Lit Century

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 several translations. Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times. Her next collection of nonfiction, Any Person Is the Only Self, will be out in 2023 from FSG. Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet and translator. He is the author of Innocence (CSU Poetry Center, 2022) and co-editor of APARTMENT Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Guernica, FOLDER, Fence, jubilat, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Quarterly, the Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Review, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, with a dissertation on Osip Mandelstam, and teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 2022 re-release of her novel, The Misconceiver. Other recent work includes the 2015 novel A Sister to Honor, as well as essays and short fiction in American Scholar, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Forthcoming in 2023 is a book of essays from Wandering Aengus Press, Meditations on a New Century, as well as Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, a monograph in Ig Publishing's Bookmarked series. She is Writer in Residence Emerita at Trinity College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Not Dead Yet: A Family History of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023). A former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, she has been traveling to and studying the former Soviet Union for 20 years. She has written for The Atlantic, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Zweig's life—and his friendship with Freud—to interpret the text. Leeore Schnairsohn's fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Painted Bride Quarterly, the Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Review, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, with a dissertation on Osip Mandelstam, and teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Isaac Butler is the co-host of Slate's Working podcast. He previously hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and co-wrote The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America with Dan Kois. His latest book is The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Literary Scouting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 author of eight books, five of them novels, including The Saskiad (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997); I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company (Viking, 2003); and Fall of Frost (Viking, 2008). The Saskiad, a coming-of-age novel about a precocious and imaginative young girl, has been translated into 12 languages. I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company was named one of the best novels of the year by The Boston Globe, Salon Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor. Fall of Frost was named one of the best novels of the year by The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. His most recent novel is The Stone Loves the World (Viking, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Outside, The Daily Beast, Vox, and Slate, among other publications. She has authored two previous books, One Long Night and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov--both critically acclaimed. She received an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in 1994, and later studied at MIT and Harvard as an affiliate of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She grew up in West Virginia and currently lives with her family near Washington, DC. Icebound is her most recent work. Matthew Hunte is a writer from St. Lucia, whose essays include “In Praise of Minor Literature,” and “Albert Murray and the Americas.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 a narrow slice of the population--she acknowledged that lesbians might exist, but she had no useful advice for them—Nichols, Hopper, and Allen discuss how her form of femininity affected their lives. Briallen Hopper is the author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Gilead Reread (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, the Washington Post, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Queens College, CUNY and in the Yale Prison Education Initiative. Samantha Allen is the author of Patricia Wants to Cuddle (Zando, 2022) and the Lambda Literary Award finalist Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States (Little, Brown, 2019). She is a GLAAD Award-winning journalist and editor with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, CNN, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 three poetry collections: The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021), The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). The Wilderness was the winner of the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including The New York Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, Boston Review, The New Republic, and Gulf Coast. Brian Hall is the author of eight books, five of them novels, including The Saskiad (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997); I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company (Viking, 2003); and Fall of Frost (Viking, 2008). The Saskiad, a coming-of-age novel about a precocious and imaginative young girl, has been translated into 12 languages. I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company was named one of the best novels of the year by The Boston Globe, Salon Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor. Fall of Frost was named one of the best novels of the year by The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. His most recent novel is The Stone Loves the World (Viking, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 her sister with the highly eligible and rich bachelor Fan Liuyuan; Bai Liusu decides she will have him instead. Adalena Kavanagh is a writer and photographer in New York. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature and The Believer, among many other publications, and she writes the weekly photography newsletter Mamiyaroid 5.5. Jaime Chu is an editor, critic, and translator from Hong Kong, currently based in Beijing, who is currently a contributing editor at Spike Art Magazine, and a part of Chaoyang Trap, an experimental newsletter about contemporary life in China. