Podcast appearances and mentions of Brandon Taylor

A so-called Spreadsheet Man responds. Does the institutional turn have a distinctly feminine ethos? [27:30] How is it rooted in the Post45 Collective? [49:00] What are its debts to New Historicism and Marxist Literary Criticism? [69:00] And to Fredric Jameson? [84:30] And what has become of Economic Criticism? [94:00] Cast (in order of appearance): Dan Sinykin, Matt Seybold, Brandon Taylor, Rachel Sagner Buurma, Laura Heffernan, J. D. Connor, Alexander Manshel, Fredric Jameson, Leigh Claire La Berge Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/TheAmericanVandal/SpreadsheetMen, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

L'intervista a Brandon Taylor realizzata da "Black&White" su Nettuno Bologna Uno.

Le parole di Brandon Taylor e Dusko Ivanovic al termine di G3 Milano-Virtus 68-78

Your competitors are already using AI. Don't get left behind. Weekly strategies used by PE Backed and Publicly Traded Companies →https://hi.switchy.io/U6H7S--In this episode, Ryan Staley and Brandon Taylor discuss the critical role of company culture in the context of AI-led transformations. They explore how to assess leadership and team dynamics, set expectations for change, and ensure cross-functional alignment. Brandon emphasizes the importance of a world-class culture, the need for personal alignment with company goals, and the use of scorecards to measure performance effectively.Chapters00:00 The Importance of Company Culture in AI Transformation02:51 Assessing Leadership and Team Dynamics05:56 Setting Expectations for Change and Growth09:04 Cross-Functional Alignment for Success11:50 Utilizing Scorecards for Performance Measurement

Your competitors are already using AI. Don't get left behind. Weekly strategies used by PE Backed and Publicly Traded Companies →https://hi.switchy.io/U6H7S----In this conversation, Ryan Staley interviews Brandon Taylor, VP of Enterprise and Partnerships at CompanyCam, discussing his extensive experience in scaling SaaS businesses and the transformative role of AI in go-to-market strategies. Brandon shares insights on the common challenges faced in B2B sales, the importance of hiring the right people, and how AI can enhance efficiency and effectiveness in sales processes. He highlights specific use cases of AI in his leadership role and the future potential of AI in shaping go-to-market strategies.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Brandon Taylor and His Background04:01 AI Go-to-Market Strategy and Its Importance07:07 Leveraging AI for Efficiency in Sales10:17 Custom Applications and Use Cases of AI in Sales12:59 Future of Go-to-Market Strategies with AI

Hapoel Tel Aviv, accordo con Manos Papadopoulos per la dirigenzaOlympiacos, si complica il rinnovo di Williams-Goss?Il GM dell'Efes raffredda la pista del ritorno di MicicVirtus Bologna, ecco Brandon Taylor per i playoffsLe ultime sul futuro di TJ ShortsValencia, Joseph Puerto rinnova fino al 2027Wolves BC, accordo per il rinnovo di Marek Blazevic Reggio Emilia, Sambugaro il prescelto per il post-ColdebellaSassari, Pedro Llompart in pole position per sostituire Pasquini Dubai, si avvicinano Kabengele e MckInney-Wright Trieste, ecco Keylor Kelley per il finale di stagioneDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/backdoor-podcast--4175169/support.

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.With the papal conclave convening in Rome to pick Pope Francis's successor, Matt and Sam are joined by novelist Brandon Taylor to discuss the 2024 film Conclave, directed by Edward Berger and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini. The film, as you might guess, depicts the shabby and conspiratorial inner-workings of a (fictional) College of Cardinals as they go about picking a new pope. Fun movie! Great chat!Furthering Reading:Brandon Taylor, Real Life, (2020)— Filthy Animals, (2021)— The Late Americans, (2023)— "Is it even good? Two Years with Zola," LRB, April 4, 2024.Ben Munster, "Cardinals are watching ‘Conclave' the movie for guidance on the actual conclave," Politico, May 6, 2025.Dan Walden, "Gender, Sex, and other Nonsense," Commonweal, March 1, 2021.

