Severance Radio: A Nevada Reads Book Club

Can the end of the world as we know it bring about new ways of living? In this broadcast of Severance Radio, host Heidi Kyser interviews expert speculative fiction writers and creative writing professors Christopher Coake and Claire Vaye Watkins on the imaginative work of starting over after disaster.

In this episode, Severance Radio host Heidi Kyser interviews Professor Shelley Kelley and Natalie Pennington on the effects of a solitary life amid a pandemic.

In this episode, Hugh Shapiro and Claytee D. White talk about memory, loss, the politics of forgetting our past when we look for ways to live during a pandemic.

In this episode, artists Brent Holmes and Lance Smith delve into art as a vehicle for imagining a new world and the current social order. How does the apocalypse inspire their art?

In this episode, Nasia Anam interviews writer Bonnie Chau about navigating cultural backgrounds in a capitalist society.

In this episode, novelist and twitter comedian Kristen Arnett and Desert Companion editor Scott Dickensheets discuss the value of satire in the middle of a pandemic.

In this episode, two voices in academics and publishing, Karen Gu and Jean Munson, trace connections between Candace's experiences and the millennial struggles to break into an industry and survive in the workplace.

In this episode, Jenna Hanchey and Erica Vital-Lazare – two scholars who study language – talk about the new voices needed to imagine new worlds.

In this episode, a long-time Las Vegas community partner Dana Lee and experimental writer Vi Khi Nao discuss how a pandemic brings out familiar–and unsettling–ways of talking about race.

In this episode, two scholars Tim Gauthier and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan delve into the Us/Them paradigm that reveals itself throughout the story. How do we decide who is human, and who is not? What are the dangers of Othering in times of crisis?

In this episode, Severance Radio host Heidi Kyser interviews two public health experts, Jennifer Carson and Marya Shegog, as they examine who is most vulnerable in a pandemic.

In this episode, two scholars of English literature, Katherine Fusco and Stephen Pasqualina, investigate one of the most unsettling signs of the apocalypse in popular culture: the rise of the undead.

For 14 weeks, Severance Radio will dissect a single book: Severance, the satirical, dystopian novel by Ling Ma. This book is a mixture of immigrant family story, corporate satire, and global health crisis. In this episode, producers Stephanie Gibson, Kathleen Kuo, and Sara Ortiz discuss how Severance Radio came to be, and how we relate to each other during a pandemic.

Severance Radio is an on-air book club dissecting Ling Ma’s satirical, dystopian novel Severance. The novel is a moving family story that explores loneliness, corporate monotony, and survival in the midst of a global health crisis.