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and used to work in book publishing. Her writing on contemporary art and cultural criticism has appeared in Spike, The Nation, The Baffler, Groove, and Telekom Electronic Beats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 conversation address issues of muses, second acts, artistic isolation and connection, and how the play is inevitably read through the lens of biography, especially in the wake of Sondheim's death. Rob Weinert-Kendt is the editor of American Theatre and a frequent contributor to America magazine. He is also a musician. Here are some of Rob's pieces on "Sunday in the Park with George" and Sondheim: An interview with Sarna Lapine, who directed the 2017 SUNDAY revival: https://www.americantheatre.org/2017/03/21/how-sarna-lapine-makes-sunday-in-the-park-sing/ A preview of the 2008 revival (not on Time Out's site anymore, but hosted on own janky website): http://robkendt.com/Features&News/sundayinpark.htm Thoughts on Sondheim's death https://www.americantheatre.org/2021/11/30/nothing-thats-not-been-said-on-sondheim/ An in-depth interview with him from 10 years ago https://www.americantheatre.org/2011/04/01/stephen-sondheim-playwright-in-song/ Then two from Isaac: https://slate.com/culture/2021/11/stephen-sondheim-dead-obituary-career-west-side-story.html https://slate.com/podcasts/culture-gabfest/2021/12/review-spencer-yellowjackets-stephen-sondheim Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 audiences comfortable. His memoir tells the story of his life through that persona, turning his career in Black baseball into a series of comical picaresque adventures. This pose would later be condemned by younger Black players. Luke Epplin is the author of Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball, about the integration of baseball, and specifically the Cleveland Indians, in the 1940s. His other writing has appeared online in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, GQ, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and The Paris Review Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 away from the character, of whom he had grown tired. Alex Higley is the author of the short story collection Cardinal and the novel Old Open. He is also co-host (with Lindsay Hunter) of the podcast "I'm a Writer But." Willie Fitzgerald is currently the Mari Sabusawa Editorial Fellow at American Short Fiction. His work has appeared in Hobart, Poor Claudia, City Arts, Keep This Bag Away From Children and elsewhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Gross is the author of the novel Hysteria, about a young woman's relationship with Freud. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Yiddish Book Center and the 14th Street Y in New York. Jessica earned her MFA in fiction from The New School, where she also taught courses in fiction and nonfiction writing. She currently teaches creative writing at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 gift-giving with their husband, Mike Meginnis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Rolling Stone, and formerly film critic for Vanity Fair and The Ringer. He was also the host of the film podcast Flashback for Slate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, writers Mike Meginnis and David Burr Gerrard join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Patricia Highsmith's 1950 novel Strangers on a Train. In the novel, two characters, Guy and Bruno, meet on a train; each have someone they would like to see murdered. Bruno offers to kill Guy's estranged wife, Miriam, in exchange for Guy killing Bruno's father. Guy doesn't agree, but Bruno kills Miriam anyway, and then expects to be paid back in murder. The conversation touches on the homoeroticism in the novel, how it deals with blurred identity, and how it expresses Highsmith's identification with monsters. Mike Meginnis is the author of the forthcoming Drowning Practice (2022, Ecco) and Fat Man and Little Boy (2014, Black Balloon). His short fiction and essays have appeared in Hobart, PANK, The Lifted Brow, Recommended Reading, Booth, The Pinch, The Collagist, The Sycamore Review, Fanzine, American Book Review, and Writer's Digest. His story "Navigators" appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012. He lives and works in Iowa City. David Burr Gerrard is the author of THE EPIPHANY MACHINE (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2017) and SHORT CENTURY (Rare Bird, 2014). He teaches creative writing at the 92nd Street Y, The New School, The Yale Writers' Workshop, Catapult, and the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, writers Alex Higley and Willie Fitzgerald join host Catherine Nichols to discuss three short stories by Wright Morris: "The Sound Tape," "The Character of the Lover," and "The Cat in the Picture." Higley, who brought the stories to Lit Century, talks about how he discovered Morris's writing through his photographs and photo-texts. The group also talks about Morris's detached, bemused voice, that sometimes tips over into confusion or joy, and the way his stories cheat the reader of conclusive meaning and leave them in a place of mystery. Alex Higley is the author of the short story collection Cardinal and the novel Old Open. Willie Fitzgerald is currently the Mari Sabusawa Editorial Fellow at American Short Fiction. His work has appeared in Hobart, Poor Claudia, City Arts, Keep This Bag Away From Children and elsewhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. Why is modernity (and the swimming pool) always deadly in twentieth century fiction? Where and how did Fitzgerald lose control of his material? Would it be a different book if Fitzgerald had chosen a different narrator? And most of all: why is this book so commonly seen as the great American novel? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode writers Alex Higley and Willie Fitzgerald join host Catherine Nichols to discuss two stories from Alice Munro's 1991 short story collection Friend of My Youth. The first is the title story, in which the narrator retells (and reinterprets) a story she was told by her dying mother about two Presbyterian sisters; the second is "Meneseteung," about a writer doing research on a 19th century poet. Willie Fitzgerald's short stories have been published in Joyland, Prairie Schooner, and many other publications. He is a graduate of the Michener Center, cofounder of the APRIL festival, and is currently the Mari Sabusawa Editorial Fellow at American Short Fiction. Alex Higley is the author of the short collection Cardinal (longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction) and the novel Old Open. He's also co-host (with Lindsay Hunter) of the podcast "I'm a Writer But." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, writers V. V. Ganeshananthan and J. Robert Lennon join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Jamaica Kincaid's 1990 novel Lucy. The novel is about a girl who travels from Antigua to the United States to be an au pair for a wealthy white family, and forms a close relationship to the mother of the family, reacting against her relationship with her own mother. The conversation addresses the novel's complex treatment of race and the concept of white innocence, its prescient interest in environmental issues, and its morally ambiguous, triumphantly selfish narrator. V.V. "Sugi" Ganeshananthan, who was a student of Kincaid, speaks about what Kincaid was like as a teacher and mentor. V.V. "Sugi" Ganeshananthan is an American fiction writer, essayist, and journalist. Her work has appeared in many leading newspapers and journals, including Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post. Her novel Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize. J. Robert Lennon is the author of nine novels, including Familiar, Broken River, and Subdivision, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand, See You in Paradise, and Let Me Think. He lives in Ithaca, New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hosts Elisa Gabbert and Catherine Nichols discuss Christopher Pike's hit 1989 novel Remember Me and his less-known Fall Into Darkness (1990). Remember Me's ghostly protagonist explores an idiosyncratic afterlife and enters the dreams of her family and friends to solve her own murder at her friend's slumber party. In Fall Into Darkness, a teenage girl discovers that her best friend has framed her for murder. Link to an interview with Christopher Pike discussed in the episode: https://electricliterature.com/everything-youve-always-wanted-to-ask-christopher-pike/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hosts Elisa Gabbert, Isaac Butler, and Catherine Nichols discuss W. G. Sebald's 1992 novel, The Emigrants, a hybrid fiction/nonfiction work made up of four long narratives about four people who emigrated from Germany around the time of WWII. A Sebald-like narrator travels in the footsteps of these characters, mentally and geographically, in an elegiac, oblique book that is ultimately about the long shadow of the Holocaust and more generally about loss and memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, critic K. Austin Collins joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Isaac Butler to discuss Albanian author Ismail Kadare's 1971 novel The General of the Dead Army. In this novel, an Italian general comes to Albania 20 years after World War II to find the bodies of Italian soldiers who died there and return them to their families, and ends up in a small village looking for the remains of a particular army captain with a particularly brutal reputation. Working as a writer in the Stalinist Albania of Enver Hoxha, Ismail Kadare became an international literary figure and a preeminent commenter on totalitarianism. His nominating juror for the Neustadt Prize wrote: "No one since Kafka has delved into the infernal mechanism of totalitarian power and its impact on the human soul in as much hypnotic depth as Kadare." K Austin Collins is a film critic for Rolling Stone and a programmer for the New York Film Festival. He was formerly film critic for The Ringer, and has also written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, and the Brooklyn Rail. He writes crosswords for The New Yorker, The New York Times and the American Values Crossword Club. He lives in Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

`In this episode, writer, actor, and performance artist M. Leona Godin joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Helen Keller's 1908 book The World I Live In. Helen Keller (1880-1968) was an American author, lecturer, vaudeville performer, and political activist. At nineteen months, she suffered an illness that left her deaf and blind; The World I Live In offers Keller's remarkable insight of the world as perceived through three senses. M. Leona Godin, is a performance artist, actor and writer with a PhD in literature. She has written a play, "The Star of Happiness," about Helen Keller's vaudeville years, and another on the invention of Braille. Godin's first book, There Plant Eyes, is a personal and cultural history of blindness. She is also, among many other things, the founding editor of Aromatica Poetica, an online magazine exploring the arts & sciences of smell & taste. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols discuss Yukio Mishima's 1963 novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, a disturbing, sui generis book about a young boy watching the developing relationship between his urbane, well-heeled mother and a quiet sailor with dark, secret dreams of glory. The boy also has secrets: he is spying on the sailor and his mother when they have sex, and he belongs to a secret society of boys that will ultimately condemn the sailor to death. The book reads like an intimate and damning portrayal of the mentality of fascism, but Mishima himself was one of the most famous Japanese fascists of the post-war period; he died by committing seppuku after leading a failed right-wing coup against Japan's democratic government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, geneticist Maria Naylor joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss James Watson and Francis Crick's 1953 paper "A Structure for DNA," for which they won the Nobel Prize (with many references also to Watson's book about the discovery, The Double Helix). The discovery of DNA's structure had a rich social context, which ultimately determined not only who got credit for the work, but who was effectively able to do it. Most notoriously, there was the malicious exclusion of Rosalind Franklin from the story, but this episodes also looks at how collaborations between scientists were facilitated or obstructed by rapidly changing rules about class, race, and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week's episode, art historian Robert Wiesenberger joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Isaac Butler to discuss artist Jenny Holzer's "Truisms" from 1978, "Truisms" is a group of declarative sentences Holzer first put up anonymously on posters all over New York City: "Labor is a life-destroying activity.," "Lack of charisma can be fatal," "Private property created crime." The work originated in a period when Holzer was