The NewlyReads

Kylie takes on another NewlyReads Game. New stakes are introduced and street pennies are argued over. 

Kylie makes Dan read Hurston's beautiful short novel about a woman chasing her horizon. They discuss Hurston's reputation with her contemporaries, the novel's engagement with Transcendentalist ideas, and why it's so frequently taught in American literature courses. 

In this freewheeling bonus episode, Kylie and Dan assess Jarett Kobek's claim in I Hate the Internet that "the good novel, as an idea, was created by the Central Intelligence Agency." Kylie summarizes her dissertation research on the relationship between the American intelligence community and American fiction, Dan comes up with some wild metaphors, and they both weigh in on whether the CIA's influence on literary production prevented authors from developing new forms or ideas. Plus, a spontaneous NewlyReads Game and Dan's infamous T.S. Eliot impression!An incomplete bibliography of great books on this topic that Kylie references in the episode: For more information on the Congress of Cultural Freedom, see Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. For more on the general relationship between American intelligence, literature, and university humanities programs, see Timothy Melley's The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State and Robin Winks's Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961.For a more focused examination of how Faulkner was promoted as an American asset in the Cold War cultural battle, see Lawrence H. Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. And finally, for more information on the FBI's policing of black writers and thinkers in the twentieth century, see F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature , Barbara Foley's Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Richard Gid Powers's G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture. 

Dan Makes Kylie read Jarett Kobek's scree against our contemporary moment. Dan explains why I Hate the Internet is a valuable reflection of the way internet discourse has broken all of our brains, and Kylie attempts to process her frustration with Kobek's means to communicate his message.

As a bonus episode accompanying last week's discussion of Women in Love, Dan tests Kylie's knowledge of D.H. Lawrence's sentence level style with another installation of The NewlyReads Game! Check out our Instagram @thenewlyreads if you want to read the passages and test your close-reading knowledge before we reveal the answers, or drop us a line at thenewlyreads@gmail.com to tell us how you did.

Kylie makes Dan read D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920). Together, they discuss the novel's place in the Modernist canon, explore its depiction of a restrictive and generally doomed  Britain in the wake of WWI and industrialization, and acknowledge that sometimes you really do have to karate chop a demonic rabbit. Follow us on Instagram @thenewlyreads or drop us a line at thenewlyreads@gmail.com ! 

In the bonus episode on Nabokov's Pale Fire, Kylie and Dan discuss what characterizes Nabokov's sentence-level style. Then, they debut The NewlyReads game, a passage identification quiz designed to test the knowledge of the host who chose the novel under discussion. Can Dan identify which one of three passages comes from Pale Fire, and earn bonus points for ID-ing the authors of the other two passages? Can you, dear listener? Check out our Instagram page @thenewlyreads to see the quiz passages. Drop us a line at thenewlyreads@gmail.com to tell us how you did!We'll be back in two weeks, after a short spring break, to discuss D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love. 

Dan makes Kylie read Nabokov's fictional scholarly edition of a poem by a fictional poet--it's fiction on fiction on fiction! They discuss the thin line between scholarship and conspiracy theories on Pale Fire, speculate on why Nabokov is rarely taught in English classes, and share anecdotes on why close reading is a helluva drug. 

In their second interstitial episode, The NewlyReads examine Jeff Vandermeer's first weird landscape by discussing "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris" from the collection City of Saints and Madmen. They talk footnote fiction, provide their rankings of Vandermeer's fictional worlds, and Dan explains why having Magneto-esque control over fungus would be the ultimate superpower. 

It's a podcast with a face! This week, Kylie has Dan read an author known with putting human faces on any old thing and calling it scary. Which, strangely, works every time. 

New music! New segment! Weekly episodes! What more could you want? Today Kylie and Daniel dig in to a sentence from Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. We talk about scansion, the passive voice, and the ways that textual artists use their medium to convey meaning, and how sleuthing literature folks tease that meaning out.

Dan makes Kylie read Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Is it a cowboy tale? A work of high modernism? The source text for Slow West? (Probably not that last one...) Rustle up your cattle and join The NewlyReads as they meander through the long history of landscape description, why Catholics get a good rep in literature, and how Kylie got Goldfinched by this one. Also, a big announcement: We're going weekly! Starting next week, after every traditional episode, we'll release a shorter companion episode that delves into each author's sentence-level style. So tune in next week for our Sentence Breakdown of a line that encapsulates the themes and style of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Follow us on Instagram @thenewlyreads or drop us a line at thenewlyreads@gmail.com

Kylie has Dan read Colson Whitehead's 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys. After Kylie shares the story of the inscription on her copy of John Henry Days, the NewlyReads discuss why Whitehead frequently baffles critics and where his career might be going next.For more on the historical research that informs the novel, go to www.theofficialwhitehouseboys.org

Dan makes Kylie read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, the book that was under a lot of Christmas trees in 2010. (That's, uh, about the best we could do to tie this deeply misanthropic book to any kind of holiday theme...) Join us as we discuss Franzen's amazing ability to antagonize everyone on the internet and decide whether Freedom lives up to its classification as one of the 21st century's Great American Novels. 

Kylie makes Dan read a B-side novel from an A-lister of American fiction! In the 1897 The Spoils of Poynton, an old woman with Britain's most beautifully decorated house is faced with the horrifying prospect of a daughter-in-law with hideous taste. Somehow, this ridiculous premise leads to high drama: furniture is moved in the night, and tea biscuits are incriminatingly displaced! Listen as The NewlyReads discuss why James isn't a household name, the novel's strange mix of headstrong and totally indecisive characters, and why titles with dual meanings really are the best. 