We're revisiting host Jo Reed's conversation with Golden Voice narrator Kevin R. Free. They discuss his impressive audiobook work, his acting career, and being named a 2023 Golden Voice narrator. Kevin is a multiple Earphones Award winner for a wide range of audiobooks, from children's stories to literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and fantastic science fiction. There are few narrators who can match his versatility and perceptive performances across genres. Kevin has had an extraordinary career, both in the recording booth and in theater as an actor, a director, a playwright, and an artistic director. He's recorded more than 450 audiobooks, including Martha Wells's wildly popular Murderbot Diaries series, Brandon Taylor's insightful works, and many memorable children's audiobooks. Listen in to Kevin and Jo's lively conversation to learn more about how he brings joy into the recording booth, the thought and care he puts into creating voices for every character, and more. Read reviews of many of Kevin R. Free's audiobooks on AudioFile's website Discover thousands of audiobook reviews and more at AudioFile's website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who else in literature today could be more interesting to interview than Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans, as well as the author of popular reviews and the sweater weather Substack? We talked about so much, including: Chopin and who plays him best; why there isn't more tennis in fiction; writing fiction on a lab bench; being a scientific critic; what he has learned working as a publisher; negative reviews; boring novels; Jane Austen. You'll also get Brandon's quick takes on Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Franzen, Lionel Trilling, György Lukács, and a few others; the modern critics he likes reading; and the dead critics he likes reading.Brandon also talked about how his new novel is going to be different from his previous novels. He told me:I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation.I have enjoyed Brandon's fiction (several people I recommend him to have loved Real Life) and I think he's one of the best critics working today. I was delighted to interview him.Oh, and he's a Dickens fan!Transcript (AI produced, lightly formatted by me)Henry: Today I am talking to Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans. Brandon is also a notable book reviewer and of course he writes a sub stack called Sweater Weather. Brandon, welcome.Brandon: Yeah, thanks for having me.Henry: What did you think of the newly discovered Chopin waltz?Brandon: Um, I thought, I mean, I remember very vividly waking up that day and there being a new waltz, but it was played by Lang Lang, which I did not. I don't know that, like, he's my go-to Chopin interpreter. But I don't know, I was, I was excited by it. Um, I don't know, it was in a world sort of dominated by this ethos of like nothing new under the sun. It felt wonderfully novel. I don't know that it's like one of Chopin's like major, I don't know that it's like major. Um, it's sort of definitively like middle of the road, middle tier Chopin, I think. But I enjoyed it. I played it like 20 times in a row.Henry: I like those moments because I like, I like it when people get surprised into realizing that like, it's not fixed what we know about the world and you can even actually get new Chopin, right?Brandon: I mean, it felt a little bit like when Beyonce did her first big surprise drop. It was like new Chopin just dropped. Oh my God. All my sort of classical music nerd group texts were buzzing. It felt like a real moment, actually.Henry: And I think it gives people a sense of what art was like in the past. You can go, oh my God, new Chopin. Like, yes, those feelings are not just about modern culture, right? That used to happen with like, oh my God, a new Jane Austen book is here.Brandon: Oh, I know. Well, I mean, I was like reading a lot of Emile Zola up until I guess late last year. And at some point I discovered that he was like an avid amateur photographer. And in like the French Ministry of Culture is like digitized a lot of his glass plate negatives. And one of them is like a picture that Zola has taken of Manet's portrait of him. And it's just like on a floor somewhere. Like he's like sort of taken this like very rickety early camera machinery to this place where this portrait is and like taken a picture of it. It's like, wow. Like you can imagine that like Manet's like, here's this painting I did of you. And Zola's like, ah, yes, I'm going to take a picture to commemorate it. And so I sort of love that.Henry: What other of his photos do you like?Brandon: Well, there's one of him on a bike riding toward the camera. That's really delightful to me because it like that impulse is so recognizable to me. There are all these photos that he took of his mistress that were also just like, you can like, there are also photographs of his children and of his family. And again, those feel so like recognizable to me. He's not even like a very good photographer. It's just that he was taking pictures of his like daily life, except for his kind of stunt photos where he's riding the bike. And it's like, ah, yes, Zola, he would have been great with an iPhone camera.Henry: Which pianists do you like for Chopin?Brandon: Which pianists do I love for Chopin? I like Pollini a lot. Pollini is amazing. Pollini the elder, not Pollini the younger. The younger is not my favorite. And he died recently, Maurizio Pollini. He died very recently. Maybe he's my favorite. I love, I love Horowitz. Horowitz is wonderful at Chopin. But it's obviously it's like not his, you know, you don't sort of go to Horowitz for Chopin, I guess. But I love his Chopin. And sometimes Trifonov. Trifonov has a couple Chopin recordings that I really, really like. I tend not to love Trifonov as much.Henry: Really?Brandon: I know it's controversial. It's very controversial. I know. Tell me why. I, I don't know. He's just a bit of a banger to me. Like, like he's sort of, I don't know, his playing is so flashy. And he feels a bit like a, like a, like a keyboard basher to me sometimes.Henry: But like, do you like his Bach?Brandon: You know, I haven't done a deep dive. Maybe I should do a sort of more rigorous engagement with Trifonov. But yeah, I don't, he's just not, he doesn't make my heart sing. I think he's very good at Bach.Henry: What about a Martha Argerich?Brandon: Oh, I mean, she's incredible. She's incredible. I bought that sort of big orange box out of like all of her, her sort of like masterwork recordings. And she's incredible. She has such feel for Chopin. But she doesn't, I think sometimes people can make Chopin feel a little like, like treacly, like, like a little too sweet. And she has this perfect understanding of his like rhythm and his like inner nuances and like the crispness in his compositions. Like she really pulls all of that out. And I love her. She has such, obviously great dexterity, but like a real sort of exquisite sensitivity to the rhythmic structures of Chopin.Henry: You listen on CD?Brandon: No, I listen on vinyl and I listen on streaming, but mostly vinyl. Mostly vinyl? Yeah, mostly vinyl. I know it's very annoying. No, no, no, no, no.Henry: Which, what are the good speakers?Brandon: I forget where I bought these speakers from, but I sort of did some Googling during the pandemic of like best speakers to use. I have a U-Turn Audio, U-Turn Orbital record player. And so I was just looking for good speakers that were compatible and like wouldn't take up a ton of space in my apartment because I was moving to New York and had a very tiny, tiny apartment. So they're just from sort of standard, I forget the brand, but they've served me well these past few years.Henry: And do you like Ólafsson? He's done some Chopin.Brandon: Who?Henry: Víkingur Ólafsson. He did the Goldbergs this year, but he's done some Chopin before. I think he's quite good.Brandon: Oh, that Icelandic guy?Henry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the glasses? That's right. And the very neat hair.Brandon: Yes. Oh, he's so chic. He's so chic. I don't know his Chopin. I know his, there's another series that he did somewhat recently that I'm more familiar with. But he is really good. He has good Beethoven, Víkingur.Henry: Yeah.Brandon: And normally I don't love Beethoven, but like—Henry: Really? Why? Why? What's wrong with Beethoven? All these controversial opinions about music.Brandon: I'm not trying to have controversial opinions. I think I'm, well, I'm such a, I'm such, I mean, I'm just like a dumb person. And so like, I don't, I don't have a really, I feel like I don't have the robust understanding to like fully appreciate Beethoven and all of his sort of like majesty. And so maybe I've just not heard good Beethoven and I need to sort of go back and sort of get a real understanding of it. But I just tend not to like it. It feels like, I don't know, like grandma's living room music to me sometimes.Henry: What other composers do you enjoy?Brandon: Oh, of course.Henry: Or other music generally, right?Brandon: Rachmaninoff is so amazing to me. There was, of course, Bach. Brahms. Oh, I love Brahms, but like specifically the intermezzi. I love the intermezzi. I recently fell in love with, oh, his name is escaping me now, but he, I went to a concert and they sort of did a Brahms intermezzi. And they also played this, I think he was an Austrian composer. And his music was like, it wasn't experimental, but it was like quite, I had a lot of dissonance in it. And I found it like really interesting and like really moving actually. And so I did a sort of listening to that constantly. Oh, I forget his name. But Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, love Rachmaninoff. I have a friend who says that Rachmaninoff writes Negro spirituals. And I love that theory that Rachmaninoff's music is like the music of the slaves. It just, I don't know. I really, that really resonates with me spiritually. Which pieces, which Rachmaninoff symphonies, concertos? Yeah, the concertos. But like specifically, like I have a friend who said that Rach II sounded to her like the sort of spiritual cry of like the slaves. And we were at like a hangout with like mostly Black people. And she like stopped playing like Juvenile, like the rapper. And she put on Rach II. And we just like sat there and listened. And it did feel like something powerful had entered the room. Yeah, but he's my guy. I secretly really, really love him. I like Liszt, but like it really depends on the day and the time for him. He makes good folk music, Liszt. I love his folky, his folk era.Henry: What is it that you enjoy about tennis?Brandon: What do I enjoy about tennis? I love the, I love not thinking. I love being able to hit the ball for hours on end and like not think. And like, it's the one part of my life. It's the one time in my life where my experience is like totally unstructured. And so like this morning, I went to a 7am drill and play class where you do drills for an hour. Then you play doubles for an hour. And during that first hour of drills, I was just like hitting the ball. I was at the mercy of the guy feeding us the ball. And I didn't have a single thought about books or literature or like the status of my soul or like the nature of American democracy. It was just like, did I hit that ball? Well, did I hit it kind of off center? Were there tingles in my wrist? Yes or no. Like it was just very, very grounding in the moment. And I think that is what I love about it. Do you like to watch tennis? Oh, yeah, constantly. Sometimes when I'm in a work meeting, the Zoom is here and the tennis is like playing in the background. Love tennis, love to watch, love to play, love to think about, to ponder. Who are the best players for you? Oh, well, the best players, my favorite players are Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Stanislas Wawrinka, love Wawrinka. And I was a really big Davydenko head back in the day. Nikolai Davydenko was this Russian player who had, he was like a metronome. He just like would not miss. Yeah, those are my favorites. Right now, the guy I'm sort of rooting for who's still active is Kasper Rud, who's this Norwegian guy. And I love him because he just looks like some guy. Like he just looks like he should be in a seminary somewhere. I love it. I love, I love his normalness. He just looks like an NPC. And I'm drawn to that in a tennis player.Henry: It's hard to think of tennis in novels. Why is that?Brandon: Well, I think a lot of people don't, well, I think part of it is a lot of novelists. Part of it is a lot of novelists don't play sports. I think that they, at least Americans, I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in America, a lot of novelists are not doing sports. So that's one. And I think two, like, you know, like with anything, I think that tennis has not been subjected to the same schemes of narrativization that like other things are. And so like it's, a lot of novelists just like don't see a sort of readily dramatizable thing in tennis. Even though if you like watch tennis and like listen to tennis commentary, they are always erecting narratives. They're like, oh yeah, she's been on a 19 match losing streak. Is this where she turns it around? And to me, tennis is like a very literary sport because tennis is one of those sports where it's all about the matchup. It's like your forehand to my backhand, like no matter how well I play against everyone else, like it's you and me locked in the struggle. And like that to me feels incredibly literary. And it is so tied to your individual psychology as well. Like, I don't know, I endlessly am fascinated by it. And indeed, I got an idea for a tennis novel the other day that I'm hopefully going to write in three to five years. We'll see.Henry: Very good. How did working in a lab influence your writing?Brandon: Well, somewhat directly and materially in the case of my first book, because I wrote it while I was working in the lab and it gave me weirdly like time and structure to do that work where I would be pipetting. And then while I was waiting for an assay or a experiment to run or finish, I would have 30 minutes to sit down and write.Henry: So you were writing like at the lab bench?Brandon: Oh, yeah, absolutely. One thousand percent. I would like put on Philip Glass's score for the hours and then just like type while my while the centrifuge was running or whatever. And and so like there's that impression sort of baked into the first couple books. And then I think more, I guess, like spiritually or broadly, it influenced my work because it taught me how to think and how to organize time and how to organize thoughts and how to sort of pursue long term, open ended projects whose results may or may not, you know, fail because of something that you did or maybe you didn't do. And that's just the nature of things. Who knows? But yeah, I think also just like discipline, the discipline to sort of clock in every day. And to sort of go to the coalface and do the work. And that's not a thing that is, you know. That you just get by working in a lab, but it's certainly something that I acquired working in a lab.Henry: Do you think it's affected your interest in criticism? Because there's there are certain types of critic who seem to come from a scientific background like Helen Vendler. And there's something something about the sort of the precision and, you know, that certain critics will refuse to use critical waffle, like the human condition. And they won't make these big, vague gestures to like how this can change the way we view society. They're like, give me real details. Give me real like empirical criticism. Do you think this is — are you one of these people?Brandon: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm, you know, I'm all about what's on the page. I'm all about the I'm not gonna go rooting in your biography for not gonna go. I'm not I'm not doing that. It's like what you brought to me on the page is what you've brought to me. And that is what I will be sort of coming over. I mean, I think so. I mean, very often when critics write about my work, or when people respond to my work, they sort of describe it as being put under a microscope. And I do think like, that is how I approach literature. It's how I approach life. If there's ever a problem or a question put to me, I just sort of dissect it and try to get down to its core bits and its core parts. And and so yeah, I mean, if that is a scientific way of doing things, that's certainly how I but also I don't know any other way to think like that's sort of that's sort of how I was trained to think about stuff. You've been to London. I have. What did you think of it? The first time I didn't love it. The second and third times I had a good time, but I felt like London didn't love me back. London is the only place on earth I've ever been where people have had a hard time understanding me like I like it's the only place where I've like attempted to order food or a drink or something in a store or a cafe or a restaurant. And the waiters like turned to my like British hosts and asked them to translate. And that is an entirely foreign experience for me. And so London and I have like a very contentious relationship, I would say.Henry: Now, you've just published four classic novels.Brandon: Yes.Henry: George Gissing, Edith Wharton, Victor Hugo and Sarah Orne Jewett. Why did you choose those four writers, those four titles?Brandon: Oh, well, once we decided that we were going to do a classics imprint, you know, then it's like, well, what are we going to do? And I'm a big Edith Wharton fan. And there are all of these Edith Wharton novels that Americans don't really know about. They know Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. And if they are an English major, they maybe know her for The House of Mirth. Or like maybe they know her for The Custom of the Country if they're like really into reading. But then they sort of think of her as a novelist of the 19th century. And she's writing all of these books set in the 1920s and about the 1920s. And so it felt important to show people like, oh, this is a writer who died a lot later than you think that she did. And whose creative output was, you know, pretty, who was like a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald in a lot of ways. Like, these books are being published around the same time as The Great Gatsby. And to sort of, you know, bring attention to a part of her over that, like, people don't know about. And like, that's really exciting to me. And Sarah Orne Jewett, I mean, I just really love The Country of the Pointed Furs. I love that book. And I found it in like in a 10 cents bin at a flea market one time. And it's a book that people have tried to bring back. And there have been editions of it. But it just felt like if we could get two people who are really cool to talk about why they love that book, we could sort of have like a real moment. And Sarah Orne Jewett was like a pretty big American writer. Like she was a pretty significant writer. And she was like really plugged in and she's not really read or thought about now. And so that felt like a cool opportunity as well to sort of create a very handsome edition of this book and to sort of talk about a bit why she matters. And the guessing of it all is we were going to do New Grub Street. And then my co-editor thought, well, The Odd Women, I think, is perhaps more relevant to our current moment than New Grub Street necessarily. And it would sort of differentiate us from the people, from the presses that are doing reissues of New Grub Street, because there's just been a new edition of that book. And nobody in America really knows The Odd Women. And it's a really wonderful novel. It's both funny and also like really biting in its satire and commentary. So we thought, oh, it'll be fun to bring this writer to Americans who they've never heard of in a way that will speak to them in a lot of ways. And the Victor Hugo, I mean, you know, there are Hugos that people know all about. And then there are Hugos that no one knows about. And Toilers of the Sea was a passion project for my co-editor. She'd read it in Guernsey. That's where she first discovered that book. And it really meant a lot to her. And I read it and really loved it. I mean, it was like Hugo at his most Hugo. Like, it's a very, it's a very, like, it's a very abundant book. And it's so wild and strange and changeful. And so I was like, oh, that seems cool. Let's do it. Let's put out Toilers of the Sea. So that's a bit of why we picked each one.Henry: And what have you learned from being on the other side of things now that you're the publisher?Brandon: So much. I've learned so much. And indeed, I just, I was just asked by my editor to do the author questionnaire for the novel that I have coming out next. And I thought, yes, I will do this. And I will do it immediately. Because now I know, I know how important these are. And I know how early and how far in advance these things need to be locked in to make everyone's life easier. I think I've learned a bit about the sometimes panicked scramble that happens to get a book published. I've learned about how hard it is to wrangle blurbs. And so I think I'm a little more forgiving of my publishers. But they've always been really great to me. But now I'm like, oh, my gosh, what can I do for you? How can I help you make this publication more of a success?Henry: Do you think that among literary people generally, there's a lack of appreciation of what business really involves in some of the senses you're talking about? I feel like I see a lot of either indifferent or hostile attitudes towards business or commerce or capitalism, late stage capitalism or whatever. And I sometimes look at it and I'm like, I don't think you guys really know what it takes to just like get stuff done. You know what I mean? Like, it's a lot of grind. I don't think it's a big nasty thing. It's just a lot of hard work, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, 1000%. Or if it's not a sort of misunderstanding, but a sort of like disinterest in like, right, like a sort of high minded, like, oh, that's just the sort of petty grimy commerce of it all. I care about the beauty and the art. And it's just like, friend, we need booksellers to like, sell this. I mean, to me, the part of it that is most to me, like the most illustrative example of this in my own life is that when I first heard how my editor was going to be describing my book, I was like, that's disgusting. That's horrible. Why are you talking about my race? Why are you talking about like my sexuality? Like, this is horrible. Why can't you just like talk about the plot of the book? Like, what is the matter with you? And then I had, you know, I acquired and edited this book called Henry Henry, which is a queer contemporary retelling of the Henry ad. And it's a wonderful novel. It's so delightful. And I had to go into our sales conference where we are talking to the people whose job it is to sell that book into bookstores to get bookstores to take that book up. And I had to write this incredibly craven description of this novel. And as I was writing it, I was like, I hope Alan, the author, I hope Alan never sees this. He never needs to hear how I'm talking about this book. And as I was doing it, I was like, I will never hold it against my editor again for writing this like, cheesy, cringy copy. Because it's like you, like, you so believe in the art of that book, so much that you want it to give it every fighting chance in the marketplace. And you need to arm your sales team with every weapon of commerce they need to get that book to succeed so that when readers pick it up, they can appreciate all of the beautiful and glorious art of it. And I do think that people, you know, like, people don't really kind of, people don't really understand that. And I do think that part of that is publishing's fault, because they are, they've been rather quick to elide the distinctions between art and commerce. And so like publishing has done a not great job of sort of giving people a lot of faith in its understanding that there's a difference between art and commerce. But yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of misapprehension out there about like, what goes into getting bookstores to acquire that book.Henry: What are the virtues of negative book reviews?Brandon: I was just on a panel about this. I mean, I mean, hopefully a negative book review, like a positive review, or like any review, will allow a reader or the audience to understand the book in a new way, or to create a desire in the reader to pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree or that they, that they have something to argue with or push against as they're reading. You know, when I'm writing a negative review, when I'm writing a review that I feel is trending toward negative, I should say, I always try to like, I don't know, I try to always remember that like, this is just me presenting my experience of the book and my take of the book. And hopefully that will be productive or useful for whoever reads the review. And hopefully that my review won't be the only thing that they read and that they will in fact, go pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree. It's hopefully it creates interesting and potentially divergent dialogues or discourses around the text. And fundamentally, I think not every critic feels this way. Not every piece of criticism is like this. But the criticism I write, I'm trying to create the conditions that will refer the reader always back to the text, be it through quotation, be it through, they're so incensed by my argument that they're going to go read the book themselves and then like, yell at me. Like, I think that that's wonderful, but like, always keeping the book at the center. But I think a negative review can, you know, it can start a conversation. It can get people talking about books, which in this culture, this phase of history feels like a win. And hopefully it can sort of be a corrective sometimes to less genuine or perceived less genuine discourses that are existing around the book.Henry: I think even whether or not it's a question of genuine, it's for me, it's just a question of if you tell people this book is good and they give up their time and money and they discover that it's trash, you've done a really bad thing to that person. And like, there might be dozens of them compared to this one author who you've been impolite to or whatever. And it's just a question of don't lie in book, right?Brandon: Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully people are honest, but I do feel sometimes that there is, there's like a lack of honesty. And look, I think that being like, well, I mean, maybe you'll love this. I don't love it, you know, but at least present your opinion in that way. At least be like, you know, there are many interpretations of this thing. Here's my interpretation. Maybe you'll feel differently or something like that. But I do think that people feel that there have been a great number of dishonest book reviews. Maybe there have been, maybe there have not been. I certainly have read some reviews I felt were dishonest about books that I have read. And I think that the negative book review does feel a bit like a corrective in a lot of ways, both, you know, justified or unjustified. People are like, finally, someone's being honest about this thing. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I think it's all really, I think it's all fascinating. I do think that there are some reviews though, that are negative and that are trying to be about the book, but are really about the author. There are some reviews that I have read that have been ostensibly about reviewing a text, but which have really been about, you don't like that person and you have decided to sort of like take an axe to them. And that to me feels not super productive. I wouldn't do it, but other people find it useful.Henry: As in, you can tell that from the review or you know that from background information?Brandon: I mean, this is all projection, of course, but like there have been some reviews where I've read, like, for example, some of the Lauren Oyler reviews, I think some of the Lauren Oyler reviews were negative and were exclusively about the text. And they sort of took the text apart and sort of dissected it and came to conclusions, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't agree with, but they were fundamentally about the text. And like all the criticisms referred back to the text. And then there were some that were like projecting attitudes onto the author that were more about creating this sort of vaporous shape of Lauren Oyler and then sort of poking holes in her literary celebrity or her stature as a critic or what have you. And that to me felt less productive as like a book review.Henry: Yes. Who are your favorite reviewers?Brandon: Ooh, my favorite reviewers. I really love Christian Lawrence. And he does my, of the critics who try to do the sort of like mini historiography of like a thing. He's my favorite because he teaches me a lot. He sort of is so good at summing up an era or summing up a phase of literary production without being like so cringe or so socialist about it. I really love, I love it when he sort of distills and dissects an era. I really like Hermione Hobie. I think she's really interesting. And she writes about books with a lot of feeling and a lot of energy. And I really love her mind. And of course, like Patricia Lockwood, of course, everyone, perhaps not everyone, but I enjoy Patricia Lockwood's criticism. You don't?Henry: Not really.Brandon: Oh, is it because it's too chatty? Is it too, is it too selfie?Henry: A little bit. I think, I think that kind of criticism can work really well. But I think, I think it's too much. I think basically she's very, she's a very stylized writer and a lot of her judgments get, it gets to the point where it's like, this is the logical conclusion of what you're trying to do stylistically. And there are some zingers in here and some great lines and whatever, but we're no longer, this is no longer really a book review.Brandon: Yeah.Henry: Like by the, by the end of the paragraph, this, like, we didn't want to let the style go. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to cap that off. And it leads her into, I think, glibness a lot of the time.Brandon: Yeah. I could see that. I mean, I mean, I enjoy reading her pieces, but do I understand like what's important to her at a sort of literary level? I don't know. I don't, and in that sense, like, are they, is it criticism or is it closer to like personal essay, humorous essay? I don't know. Maybe that's true. I enjoy reading them, but I get why people are like, this is a very, very strong flavor for sure.Henry: Now you've been reading a lot of literary criticism.Brandon: Oh yeah.Henry: Not of the LRB variety, but of the, the old books in libraries variety. Yes. How did that start? How did, how did you come to this?Brandon: Somewhat like ham-fistedly. I, in 2021, I had a really bad case of writer's block and I thought maybe part of the reason I had writer's block was that I didn't know anything about writing or I didn't know anything about like literature or like writing. I'd been writing, I'd published a novel. I was working on another novel. I'd published a book of stories, but like, I just like truly didn't know anything about literature really. And I thought I need some big boy ideas. I need, I need to find out what adults think about literature. And so I went to my buddy, Christian Lorenzen, and I was like, you write criticism. What is it? And what should I read? And he gave me a sort of starter list of criticism. And it was like the liberal imagination by Lionel Trilling and Guy Davenport and Alfred Kazin who wrote On Native Grounds, which is this great book on the American literary tradition and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. And I, and then Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle. And I read all of those. And then as each one would sort of refer to a different text or person, I sort of like followed the footnotes down into this rabbit hole of like literary criticism. And now it's been a sort of ongoing project of the last few years of like reading. I always try to have a book of criticism on the go. And then earlier this year, I read Jameson's The Antimonies of Realism. And he kept talking about this Georg Lukács guy. And I was like, I guess I should go read Lukács. And so then I started reading Lukács so that I could get back to Jameson. And I've been reading Lukács ever since. I am like deep down the Lukács rabbit hole. But I'm not reading any of the socialism stuff. I told myself that I wouldn't read any of the socialism stuff and I would only read the literary criticism stuff, which makes me very different from a lot of the socialist literary critics I really enjoy because they're like Lukács, don't read in that literary criticism stuff, just read his socialism stuff. So I'm reading all the wrong stuff from Lukács, but I really, I really love it. But yeah, it sort of started because I thought I needed grown up ideas about literature. And it's been, I don't know, I've really enjoyed it. I really, really enjoy it. It's given me perhaps terrible ideas about what novels should be or do. But, you know, that's one of the side effects to reading.Henry: Has it made, like, what specific ways has it changed how you've written since you've acquired a set of critical principles or ideas?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is, part of it has to do with Lukács' idea of the totality. And, you know, I think that the sort of most direct way that it shows up in a sort of really practical way in my novel writing is that I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. Like, I don't want, I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation and stuff like that. And so like that, that's sort of, that's sort of abstract, but like in a concrete way, like what I'm kind of trying to resolve in my novel writing these days.Henry: You mentioned Dickens.Brandon: Oh, yes.Henry: Which Dickens novels do you like?Brandon: Now I'm afraid I'm going to say something else controversial. We love controversial. Which Dickens? I love Bleak House. I love Bleak House. I love Tale of Two Cities. It is one of the best openings ever, ever, ever, ever in the sweep of that book at once personal and universal anyway. Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities. And I also, I read Great Expectations as like a high school student and didn't like it, hated it. It was so boring. But now coming back to it, I think it, honestly, it might be the novel of our time. I think it might accidentally be a novel. I mean, it's a novel of scammers, a novel of like, interpersonal beef taken to the level of like, spiritual conflict, like it's about thieves and class, like it just feels like like that novel could have been written today about people today, like that book just feels so alive to today's concerns, which perhaps, I don't know, says something really evil about this cultural stagnation under capitalism, perhaps, but I don't know, love, love Great Expectations now.Henry: Why are so many modern novels boring?Brandon: Well, depends on what you mean by boring, Henry, what do you mean? Why?Henry: I mean, you said this.Brandon: Oh.Henry: I mean, I happen to agree, but this is, I'm quoting you.Brandon: Oh, yes. I remember that. I remember that review.Henry: I mean, I can tell you why I think they're boring.Brandon: Oh, yes, please.Henry: So I think, I think what you said before is true. They all read like movies. And I think I very often I go in, I pick up six or seven books on the new book table. And I'm like, these openings are all just the same. You're all thinking you can all see Netflix in your head. This is not really a novel. And so the dialogue is really boring, because you kind of you can hear some actor or actress saying it. But I can't hear that because I'm the idiot stuck in the bookshop reading your Netflix script. Whereas, you know, I think you're right that a lot of those traditional forms of storytelling, they like pull you in to the to the novel. And they and they like by the end of the first few pages, you sort of feel like I'm in this funny place now. And to do in media res, like, someone needs to get shot, or something, something weird needs to be said, like, you can't just do another, another standard opening. So I think that's a big, that's a big point.Brandon: Well, as Lukasz tells us, bourgeois realism has a, an unholy fondness for the, the average, the merely average, as opposed to the typical. And I think, yeah, a lot of it, a lot of why I think it's boring echoes you, I think that for me, what I find boring, and a lot of them is that it feels like novelists have abandoned any desire to, to have their characters or the novels themselves integrate the sort of disparate experiences within the novel into any kind of meaningful hole. And so there isn't this like sense of like things advancing toward a grander understanding. And I think a lot of it is because they've, they are writing under the assumption that like the question of why can never be answered. There can never be like a why, there can never be a sort of significance to anything. And so everything is sort of like evacuated of significance or meaning. And so you have what I've taken to calling like reality TV fiction, where the characters are just like going places and doing things, and there are no thoughts, there are no thoughts about their lives, or no thoughts about the things that they are doing, there are no thoughts about their experiences. And it's just a lot of like, like lowercase e events in their lives, but like no attempt to organize those events into any sort of meaningful hole. And I think also just like, what leads to a lot of dead writing is writers who are deeply aware that they're writing about themes, they're writing about themes instead of people. And they're working from generalities instead of particularities and specificities. And they have no understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular. And so like, everything is just like, like beans in a can that they're shaking around. And I think that that's really boring. I think it's really tedious. Like, like, sure, we can we can find something really profound in the mundane, but like, you have to be really smart to do that. So like the average novelist is like better off like, starting with a gunshot or something like do something big.Henry: If you're not Virginia Woolf, it is in fact just mundane.Brandon: Indeed. Yeah.Henry: Is there too much emphasis on craft? In the way, in the way, in like what's valued among writers, in the way writers are taught, I feel like everything I see is about craft. And I'm like, craft is good, but that can just be like how you make a table rather than like how you make a house. Craft is not the guarantor of anything. And I see a lot of books where I think this person knows some craft. But as you say, they don't really have an application for it. And they don't. No one actually said to them, all style has a moral purpose, whether you're aware of it or not. And so they default to this like pointless use of the craft. And someone should say to them, like, you need to know history. You need to know tennis. You need to know business. You need to know like whatever, you know. And I feel like the novels I don't like are reflections of the discourse bubble that the novelist lives in. And I feel like it's often the continuation of Twitter by other means. So in the Rachel Kong novel that I think it came out this year, there's a character, a billionaire character who comes in near the end. And everything that he says or that is said about him is literally just meme. It's online billionaire meme because billionaires are bad because of all the things we all know from being on Twitter. And I was like, so you just we literally have him a character as meme. And this is the most representative thing to me, because that's maybe there's craft in that. Right. But what you've chosen to craft is like 28 tweets. That's pointless.Brandon: 28 tweets be a great title for a book, though, you have to admit, I would buy that book off the new book table. 28 tweets. I would. I would buy that. Yeah, I do think. Well, I think it goes both ways. I think it goes both ways. I somewhat famously said this about Sally Rooney that like she her books have no craft. The craft is bad. And I do think like there are writers who only have craft, who are able to sort of create these wonderfully structured books and to sort of deploy these beautiful techniques. And those books are absolutely dead. There's just like nothing in them because they have nothing to say. There's just like nothing to be said about any of that. And on the other hand, you have these books that are full of feelings that like would be better had someone taught that person about structure or form or had they sort of had like a rigorous thing. And I would say that like both of those are probably bad, like depending on who you are, you find one more like, like easier to deal with than the other. I do think that like part of why there's such an emphasis on craft is because not to sort of bring capitalism back in but you can monetize craft, you know what I mean? Like, craft is one of those things that is like readily monetizable. Like, if I'm a writer, and I would like to make money, and I can't sell a novel, I can tell people like, oh, how to craft a perfect opening, how to create a novel opening that will make agents pick it up and that will make editors say yes, but like what the sort of promise of craft is that you can finish a thing, but not that it is good, as you say, there's no guarantor. Whereas you know, like it's harder to monetize someone's soul, or like, it's harder to monetize like the sort of random happenstance of just like a writer's voice sort of emerging from from whatever, like you can't turn that into profit. But you can turn into profit, let me help you craft your voice. So it's very grind set, I think craft has a tendency to sort of skew toward the grind set and toward people trying to make money from, from writing when they can't sell a book, you know. Henry: Let's play a game. Brandon: Oh dear.Henry: I say the name of a writer. You give us like the 30 second Brandon Taylor opinion of that writer.Brandon: Okay. Yeah.Henry: Jonathan Franzen.Brandon: Thomas Mann, but like, slightly more boring, I think.Henry: Iris Murdoch.Brandon: A friend of mine calls her a modern calls her the sort of pre Sally Rooney, Sally Rooney. And I agree with that.Henry: When I'm at parties, I try and sell her to people where I say she's post-war Sally Rooney.Brandon: Yes, yes. And like, and like all that that entails, and so many delightful, I read all these like incredible sort of mid century reviews of her novels, and like the men, the male critics, like the Bernard Breganzis of the world being like, why is there so much sex in this book? It's amazing. Please go look up those like mid-century reviews of Iris Murdoch. They were losing their minds. Henry: Chekhov.Brandon: Perfect, iconic, baby girl, angel, legend. Can't get enough. 10 out of 10.Henry: Evelyn Waugh.Brandon: So Catholic, real Catholic vibes. But like, scabrously funny. And like, perhaps the last writer to write about life as though it had meaning. Hot take, but I'll, I stand by it.Henry: Yeah, well, him and Murdoch. But yeah, no, I think I think there's a lot in that. C.V. Wedgwood.Brandon: Oh, my gosh. The best, a titan, a master of history. Like, oh, my God. I would not be the same without Wedgwood.Henry: Tell us which one we should read.Brandon: Oh, the 30 Years War. What are you talking about?Henry: Well, I think her books on the English Civil War… I'm a parochial Brit.Brandon: Oh, see, I don't, not that I don't, I will go read those. But her book on the 30 Years War is so incredible. It's, it's amazing. It's second to like, Froissart's Chronicles for like, sort of history, history books for me.Henry: Northrop Frye.Brandon: My father. I, Northrop Frye taught me so much about how to see and how to think. Just amazing, a true thinker in a mind. Henry: Which book? Brandon: Oh, Anatomy of Criticism is fantastic. But Fearful Symmetry is just, it will blow your head off. Just amazing. But if you're looking for like, to have your, your mind gently remapped, then Anatomy of Criticism.Henry: Emma Cline.Brandon: A throwback. I think she's, I think she's Anne Beattie meets John Cheever for a new era. And I think she's amazing. She's perfect. Don't love her first novel. I think her stories are better. She's a short story writer. And she should stay that way.Henry: Okay, now I want you to rank Jane Austen's novels.Brandon: Wait, okay. So like, by my preference, or by like, what I think is the best?Henry: You can do both.Brandon: Okay. So in terms, my favorite, Persuasion. Then Mansfield Park. Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice. And then Emma, then Northanger Abbey. Okay.Henry: Now, how about for which ones are the best?Brandon: Persuasion. Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park. Emma,.Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey.Henry: Why do people not like Fanny Price? And what is wrong with them?Brandon: Fanny Price is perfect. Fanny Price, I was just talking to someone about this last night at dinner. Fanny Price, she's perfect. First of all, she is, I don't know why people don't like her. She's like a chronically ill girl who's hot for her cousin and like, has deep thoughts. It seems like she would be the icon of literary Twitter for like a certain kind of person, you know? And I don't know why they don't like her. I think I'm, I am becoming the loudest Mansfield Park apologist on the internet. I think that people don't like Fanny because she's less vivacious than Mary Crawford. And I think that people are afraid to see themselves in Fanny because she seems like she's unfun or whatever. But what they don't realize is that like Fanny Price, Fanny Price has like a moral intelligence and like a moral consciousness. And like Fanny Price is one of the few Austen characters who actually argues directly and literally about the way the world is. Like with multiple people, like the whole, the whole novel is her sort of arguing about, well, cities are this and the country is this. And like, we need Parsons as much as we need party boys. Like, like she's arguing not just about, not just about these things like through the lens of like marriage or like the sort of marriage economy, but like in literal terms, I mean, she is so, she's like a moral philosopher. I love Fanny Price and she's so smart and so sensitive and so, and I guess like maybe it's just that people don't like a character who's kind of at the mercy of others and they view her as passive. When in fact, like a young woman arguing about the way the world should be, like Mary Crawford's, Mary Crawford's like kind of doing the above, not really, not like Fanny. But yeah, I love her. She's amazing. I love Fanny Price. And I also think that people love Margaret Hale from North and South. And I think that when people are saying they hate Fanny Price, what they're picturing is actually how Margaret Hale is. Margaret Hale is one of the worst heroines of a novel. She's so insufferable. She's so rude. She's so condescending. And like, she does get her comeuppance and like Gaskell does sort of bring about a transformation where she's actually able to sort of like see poor people as people first and not like subjects of sympathy. But Margaret is what people imagine Fanny is, I think. And we should, we should start a Fanny Price, like booster club. Henry, should we? Let's do it. It begins here. I just feel so strongly about her. I feel, I love, I love Fanny.Henry: She's my favorite of Austen's characters. And I think she is the most representative Austen character. She's the most Austen of all of them, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, that makes great deal of sense to me. She's just so wonderful. Like she's so funny and so observant. And she's like this quiet little girl who's like kind of sickly and people don't really like her. And she's kind of maybe I'm just like, maybe I just like see myself in her. And I don't mind being a sort of annoying little person who's going around the world.Henry: What are some good principles for naming literary characters?Brandon: Ooh, I have a lot of strong feelings about this. I think that names should be memorable. They should have like, like an aura of sort of literariness about them. I don't mean, I mean, taken to like hilarious extremes. It's like Henry James. Catherine Goodwood, Isabelle Archer, Ralph Touchett, like, you know, Henry had a stack pole. So like, not like that. But I mean, that could be fun in a modern way. But I think there's like an aura of like, it's a name that you might hear in real life, but it sort of add or remove, it's sort of charged and elevated, sort of like with dialogue. And that it's like a memorable thing that sort of like, you know, it's like, you know, memorable thing that sort of sticks in the reader's mind. It is both a name, a literary, a good literary name is both a part of this world and not of this world, I think. And, yeah, and I love that. I think like, don't give your character a name like you hear all the time. Like, Tyler is a terrible literary name. Like, no novel has ever, no good novel has ever had a really important character named Tyler in it. It just hasn't. Ryan? What makes a good sentence? Well, my sort of like, live and let live answer is that a good sentence is a sentence that is perfectly suited to the purpose it has. But I don't know, I like a clear sentence, regardless of length or lyric intensity, but just like a clear sentence that articulates something. I like a sentence with motion, a sense of rhythm, a sense of feel without any bad words in it. And I don't mean like curse words, I mean like words that shouldn't be in literature. Like, there's some words that just like don't belong in novels.Henry: Like what?Brandon: Squelch. Like, I don't think the word squelch should be in a novel. That's a gross word and it doesn't sound literary to me. I don't want to see it.Henry: I wouldn't be surprised if it was in Ulysses.Brandon: Well, yes.Henry: I have no idea, but I'm sure, I'm sure.Brandon: But so few of us are James Joyce. And that novel is like a thousand bodily functions per page. But don't love it. Don't love it.Henry: You don't love Ulysses?Brandon: No, I don't… Listen, I don't have a strong opinion, but you're not going to get me cancelled about Ulysses. I'm not Virginia Woolf.Henry: We're happy to have opinions of that nature here. That's fine.Brandon: You know, I don't have a strong feeling about it, actually. Some parts of it that I've read are really wonderful. And some parts of it that I have read are really dense and confusing to me. I haven't sort of given it the time it needs or deserves. What did you learn from reading Toni Morris? What did I learn? I think I learned a lot about the moral force of melodrama. I think that she shows us a lot about the uses of melodrama and how it isn't just like a lesion of realism, that it isn't just a sort of malfunctioning realism, but that there are certain experiences and certain lives and certain things that require and necessitate melodrama. And when deployed, it's not tacky or distasteful that it actually is like deeply necessary. And also just like the joy of access and language, like the sort of... Her language is so towering. I don't know, whenever I'm being really shy about a sentence being too vivid or too much, I'm like, well, Toni Morrison would just go for it. And I am not Toni Morrison, but she has given me the courage to try.Henry: What did you like about the Annette Benning film of The Seagull?Brandon: The moment when Annette Benning sings Dark Eyes is so good. It's so good. I think about it all the time. And indeed, I stole that moment for a short story that I wrote. And I liked that part of it. I liked the set design. I think also Saoirse Ronan, when she gives that speech as Nina, where she's like, you know, where the guy's like, what do you want from, you know, what do you want? Why do you want to be an actress? And she's like, I want fame. You know, like, I want to be totally adored. And I'm just like, yeah, that's so real. That's so, that is so real. Like Chekhov has understood something so deep, so deep about the nature of commerce and art there. And I think Saoirse is really wonderful in that movie. It's a not, it's not a good movie. It's maybe not even a good adaptation of The Seagull. But I really enjoyed it. I saw it like five times in a theater in Iowa City.Henry: I don't know if it's a bad adaptation of The Seagull, because it's one of the, it's one of the Chekhov's I've seen that actually understands that, like, the tragic and the and the comic are not meant to be easily distinguishable in his work. And it does have all this lightheartedness. And it is quite funny. And I was like, well, at least someone's doing that because I'm so sick of, like, gloomy Chekhov. You know what I mean? Like, oh, the clouds and the misery. Like, no, he wants you, he wants you to laugh and then be like, I shouldn't laugh because it's kind of tragic, but it's also just funny.Brandon: Yeah. Yes, I mean, all the moments were like, like Annette Bening's characters, like endless stories, like she's just like constantly unfurling a story and a story and a story and a story. Every scene kind of was like, she's in the middle of telling another interminable anecdote. And of course, the sort of big tragic turn at the end is like, where like, Kostya kills himself. And she's like, in the middle of like, another really long anecdote while they're in the other room playing cards. Like, it's so, it's so good. So I love that. I enjoy watching that movie. I still think it's maybe not. It's a little wooden, like as a movie, like it's a little, it's a little rickety.Henry: Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. But for someone looking to like, get a handle on Chekhov, it's actually a good place to go. What is the best make of Fountain Pen?Brandon: That's a really good, that's a really, really, really good question. Like, what's your Desert Island Fountain Pen? My Desert Island Fountain Pen. Right now, it's an Esterbrook Estee with a needlepoint nib. It's like, so, I can use that pen for hours and hours and hours and hours. I think my favorite Fountain Pen, though, is probably the Pilot Custom 743. It's a really good pen, not too big, not too small. It can hold a ton of ink, really wonderful. I use, I think, like a Soft Fine nib, incredible nib, so smooth. Like, I, you could cap it and then uncap it a month later, and it just like starts immediately. It's amazing. And it's not too expensive.Henry: Brandon Taylor, thank you very much.Brandon: Thanks for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