frustrated with painting and turned to language as a more direct means of expression. "Language is a good way to convey meaning," as Holzer put it. Robert Wiesenberger is the associate curator of Contemporary Projects at the Clark Art Institute and co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press 2017). He has also contributed catalog essays for the Harvard Art Museums and the Walker Art Center, and is a contributing editor to Art Papers magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, novelist and poet Kathleen Rooney joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Elisa Gabbert to discuss Robert Aickman's 1988 collection of stories The Wine-Dark Sea, with particular focus on the title story and the uncanny dollhouse story "The Inner Room." Aickman's work is often characterized as horror fiction, but he preferred the term "strange stories." His stories take the reader imperceptibly across the gauzy line between mundane reality and surreal terror. As one of his characters says: "Dreams are misleading because they make life seem real." Kathleen Rooney is the author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her most recent novel is Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. She is also the author of the national bestseller Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte. She is also a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode co-hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss Jacqueline Susann's 1966 mega-bestseller Valley of the Dolls, looking at how it treats women's bodies, sexuality, success, and glamour purely as sources of misery. In this book (nominally a cautionary tale about drug addiction) the only real joy comes from pills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, novelist Miranda Popkey joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Isaac Butler to discuss Norman Mailer's 1960 essay, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," a landmark work in the history of New Journalism. The essay is about the presidential campaign of JFK and the cultural changes it embodies, particularly the emergence from the fifties culture of conformity and the way television impacts politics. Today's conversation deals not only with the essay but with Norman Mailer's legacy, and how it's been reassessed in the light of his habit of violence, most notably exemplified by the fact that he stabbed his wife just months after the publication of this essay. Miranda Popkey is a writer, editor, and translator from the Italian. Her debut novel is Topics of Conversation, and it was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by TIME, Esquire, Real Simple, Marie Claire, Glamor, Bustle, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, writer and critic Elisa Gabbert joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss T.S. Eliot's 1915 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem about aging, limitations and disillusionment written by a young poet on the threshold of a brilliant career. How do the poet's youth and the narrator's age affect the tone of the poem? What makes it such a potently memorable (but also elusive) work? Included in the episode is discussion of Eliot's essay about Marvell. Lit Century also wants to thank the T. S. Eliot Society for use of the audio recording of Eliot. Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, out now from FSG Originals and Atlantic UK; The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were both named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. She writes a regular poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, the London Review of Books, A Public Space, the Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and many other venues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, co-hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss André Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto from 1924. Why were the demands of the surrealists such a lasting influence on twentieth century art? Are they revolutionary or insidiously counter-revolutionary in their meaning? Mentioned in the episode is Catherine Nichols' essay about privilege and the avant garde, "A God-awful Small Affair." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, writer Matthew Hunte joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss David Bradley's 1981 novel The Chaneysville Incident, a historical novel based on a legend of thirteen runaway slaves who killed themselves to avoid being caught and returned to slavery. Matthew Hunte is a writer from St. Lucia, whose essays include "In Praise of Minor Literature," and "Albert Murray and the Americas." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode V V Ganeshananthan joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Barbara Pym's novel Excellent Women, a comedy of manners about an unmarried woman living in the very small world of 1950s Britain, and about the pleasures of independence—and of pettiness. V V Ganeshananthan is a fiction writer and journalist. Her novel, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World's best books of the year, and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. Her work has also appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Washington Post, among many other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, author Tyrese L. Coleman joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman again to continue their discussion of Gloria Naylor’s book of linked short stories, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), a classic of Black women’s literature. Tyrese L. Coleman is a writer, wife, mother, and attorney. Her debut collection of stories and essays, How to Sit, was published by Mason Jar Press in 2018 and nominated for a 2019 PEN Open Book Award. Her work has appeared as a notable in Best American Essays 2018 and 2016 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, author Tyrese L. Coleman joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman to discuss Gloria Naylor's book of linked short stories, The Women of Brewster Place (1982). This book is a classic of Black women's literature; does that canon differ from the white male canon, and why might any differences have arisen? Tyrese L. Coleman is the author of How to Sit, a 2019 Pen Open Book Award finalist published with Mason Jar Press in 2018. She's also the writer of the forthcoming book, Spectacle. Writer, wife, mother, attorney, and writing instructor, she is a contributing editor at Split Lip Magazine and occasionally teaches at American University. Her essays and stories have appeared in several publications, including Black Warrior Review, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and the Kenyon Review and noted in Best American Essays and the Pushcart Anthology. She is an alumni of the Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. Find her at tyresecoleman.com or on Twitter @tylachelleco. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols discuss Thomas Nagel's 1974 essay "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" How did materialism, for centuries the tool of radical thinkers, become the philosophy of the status quo? And why was this philosophical essay about the possibility of understanding other minds—or any minds—so crucial for contemporary thinkers? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Adalena Kavanagh joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss Tom Drury's 1994 novel The End of Vandalism, a quietly hilarious and profound novel about a love triangle in rural Iowa, with a huge cast of characters who have all known each other from birth. What does this book have to tell us about rural America, and why does this relatively recent novel already feel like a work that could not be written and published now? Adalena Kavanagh is a writer and librarian in New York. She has just completed a novel, and writes a weekly photography newsletter which you can find here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, author J. Robert Lennon joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss Kazuo Ishiguro's novel-in-the-form-of-an-extended-dream, The Unconsoled (1995). Why is this novel called a masterpiece by some (including the participants in this conversation), while being dismissed as rambling and pointless by others? J. Robert Lennon is the author of nine novels, including Familiar, Broken River, and Subdivision, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand, See You in Paradise, and Let Me Think. He lives in Ithaca, New York. His most recent books are available for order and pre-order here. You can find all his other books, and more information here. And, as a bit of supplemental reading on The Unconsoled, here's a LitHub piece giving Ishiguro's own list of the dream techniques he used in the novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman talk about the short stories of Anton Chekhov, particularly "Lady With a Little Dog" and "Ward No. 6." What do these stories tell us about the revolutionary sentiment that was about to change not just Russia but the world? The stories embody a radical hopelessness, but also a harsh judgment of that hopelessness. Do we need to continue to hope in order to be good people? And is Chekhov telling us that (partly for that reason) it's not possible for some people to be good? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss "The Cherry Orchard" by Anton Chekhov, and particularly what it has to say about slavery, upper-class revolutionary types, and the twentieth-century tendency to turn all relationships into transactions. With added material from guest Isaac Butler, who tells us how Chekhov originally wrote the play for Stanislavsky, and the hijinks that ensued. Isaac Butler is a writer and theater director, co-author (with Dan Kose) of The World Only Spins Forward, and author of the upcoming The Method.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The second part of a discussion between co-hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols about the first ten books discussed on Lit Century. How did suffering come to be seen as cool in the twentieth century? Is this related to the fact that most of the writers discussed had domestic help, and that the perspective of the people doing the cleaning is notably absent from their work? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Co-hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols look back on the first ten books on Lit Century and what they tell us about the mindset of the 20th century. Why was the 20th century so obsessed with what is normal, and what is transgressive? How did normality become uncool? 20th century literature also tended to fetishize pain, particularly the pain of marginalized people. Why was this, and what does it mean? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, writer, actor and director John Cotter joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman to discuss Wallace Shawn's 1996 play "The Designated Mourner," about the fate of intellectuals during an authoritarian coup in an unnamed country. John Cotter directed The Designated Mourner in Denver in 2013 & 2014. There's a chapter about one of the performances in his forthcoming memoir,Losing Music, which is due out from Milkweed Editions in 2021. Elisa Gabbert, who played the role of Judy in that production, wrote a book of poems inspired by the experience, L'Heure Bleue, or The Judy Poems, which was published by Black Ocean Books in 2016.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman continue their discussion of V. C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic (1979) and the story behind the story—particularly the ableism Andrews encountered in how she was marketed to her readership, plus her strong opinions on gender that didn't stop her publisher from hiring a male ghostwriter to write under her name after her death in 1986.

In this episode, Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman talk about V. C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic (1979), focusing on how the book is an allegory for the treatment of people with disabilities; Andrews herself had a serious spinal injury and used a wheelchair for most of her life. The hosts also discuss the book's notoriously transgressive subject matter, and how it's been dismissed as trash, largely because its fans were mostly teenaged girls.

In this episode, author and editor Benjamin Dreyer joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss the all-time great haunted house novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Benjamin Dreyer is the author of Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, a sharp, funny guide to style and grammar, which also happens to be a New York Times bestseller. He is also the copy chief at Random House, in which capacity he worked on Let Me Tell You, a collection of previously unpublished work by Shirley Jackson. And for those who want to do extra reading, the Shirley Jackson biography mentioned in the podcast is Ruth Franklin's A Rather Haunted Life.