The NewlyReads do poetry! This episode we discuss why feminism is rockstar-level awesome, the caves under New York City (populated by monsters? I don't know, but probably), the newest biography of Adrienne Rich, and why poetry can make us sweat.  A note about the end of the episode: We had a problem at the very end of the recording, so we learned that our announcement of the next episode was cut off! Tragedy. It's The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James, though!  

In this special episode, Dan and Kylie wade into murky philosophical waters to investigate why we're able to laugh, cry, and rage over the fates of fictional characters. If you want to know what's in Dan's copious notes referenced on this episode, here's some of the reading we did to prep for this recording: --Bernard Paris, Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature, NYU Press (1997) --Amie L. Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, Cambridge UP (1999)--Baruch Hochman, Character in Literature , Cornell University Press (1985)--Howard Sklar, "Believable Fictions: On the Nature of Emotional Responses to Fictional Characters," Helsinki English Studies, Vol 5 (2009) --Paisley Livingstone, Andrea Sauchelli, and Paisley Livingston, "Philosophical Perspectives on --Fictional Characters," New Literary History, Vol. 42.2 (2011)--Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's "Fictional Entities" (2018)

Today's episode is a Kylie pick! Is it a street filled with mangoes? A street on a mango? A street for mangoes? The only possible way to know is to listen!

Dan makes Kylie read Paul Theroux's 1981 novel about a man who drags his family down with him as he pursues his dream of total self-sufficiency. Hopefully Dan doesn't have similar plans for Kylie and their cat children... Come on a journey upriver as The NewlyReads debate whether Allie Fox is an interestingly flawed character or just a tiresome egomaniac, examine how Theroux's travel writing clarifies the novel's ideas, and decide whether ice is really civilization. Thanks to a generous grant from Indiana University, we were able to make a major equipment upgrade. Starting with this episode, you can hear us even more clearly as we argue about critical theory and character arcs! Follow us on Instagram @thenewlyreads or send us an email at thenewlyreads@gmail.com

Do you hear that sound? That constant sound in the background? It's the long silence since we went on vacation. Well, we're back! This is our last episode with our old recording equipment, and we used it to discuss a classic: Don DeLillo's White Noise. Next episode: new fancy tech that we will spend the intervening weeks learning how to use.

The NewlyReads will return on October 2!

Dan makes Kylie read Barbara Kingsolver's debut novel, The Bean Trees (1988). They discuss the tradition of scientist-turned-writers, wonder why B-side books sometimes stick with them more than an author's "major work," and debate the virtues of wide-open Midwestern plains!Follow us on Instagram @thenewlyreads or send us an email at thenewlyreads@gmail.com

Kylie makes Dan read James Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956). They discuss Baldwin's unique prose style, why his essays get more attention than his fiction, and the history of black American writer-activists and analyze why Baldwin's novel about doomed love, repressed sexuality, and the difficulty of defining Americanness feels so timeless. 

A visit from the longest episode yet. A NEW SEGMENT appears: the Sentence Breakdown. 

Here at The NewlyReads we have a core tenet: Thou shalt not dunk on thy books. This week, Daniel gets dangerously close to sinning against that core belief, our cats make not one but TWO appearances, and we try to solve the mystery: Wait, wasn't this all about Waldegrave?

Dan makes Kylie read another doorstop novel, Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 (2017). They discuss the history of climate fiction, the challenges of crafting multiple protagonists, and Robinson's play with traditional literary genres. Also, Dan confesses that he never read a book that Kylie loaned to him years ago...Follow our Instagram @thenewlyreads or email us at thenewlyreads@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you!

Dan invites Kylie to discuss the tradition of pandemic literature and the new crop of fiction that's attempting to make sense of the coronavirus. Not just another pair of podcasters griping about being locked inside, The NewlyReads discuss Katherine Anne Porter's 1939 Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Albert Camus's 1947 The Plague, and several novels and short stories published in the last few months. They also ruminate on why literature is essential during crises like this and whether or not COVID will lead to new literary genres.

Kylie makes Dan read Dean Koontz's murder-clown-prophecy-thriller-comedy Life Expectancy (2004). As they sort through the novel's many, many twists, The NewlyReads discuss Koontz's big imagination, identify the common elements and themes in his diverse collection of work, and weigh in on the longstanding divide between popular and literary fiction. Also, they announce a special upcoming episode on pandemic literature!Follow us on Instagram @thenewlyreads, drop us a line at thenewlyreads@gmail.com, or visit our website www.thenewlyreads.com. We'd love to hear from you!

Dan makes Kylie read Cheryl Strayed's bestselling memoir Wild (2012). They discuss the book's reputation in backpacking and literary communities, the craft of the book as it narrates both trauma and a sport that typically isn't action-packed, Strayed's description of being a woman in a hyper-masculine space, and why Edward Abbey might be a druid. Also, tales from Dan's wilderness ranger days and Kylie's confession of her greatest fear!Check out our website at www.thenewlyreads.com, follow us on Instagram @thenewlyreads, or drop us a line at thenewlyreads@gmail.com! We'd love to hear from our listeners!

Kylie makes Dan read Steinbeck's masterwork social novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Kylie reveals the argument of her Masters' thesis, Dan tries out an Okie accent, and together they explore the unfortunate relevance of the American social inequality that this 1939 novel critiques.Check out our new website, www.thenewlyreads.com and drop us a line at thenewlyreads@gmail.com. We'd love to hear your takes on the books we've covered or suggestions for what to read next!