In this episode, Steve talks with five hunters from as many states that came to hunt raccoons with hounds in the White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas this year. Hunters from the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee are included in the conversations. The episode offers more than three hours of content that collectively describe the hunts and the types of hunting the refuge offered this year. Perhaps more so than any of the previous fourteen years Steve has hunted the White River Refuge, this year presented many challenges which are discussed in length in the episode. Whether you take in the full volume of content at one time or carve it into bite-sized pieces to enjoy in coming days, you will enjoy meeting Billy Carter, Robert Cromer, Caleb Griffin, John Staib and Brandon Taylor as they tell their stories in our White River Recap 2004.   We would like to thank those who support this podcast. Special thanks to Alpha Dog Nutrition and Double U Hunting Supply for sponsoring this episode. Want to learn more about Alpha Dog Nutrition? Check out the links below https://www.dusupply.com/alphadog www.dusupply.com https://alphadognutrition.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Steve talks with five hunters from as many states that came to hunt raccoons with hounds in the White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas this year.   Hunters from the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee are included in the conversations.The episode offers more than three hours of content that collectively describe the hunts and the types of hunting the refuge offered this year.  Perhaps more so than any of the previous fourteen years Steve has hunted the White River Refuge, this year presented many challenges which are discussed in length in the episode.Whether you take in the full volume of content at one time or carve it into bite-sized pieces to enjoy in coming days, you will enjoy meeting Billy Carter, Robert Cromer, Caleb Griffin, John Staib and Brandon Taylor as they tell their stories in our White River Recap 2004.  We would like to thank those who support this podcast.  Special thanks to Alpha Dog Nutrition and Double U Hunting Supply for sponsoring this episode.  Want to learn more about Alpha Dog Nutrition? Check out the links belowhttps://www.dusupply.com/alphadogwww.dusupply.comhttps://alphadognutrition.com/

