss case.

You should also check out Sub’s newsletter! You can find it -- and subscribe! -- here: https://sebastianstockman.substack.com.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Sub on Twitter @substockman, Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

May 09, 202101:33:39
Episode 66: The White Album

Episode 66: The White Album

DID YOU MISS US? Reading with Reds returns for Season Four, and we’re talking about Joan Didion’s The White Album as the first of a three-part series on The New Journalism. We discuss Didion’s recording and perception of the 1960s, non-fiction writing and style, reactionary politics, and why you have to take a bottle of bourbon on all your travels. Remember to email us with suggestions for institutions that we should for real abolish, like for real for real.

We read the Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux edition. We recommend Sulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex because Didion hates it and it deserves to be revisited.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus. And next week, journalist Sebastian Stockman joins us to talk about The Journalist and the Murderer, so definitely don’t miss it!

May 02, 202101:24:17
Episode 65: Season 3 Wrap-Up
Jan 17, 202151:58
Episode 64: Absalom, Absalom!

Episode 64: Absalom, Absalom!

If you’ve been listening to Better Read for a bit, you’re probably aware that Megan’s favorite genre of novel is "brother hearts sister but in a distressing sex way." In that vein, we present one of the absolute classics of the genre, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, which is 300 pages but feels longer. A lot longer. The novel features an upwardly-downwardly mobile Scots-Irish bigamist and his children, both “legitimate” and “illegitimate,” and the problem of racial panic in the 19th-century US. We talk about race, colonization, incest (of course), property, and style. In lieu of a game we induct some very special novels and films into the Literary Incest Hall of Fame.

We read the Vintage edition. We sort of recommend the midcentury books on Faulker like Irving Howe’s William Faulkner: A Critical Study, but suggest first checking out Toni Morrison’s article “The Color Fetish” from the September 14, 2017 issue of The New Yorker.

*Note to our listeners -- Katie is off this episode. She’ll be back next week.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Jan 10, 202101:27:21
Episode 63: The Wild Irish Girl
Jan 03, 202101:19:07
Episode 62: A Christmas Memory

Episode 62: A Christmas Memory

If you need some salty tears in your fruitcake, have we got the one for you. We’re talking about Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” originally published in Mademoiselle in 1956. It’s his semi-autobiographical short story about a young boy’s friendship with his way-older cousin in 1930s Alabama and their alienation from the rest of the adults in the family, something that most of us can relate to. We talk about writing childhood, outsiderness, and the troubles with reading autobiography.

We read the version in Vintage’s The Complete Stories of Truman Capote. We mention it in the show and recommend Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley’s collection Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Dec 27, 202001:16:41
Episode 61: A Child's Christmas in Wales

Episode 61: A Child's Christmas in Wales

Ho ho ho! Or in Welsh, cywnwn cywnwn cywnwn! (Probably. Or definitely not, we don’t speak Welsh). For the first of two Christmas episodes this year, we’re getting all poetic-like -- or rather, prose fiction that follows TONS of poetic conventions -- with Dylan Thomas’s 1952 A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Whether you love Christmas or hate it, this is a beautiful and hilarious piece, and a lot more complex than its surface nostalgia would indicate. We talk mythic vs. historical time, the nation, class, and more, plus Thomas’s notoriously messy (and, ultimately, tragic) biography.

We read the David R. Godine edition, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. For more on Thomas, two often-cited biographies are those by Paul Ferris (1977) and Andrew Lycett (2003).

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Dec 20, 202001:14:47
Episode 60: The Screwtape Letters

Episode 60: The Screwtape Letters

This week we descend into the bowels of hell to bring you C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (1942), a Christian epistolary novel about what happens when your demon uncle is also your boss and you’re both very concerned with meeting the Dark Lord’s soul quota for professional reasons. We talk about religion, Anglicanism, Lewis’s politics (confusing!), and Eton’s satellite campus in the underworld. We also discuss the two surest paths to damnation: saying “after you, my dear” too much and complaining about toast.

We read the Harper Collins 60th anniversary edition, which includes “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” For more C.S. Lewis, check out his series of safety tips following an enchanted journey through furniture, The Chronicles of Narnia. If you don’t have time to read those just remember not to take candy from any sexy witches and that lions are your friends who would never eat you, unlike your demon uncle.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Dec 13, 202001:19:32