In this episode, Steve talks with five hunters from as many states that came to hunt raccoons with hounds in the White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas this year.   Hunters from the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee are included in the conversations.The episode offers more than three hours of content that collectively describe the hunts and the types of hunting the refuge offered this year.  Perhaps more so than any of the previous fourteen years Steve has hunted the White River Refuge, this year presented many challenges which are discussed in length in the episode.Whether you take in the full volume of content at one time or carve it into bite-sized pieces to enjoy in coming days, you will enjoy meeting Billy Carter, Robert Cromer, Caleb Griffin, John Staib and Brandon Taylor as they tell their stories in our White River Recap 2004.  We would like to thank those who support this podcast.  Special thanks to Alpha Dog Nutrition and Double U Hunting Supply for sponsoring this episode.  Want to learn more about Alpha Dog Nutrition? Check out the links belowhttps://www.dusupply.com/alphadogwww.dusupply.comhttps://alphadognutrition.com/

In this episode, Steve talks with five hunters from as many states that came to hunt raccoons with hounds in the White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas this year.   Hunters from the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee are included in the conversations.The episode offers more than three hours of content that collectively describe the hunts and the types of hunting the refuge offered this year.  Perhaps more so than any of the previous fourteen years Steve has hunted the White River Refuge, this year presented many challenges which are discussed in length in the episode.Whether you take in the full volume of content at one time or carve it into bite-sized pieces to enjoy in coming days, you will enjoy meeting Billy Carter, Robert Cromer, Caleb Griffin, John Staib and Brandon Taylor as they tell their stories in our White River Recap 2004.   We would like to thank those who support this podcast. Special thanks to Alpha Dog Nutrition and Double U Hunting Supply for sponsoring this episode. Want to learn more about Alpha Dog Nutrition? Check out the links belowhttps://www.dusupply.com/alphadogwww.dusupply.comhttps://alphadognutrition.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@DoubleUHuntingSupply/podcasts

In this episode, Steve talks with five hunters from as many states that came to hunt raccoons with hounds in the White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas this year.   Hunters from the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee are included in the conversations.The episode offers more than three hours of content that collectively describe the hunts and the types of hunting the refuge offered this year.  Perhaps more so than any of the previous fourteen years Steve has hunted the White River Refuge, this year presented many challenges which are discussed in length in the episode.Whether you take in the full volume of content at one time or carve it into bite-sized pieces to enjoy in coming days, you will enjoy meeting Billy Carter, Robert Cromer, Caleb Griffin, John Staib and Brandon Taylor as they tell their stories in our White River Recap 2004.  We would like to thank those who support this podcast.  Special thanks to Alpha Dog Nutrition and Double U Hunting Supply for sponsoring this episode.  Want to learn more about Alpha Dog Nutrition? Check out the links belowhttps://www.dusupply.com/alphadogwww.dusupply.comhttps://alphadognutrition.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@DoubleUHuntingSupply/podcasts

In hour two of After Further Review, Matt updates the latest injuries surrounding the LSU-Florida game on Saturday. Will the Tigers face Florida's freshman quarterback DJ Lagway? Scott Kushner joins the show to discuss the rash of soft tissue injuries for the Pelicans. Brandon Taylor joins the show to talk the issues at safety for LSU and the possibility of younger players taking on bigger roles down the stretch. Musso wraps the hour with Tigers in the Pros. 

Organized around a comparison of György Lukács's "The Historical Novel" and Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner's "The Gilded Age," in this episode we take a detour from Jameson to Lukács, question what realism means [8:30], whether "The Gilded Age" is a historical novel [19:30], whether historical novels are intrinsically conservative [33:30}, whether novelists can live up to Lukács's high expecations [41:00], what distinguishes historical novels from historical fictions [64:30], and who are the "spreasheet men" [85:00]. Cast (in order of appearance): Brandon Taylor, Matt Seybold, Eleanor Courtemanche, Nathan Wolff, Anna Kornbluh, Jeffrey Insko, Alexander Manshel Soundtrack: DownRiver Collective Narration: Nathan Osgood & SNR Audio For more about this episode, including a complete bibliography, please visit MarkTwainStudies.com/Lukacs, or subscribe to Matt Seybold's newsletter at TheAmericanVandal.substack.com

In hour two of After Further Review, Matt looks at a mock draft from Pro Football Focus. Former LSU safety Brandon Taylor joins the show to discuss the position and more shuffling in the Tigers secondary. Musso plays Pluckers Trivia and wraps the hour with Tigers in the Pros. 

Notes and Links to Jami Attenberg's Work        For Episode 254, Pete welcomes Jami Attenberg, and the two discuss, among other topics, seeds for her newest novel, the significance of its title, research and its connection to continuity, and salient themes and issues in her novel like grief and intergenerational traumas, the rapid development of digital technology and its ever-changing effects on society, conventional and unconventional family bonds, and guilt.      Jami Attenberg is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including The Middlesteins, All Grown Up and a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. She is also the creator of the annual online group writing accountability project #1000wordsofsummer, which inspired the recently published USA Today bestseller 1000 Words:A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. Jami has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, The Guardian, and others. Her work has been published in sixteen languages.    Her debut collection of stories, Instant Love, was published in 2006, followed by the novels The Kept Man and The Melting Season. Her fourth book, The Middlesteins, was published in October 2012. It appeared on The New York Times bestseller list, and was published in ten countries in 2013. It was also a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. Her fifth book, Saint Mazie, was described by The New York Times Book Review as, “full of love and drink and dirty sex and nobility.” Her sixth book, All Grown Up, was a national bestseller, appearing on numerous year-end lists. Her most recent novel, All This Could Be Yours, for which Kirkus dubbed her, “poet laureate of difficult families,” also appeared on a number of year-end lists. In 2022 she published a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home, which USA Today called, “a fierce memoir of personal transformation.”    In January 2024 she published the creativity book, 1000 Words:A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round which was praised on The Today Show, NPR, and elsewhere. In September 2024 she will also publish a new novel, A Reason to See You Again.    She lives in New Orleans, LA.     Buy A Reason to See You Again   New York Times Review of A Reason to See You Again   Excerpt of A Reason to See You Again from People Magazine   Jami Attenberg Website   At about 3:20: Jami describes her mindset as her 10th book is set to be published within the week At about 4:40, Jami details her exciting book tour, including a cool stop in Ireland for a book festival At about 8:00, Jami describes which books of her own and of others are “in conversation” with her latest  At about 11:10, Pete and Jami share a few interesting and complimentary and funny reviews  At about 12:10, Jami responds to Pete's wondering about seeds for the book At about 13:40, Pete cites the book's first scene and its focus on a pre-Internet world; Jami expands upon her mindset in showing the changes in technology in the book's 46 year-arc At about 16:00, Jami remarks on the ways in which she wanted to have work and technology as background and not at the forefront, and how it is and isn't a “work novel” At about 17:30, The two laugh over a labeling of the book as “historical fiction” At about 18:10, Pete highlights Jami's trendsetting abilities involving “demure” At about 19:15, Pete notes the interesting ways in which Jami structures her dialogue At about 20:45, Jami responds to Pete's questions about how she maintained continuity in writing the book chronologically or not  At about 23:25, Pete asks Jami about the background of the evocative first line of the novel At about 25:55, The two discuss Rudy, the “hero” of the members of the Cohen family, and the ways in which Jami sees him  At about 28:15, Jami discusses Frieda and what she may have been missing in her life At about 30:00, Jami reflects on the balance and relationship between Shelley and Nancy, the sisters At about 33:30, Jami responds to Pete's questions about familial connections over generations At about 36:00, Frieda and her resignation towards her daughters and Robby and Nancy's relationship is discussed At about 39:10, Generational traumas and guilt are discussed At about 42:40, Jami shouts out helpful feedback from helpful writer friends in expanding parts of the novel At about 43:35, Pete and Jami reflect on two interesting pairs and family dynamics  At about 47:25, Jami details how her current novel title happened, and the importance of this title  At about 49:25, Jami shouts out some favorite bookstores to buy her novel          You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch this and other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode.       I am very excited about having one or two podcast episodes per month featured on the website of Chicago Review of Books. The audio will be posted, along with a written interview culled from the audio. A big thanks to Rachel León and Michael Welch at Chicago Review.    Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl     Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content! This month's Patreon bonus episode features segments from conversations with Deesha Philyaw, Luis Alberto Urrea, Chris Stuck, and more, as they reflect on chill-inducing writing and writers that have inspired their own work.       This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.    The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.     Please tune in for Episode 255 with Chris Knapp, whose work has appeared in print in the Paris Review and the New England Review, among other publications. His novel, States of Emergency, from Unnamed Press, has Sept 17 as its Pub Day and has been widely-acclaimed, including by the masterful Brandon Taylor.  The episode will air on September 27. Lastly, please go to ceasefiretoday.com, which features 10+ actions to help bring about Ceasefire in Gaza.  

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 22, 2024 is: heinous • HAY-nus • adjective Heinous describes things—such as acts, deeds, or crimes—that are hatefully or shockingly evil, or in other words, deserving of hate or contempt. // The former dictator will stand trial for the role he played in his government's heinous treatment of political dissidents. See the entry > Examples: “‘I didn't say anything at the time,' Fyodor said. ‘But I don't agree with you. I think killing people is wrong. It is always wrong. Even if you do something really awful or heinous. Nobody should get to kill you.'” — Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans: A Novel, 2023 Did you know? For eons, humans have contrasted love with hate and good with evil, putting love and good on one side, and hate and evil on the other. The association of hate with evil is baked into the etymology of heinous, which English gained directly from Anglo-French in the 14th century with the meaning we still know today; its source is the Anglo-French noun haine, meaning “hate.” Haine in turn comes from a verb of Germanic origin, hair, also meaning “to hate.” (The similarity between this hair and the other hair is coincidental.) Chaucer's poem “Troilus and Criseyde” provides an early example of heinous in English: “He rang them out a story like a bell, against her foe who was called Polyphete, so heinous that men might on it spit.”

In hour two of After Further Review, Matt talks Saints camp as Dennis Allen updated injuries and Klint Kubiak talked the offensive install. Former LSU safety Brandon Taylor joins the show to discuss the Tigers secondary in 2024. Musso provides the Olympic update. Tigers in the Pros wraps the hour. 

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Brandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone could get punched in the face.” Brandon, author of the novels Real Life and The Late Americans, joins Stephanie Insley Hershinow for a wide-ranging, engrossing, and often hilarious conversation about the stakes of the novel today. They discuss Brandon's “Hot Freud Summer,” during which he read all of Sigmund Freud's essential works, as an example of an intellectual journey that engages with what Brandon calls the PDFs of criticism: the histories of ideas that he wishes to track back to their origins. Along the way, Brandon reveals what he has taken away from the Romance genre (“everything”), his conviction that The House of Mirth is the prototypical social media novel, and how he tries to avoid writing characters that are just “three spritzes of a personality standing in a room.” Brandon, Stephanie, and Chris close things out with their answers to the signature question about the first books they loved, and the answers are…revealing. Mentioned in this episode By Brandon Taylor: Real Life Filthy Animals The Late Americans Also mentioned: The House of Mirth The Liberal Imagination Georg Lukács Frederick Jameson Germinal Debbie Macomber Julianne MacLean Johanna Lindsey Liz Carlyle, Beauty Like the Night Beverly Jenkins A is for Apple, W is for Witch Guinness Book of World Records Gremlins: The Novelization of the Film Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Brandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone could get punched in the face.” Brandon, author of the novels Real Life and The Late Americans, joins Stephanie Insley Hershinow for a wide-ranging, engrossing, and often hilarious conversation about the stakes of the novel today. They discuss Brandon's “Hot Freud Summer,” during which he read all of Sigmund Freud's essential works, as an example of an intellectual journey that engages with what Brandon calls the PDFs of criticism: the histories of ideas that he wishes to track back to their origins. Along the way, Brandon reveals what he has taken away from the Romance genre (“everything”), his conviction that The House of Mirth is the prototypical social media novel, and how he tries to avoid writing characters that are just “three spritzes of a personality standing in a room.” Brandon, Stephanie, and Chris close things out with their answers to the signature question about the first books they loved, and the answers are…revealing. Mentioned in this episode By Brandon Taylor: Real Life Filthy Animals The Late Americans Also mentioned: The House of Mirth The Liberal Imagination Georg Lukács Frederick Jameson Germinal Debbie Macomber Julianne MacLean Johanna Lindsey Liz Carlyle, Beauty Like the Night Beverly Jenkins A is for Apple, W is for Witch Guinness Book of World Records Gremlins: The Novelization of the Film Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Brandon Taylor is the author of The Late Americans.

According to a study conducted by Zippia, organizations with a comprehensive training program see 24% higher profit margins. So how can you improve rep readiness with a unified platform?Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Marc Losito, the chief of staff at FoodChain ID. Thank you for joining us, Marc. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Marc Losito: It’s a pleasure to be here and, currently, I serve as the Chief of Staff at FoodChain ID and the Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives. I just finished a 23-year career in the military where I finished up in strategy and operations. And so transitioning into a strategic initiatives role or an operations-based role is exciting, and fluid for me. I’ve been at FoodChain ID for over a year now, and we’ve been employing Highspot as our primary sales enablement tool for about eight months. SS: We’re excited to have you here with us today. Now I know when you first started at FoodChain ID, one of your first tasks was to implement an enablement platform. Tell us about that journey. Why was it a strategic priority for the business to invest in an enablement solution? ML: Yeah, that’s a great way to phrase it, it was a journey. So, about this time last year, our executive leadership team gathered together and began to evaluate our strategic growth options, and sales enablement kept rising to the top. Brandon Taylor, our Chief Revenue Officer our champion of Highspot really put it on the front of our growth initiatives and really championed our adoption of Highspot. It wasn’t too much longer after that, and it was about, May of last year that we began to adopt Highspot and we rolled it out in August. We have been rolling ever since. One of the key differences that we’ve seen, and it’s really just the realization of this, this growth narrative that Highspot brings to sales enablement is we were able to cut down our seller ramp time from nine months to six months immediately with the training and coaching features on Highspot and, professionalizing our onboarding, putting it all into one spot and having sellers singing off the same choir sheet, as it were. SS: That is amazing to go from nine months to six months, and I definitely want to circle back to that. I do want to get a better sense because you were the executive sponsor for the evaluation and I know that you partnered closely with other key stakeholders in the process. How did you partner with your CRO and RevOps to find the right solution for the business and ultimately gain buy-in? ML: That’s a great question. Our CRO, Brandon Taylor, was the champion of this growth initiative, and Ryan Wing, our Director of Revenue Operations, was crucial to making sure that we were all aligned on a collective vision, making sure that our strategic goals were synchronized, and to make sure that everything from, sales enablement content to the way we wanted to orchestrate our plays and the KPIs that we had set out, the first being to decrease that ramp time. We thought that was the closest crocodile to the canoe if you will. We’re continuing to chase, some other goals, and our CRO has really put a high bar on what we want to achieve with this. With Highspot in, shortening our sales cycle times, increasing our win rates, increasing our ACVs, and increasing our opportunity creation, but ultimately getting their buy-in was the first step and making sure that we were all aligned on what the opportunity was and what the return on investment could be if we unanimously supported the adoption. SS: Absolutely. And I know that having one unified solution for enablement at FoodChain ID was really important rather than separate tools to equip, train, and coach your teams. In your opinion, what has been the impact of that unified experience on your sellers and their productivity? ML: The essence here is, bringing fragmented tools from across our enterprise and bringing them into one centralized location. It’s like switching from a vehicle that has manual steering, where you’re trying to struggle to shift and pivot with market trends, market changes, and competitor dynamics. But bringing Highspot into FoodChain ID is like switching to autopilot. You’re able to cue seller behaviors so quickly. You’re able to pivot and adapt to key changes that you’re seeing in the marketplace and it allows for a seamless inflow of information. As a result, our sellers become more agile, more informed, they execute it. Seller behaviors and plays are better, and they’re significantly more effective. And we’re starting to see the impacts of that. SS: Now, we alluded to one of the big wins earlier, but I know since implementation, you guys have shortened your onboarding time from nine months to six months, and you’ve also reduced ramp time by 30%. Can you walk us through how you optimized sales onboarding and ultimately drove these very impressive results? ML: I tell you, reducing onboarding time was a challenge but it’s one that Highspot is tailor-made to go after. And so we focused on three primary areas with Highspot when it comes to onboarding, which is customized learning paths. Integrating real-world scenarios into the training process and then leveraging the enormous amount of data and feedback that you get to continuously refine your onboarding approach. And so that triad not only expedited our onboarding process, but it ensured that new team members were sales-ready in a shorter amount of time. SS: Fantastic. I love to hear that. In addition to onboarding, your team also focused on improving sales coaching. In your opinion, what is the value of real-world coaching for sales reps? ML: There’s nothing that can replace real-world coaching. You’re not going to be able to automate or AI your way out of real-world, human touch. And the crucible where theory meets practice. When we’re onboarding reps, it’s not only important for them to learn in a classroom, but it’s also important to have a setting to apply, iterate, and refine their approaches in real scenarios with a feedback loop. That accelerates their learning and adaptability. And ultimately, the adage is true that practice makes perfect. And in today’s dynamic market, that’s especially critical. SS: You did mention AI, so I’m curious. How do you plan to utilize innovation in the enablement space like AI to help your team deliver effective coaching? ML: I actually have a bit of a background in AI, from graduate school and from my time in the military. I just believe that AI opens up a whole new frontier that revolutionizes sales coaching, by using AI features like meeting intelligence, we can personalize learning you can personalize it at scale you can provide real-time feedback, and more importantly is that you can identify patterns that would be impossible for humans to detect. And it’s not about replacing the human element. Like I said, nothing is going to replace the human touch in training and coaching, but augmenting it, and learning how to use AI with that human touch is going to make coaching more impactful and insights-driven. SS: Absolutely. And I did not know that about your background, that you have a background in AI. So I’d love to get your opinion: how can AI help the business scale sales productivity more broadly? ML: I’ve seen firsthand from my time in the military, how AI can have a transformative power globally and on the battlefield. And if you think of sales as a battlefield it scales productivity by automating routine tasks that otherwise take sellers away from engaging the customers, it delivers insights that would take us ages to analyze, with torrents of data, stacks upon stacks, and personalize the customer experience as well at scale. It’s a game changer, and it turns data into a strategic asset for every organization.  SS: How do you think AI will continue to drive business innovation in the near future, especially when it comes to enablement? ML: AI is bound to expand, especially in enablement and business innovation. I think we’re going to see AI become more integrated into daily operations. Highspot is already at the forefront here with meeting intelligence, being part of every sales engagement, and providing analytics.I think those analytics will become more accurate over time as we, train new models and reach new heights. But at the end of the day, the potential is it’s pretty vast: from automating administrative tasks to delivering those strategic insights and shaping seller behavior and future directions to make our customer experience more delightful. SS: Mark, last question for you. As you look ahead, how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help you achieve some of the innovation that you’re aiming to drive this year? ML: That’s a great question. So where do we go after our tremendous start? And I think what our CRO would tell you, and our director of revenue ops would tell you is that Highspot is poised to be a cornerstone of our strategy to drive innovation.Internally to FoodChain ID, we refer to Highspot as the sales accelerator. It is what propels our sales cycles forward. So we plan to leverage its capabilities to personalize learning scale development. We’re currently going through an environment optimization where we are using the motto of all the sales enablement you need when you need it, and none of it when you don’t.So the key there. Is that a sales rep doesn’t have to wade through this swamp of sales enablement that they don’t particularly need at that time, and Highspot is tailor-made – with its filtering, its lists, and its search features – to provide the right sales enablement at the right time and none that you don’t SS: I love that. I might have to steal some of those taglines for our marketing efforts. Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. ML: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. SS: To our audience. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

In this episode of the Granta Podcast, we speak to the novelist Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life (2020) and The Late Americans (2023), about naturalism, the future of fiction, and the connection between Émile Zola and The Sims.We also discuss Taylor's short story ‘Stalin, Lenin, Robespierre', which appeared in Granta 166: Generations.You can read ‘Stalin, Lenin, Robespierre' here.Follow these links to subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

In this episode we speak to the reigning CRA Street Stock champion Dalton Conner. We also talk to the announcer at the Sportsdrome Speedway Brandon Taylor about the upcoming season and opener this weekend. Plus we talk about the discussion topic of the week and much more on the show. 

Hi Everyone, I'm thrilled to host Cara Blue Adams today on the podcast. We talked about her stellar short story, "Vision," available from Joyland Magazine. I met Cara years ago at the Kenyon Writers Workshop (which I highly recommend by the way...) so it was great fun to reconnect on the podcast. Cara's work was recommended by Vincent Perrone, who is a part owner of the co-op bookstore, Book Suey, in Hamtramck, MI, so he joined us for the podcast as well. See his bio below, and please consider buying from Bookshop or even directly from Book Suey to support local bookstores! Enjoy the show and see you on April 1st! Kelly Cara Blue Adams is the author of the interlinked story collection You Never Get It Back (University of Iowa Press, 2021), named a New York Times Editors' Choice and awarded the John Simmons Short Fiction Prize, judged by Brandon Taylor, who calls it “a modern classic.” The collection was shortlisted for the Mary McCarthy Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize. Over twenty-five of her stories appear in magazines like the Granta, The Kenyon Review, Epoch, American Short Fiction, and Electric Literature, and her nonfiction appears in Bookforum and The Believer. She has received the Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize, the Missouri Review William Peden Prize, and the Meringoff Prize in Fiction, along with a 2018 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer fellowship and selection as a Pushcart Prize Notable. She has also received support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the VCCA, the Lighthouse Works, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Cara earned a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Smith College and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Originally from Vermont, she has lived in Boston, Tucson, Montreal, Maine, South Carolina, and Baton Rouge. She is a former coeditor of The Southern Review. Currently, she is an associate professor in the MFA program at Temple University and lives in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley. Purchase Cara's book at Book Suey (link above) or Book Shop or Amazon. My co-host: Vincent James Perrone is the author of the poetry collection, Starving Romantic (11:11 Press, 2018), the microchap, Travelogue For The Dispossessed (Ghost City Press, 2021), and a contributor to the anthology, Collected Voices in the Expanded Field (11:11 Press, 2020). His recent and forthcoming work can be found in Pithead Chapel, New Flash Fiction Review, TIMBER, Storm Cellar, and A Common Well Journal. Vincent lives in Detroit where he teaches at Wayne State University. He reads for Conduit and is a member-owner of the co-op bookstore, Book Suey. #shortstories #creativewriting #joylandmag #kenyonreview #booksuey

Our guest this week is Brandon Taylor, whose new book The Late Americans is a stark retooling of the campus novel for the 21st century. Taking a university town in Iowa as his canvas, Taylor depicts the lives of a loose group of friends and associates: Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima—students of writing and dance—as time barrels them towards the end of their studies and the harsh realities of the so-called “real” world beyond. The novel lives in Taylor's delicate and perceptive handling of the complicated interplay of money, class, race, art and sex—the bonds each of these can form between us and the divides they create. It is a book rich in ideas and reflections about contemporary life, contemporary America in particular, but these would all be for nothing without the meticulously wrought human comedy—in all its beauty and ugliness—at its core.Buy The Late Americans: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-late-americansBrandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He was the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman's latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The idea of “interiority” is all the talk these days, but what actually is it? How is it different from exposition and simply telling a reader about a character's thoughts and feelings? How do you access that deeper level of character development and voice from which great interiority comes? We've got two master writers and teachers today to help us out: Dawn Tripp and Christopher BoucherWatch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.I also recommend the following Substack articles about Interiority, the first from Brandon Taylor and the second from Courtney Maum.Christopher Boucher is the author of the novels How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, Golden Delicious and Big Giant Floating Head (a 2019 Massachusetts Book Award Finalist). He's also an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Boston College and the managing editor of Post Road Magazine.Dawn Tripp is the author of the novel Georgia, which was a national bestseller and a finalist for the New England Book Award, and three previous novels: Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her new novel, Jackie, about Jacqueline Kennedy, will be released in June.Photo by Daniel Jericó on Unsplash This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com

Narrator Helen Laser joins AudioFile's Michele Cobb to discuss her narration of YELLOWFACE, R.F. Kuang's novel with a sharp look at the publishing world and one of AudioFile's 2023 Best Fiction Audiobooks. Laser gives a mesmerizing performance as June Hayward, a struggling author who steals her dead friend's manuscript, passing it off as her own, and publishing it while pretending she is Asian. It's a riveting production of a thrilling and thought-provoking story. Laser shares the challenges of narrating YELLOWFACE, and what has stayed with her about this audiobook. Read AudioFile's review of the audiobook. Published by Harper Audio. AudioFile's 2023 Best Fiction Audiobooks are: CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, read by Shayna Small, Aaron Goodson, Michael Crouch, Lee Osorio THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride, read by Dominic Hoffman I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU by Rebecca Makkai, read by Julia Whelan, JD Jackson THE LATE AMERICANS by Brandon Taylor, read by Kevin R. Free TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett, read by Meryl Streep YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang, read by Helen Laser For the full list of 2023 Best Audiobooks visit our website. Support for AudioFile's Behind the Mic comes from HarperAudio. Get up-close to artists you admire with Willie Nelson's Energy Follows Thought, Melissa Etheridge's Talking to My Angels, and Jada Pinkett Smith's Worthy. Listen to samples at www.hc.com. Photo of Helen Laser by John DeAmara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If Data Vault is a new term for you, it's a data modeling design pattern. We're joined by Brandon Taylor, a senior data architect at Guild, and Michael Olschimke, who is the CEO of Scalefree—the consulting firm whose co-founder Dan Lindstedt is credited as the designer of the data vault architecture.  In this conversation with Tristan and Julia, Michael and Brandon explore the Data Vault approach among data warehouse design methodologies. They discuss Data Vault's adoption in Europe, its alignment with data mesh architecture, and the ongoing debate over Data Vault vs. Kimball methods.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

This week on Rational Security, Quinta and Scott bade a temporary farewell to Alan and spent one last afternoon (for a few months, anyway) digging into the week's big national security news stories, including:“Ceasefire or Misfire?” We are now one month into Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip. As civilian casualties continue to mount and Israel's ground operations get underway, there are growing calls for a ceasefire—calls that the Biden administration may now be taking up, in more limited and temporary fashion. Where are we in this conflict? Is there any end in sight?“Freedom of Screech.” Former President Trump's speech—and the right to it—is increasingly becoming an issue in his various criminal and civil trials, both legal and otherwise (as evidenced by a recent bout of angry shouting he pursued on the stand in his New York civil case). How have courts been balancing the equities? Is there something they can do better?“No, no—THAT's what the Insurrection Act is for.” In an effort spearheaded by co-conspirator number four himself Jeffrey Clark, President Trump and his allies are reportedly planning for a revenge campaign if he returns to the White House, beginning with a complete takeover of the Justice Department. How realistic are these plans? What can be done to stop them?For object lessons, Alan recommended Sandra Newman's “Julia,” a retelling of the classic “1984” from a new perspective. Quinta gave a similar bump to Brandon Taylor's new novel, “The Late Americans.” And Scott rolled logs for his latest piece for Lawfare, a retrospective on the legacy of the War Powers Resolution fifty years after its enactment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Quinta and Scott bade a temporary farewell to Alan and spent one last afternoon (for a few months, anyway) digging into the week's big national security news stories, including:“Ceasefire or Misfire?” We are now one month into Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip. As civilian casualties continue to mount and Israel's ground operations get underway, there are growing calls for a ceasefire—calls that the Biden administration may now be taking up, in more limited and temporary fashion. Where are we in this conflict? Is there any end in sight?“Freedom of Screech.” Former President Trump's speech—and the right to it—is increasingly becoming an issue in his various criminal and civil trials, both legal and otherwise (as evidenced by a recent bout of angry shouting he pursued on the stand in his New York civil case). How have courts been balancing the equities? Is there something they can do better?“No, no—THAT's what the Insurrection Act is for.” In an effort spearheaded by co-conspirator number four himself Jeffrey Clark, President Trump and his allies are reportedly planning for a revenge campaign if he returns to the White House, beginning with a complete takeover of the Justice Department. How realistic are these plans? What can be done to stop them?For object lessons, Alan recommended Sandra Newman's “Julia,” a retelling of the classic “1984” from a new perspective. Quinta gave a similar bump to Brandon Taylor's new novel, “The Late Americans.” And Scott rolled logs for his latest piece for Lawfare, a retrospective on the legacy of the War Powers Resolution fifty years after its enactment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In "Multifaceted Discourse" John discusses various topics and gives shout-outs. Here's a summary of the episode: The humorous and diverse "Multifaceted Discourse" delves into a smorgasbord of subjects, with the usual touch of self-deprecating charm. Being a jazz vocalist is a real thing We saw Kurt Elling & Charlie Hunter at Yoshi's, where they always have a great accessible seating setup It was cool to see a jazz vocalist headliner; they scat on every song Bow Down John dishes out shout-outs, paying homage to a variety of individuals, and even reflects on reaching a milestone 201st episode. Shout out to slartibartfast who loves the production Shout out to Jersey girl, who ideated the blind musicians kfjc special Shout out to Nathan Mary tibby & butters who wrote in to Let me know, this is my 201st episode Shout out to the sandman who said "it's good and reassuring that AI cannot describe your show. Your show is about a specific human experience. I am glad that AI does not understand that yet, it means we still have time" Onus Removed? This could be a moment to rethink the A.D.A.'s framework. The Justice Department could take a larger role in enforcing the law, and Congress could amend the statute to give businesses a window to correct violations. Evelyn Clark We nearly take a thought-provoking turn reading The New York Times' article, "It's Time to Rethink the Americans With Disabilities Act," shedding light on disability-related discussions. Always Protect Yourself A viewing of the film "Million Dollar Baby"; delving into thoughts on body limitations and the pursuit of perfection. As Lennard Davis himself has written, "what is universal in life, if there are universals, is the experience of the limitations of the body". Yet in films like Million Dollar Baby, and seemingly in every other ideological corner, we confront what Davis calls a "fantasy…of the perfection of the body and its activities". We cannot step into this ring alone. Jay Dolmage &William DeGenaro, Ph.D. Submission The episode then takes a poetic turn, inspired by Joe Imwalle. I've submitted my poetry around to some places and that's a lot of fun and disheartening, but I'm more having fun with it. Still need a lift Wheelchair lift issues are ongoing. Book Rundown Book reviews include "2021 Best Sports Writing" anthology, Brandon Taylor's "The Late Americans" and "Biography of a Phantom" by Mack McCormick. Letting AI sum up "Multifaceted Discourse" is a delightful blend of humor, insight, and intrigue.

For our first Into It Book Club pick, Sam talks to Brandon Taylor about his latest novel The Late Americans. Set in Iowa City, the book follows a group of lovers and friends who are navigating the world of art, love, sex... and graduate school. We also ask about the broader discourse around books today: In the age of #BookTok and Goodreads, what should readers expect from writers? And —for Brandon, in particular — what's the line between reviewing an author's published work and the author himself? ICYMI, Sam is guest hosting on Vox's daily news show Today, Explained this week. Listen at https://bit.ly/texwsam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Are you intrigued by both campus novels and academia novels?  Join me as we talk about the distinctive traits of these novels, the similarities and differences, and the stories of identity, sexuality, class, and race that they often encapsulate.  In this episode, I'll also share nine captivating novels that provide a glimpse into campus and academic life, from The Secret History to Vladimir.  Get ready to embark on a literary journey through the hallowed halls of academia, engaging with narratives that will surely pique your curiosity and fascination.SHOW NOTES & BOOKLIST: Find the episode show notes and a list of all the books mentioned here.MORE RESOURCES:  Visit bibliolifestyle.com for more information and resources to help you in your reading journey.JOIN THE COMMUNITY:Join the BiblioLifestyle Community & the Bring Your Own Book (BYOB) Club for a fun, online book club experience!  Come and share books you've read, get inspiration for what to read next, make friends, and encourage each other along the way.  Learn more and join the community: bibliolifestyle.com/community.THE BIBLIOLIFESTYLE 2023 FALL READING GUIDEGet ready for a cozy fall reading season! Download your free copy of the guide when you visit fallreadingguide.com. This year's guide has thirty books organized across nine categories, plus fun recipes, fall activities, lifestyle tips, classic books, and a fun challenge. So download your free copy and discover your next favorite book! BIBLIOLIFESTYLE COMMUNITY & BYOB CLUBRead a good book recently? Join our members-only Community & Bring Your Own Book (BYOB) Club and tell us about it! Here we read what we want, make friends, and encourage each other along the way. Attend our online book club, seasonally-themed happenings, get exclusive content, plus more!

In 2020, Brandon Taylor burst onto the literary scene with Real Life, a novel about a gay black doctoral student and his predominantly white colleagues.  A finalist for the Booker Prize, Real Life offered a comedic take on themes like privilege and prejudice. Taylor followed that with another book about young creatives, the short story collection Filthy Animals. His highly anticipated new novel, The Late Americans, follows a circle of lovers and friends during a volatile year of self-discovery. On June 2, 2023, Brandon Taylor came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an on-stage conversation with Kate Schatz. Schatz is the bestselling author of the “Rad Women” book series, and Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book, co-written with W. Kamau Bell. 

Kevin R. Free joins host Jo Reed for a conversation about his impressive audiobook work, his acting career, and being named a 2023 Golden Voice narrator. Kevin is a multiple Earphones Award winner for a wide range of audiobooks, from children's stories to literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and fantastic science fiction. There are few narrators who can match his versatility and perceptive performances across genres. Kevin has had an extraordinary career, both in the recording booth and in theater as an actor, a director, a playwright, and an artistic director. He's recorded 450 audiobooks, including Martha Wells's wildly popular Murderbot Diaries series, Brandon Taylor's insightful works, and many memorable children's audiobooks. Listen in to Kevin and Jo's lively conversation to learn more about how he brings joy into the recording booth, the thought and care he puts into creating voices for every character, and more. Read reviews of many of Kevin R. Free's audiobooks on AudioFile's website. Support for AudioFile's Behind the Mic comes from BOLINDA. A world-leading audiobook and technology company, Bolinda publishes the greatest books you'll ever hear and inspire people to live their best lives through the power of storytelling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When writer Brandon Taylor was growing up in Alabama in the early 2000s, he didn't quite fit in with the rest of his family or his classmates at school. And these days, he still prefers his own company. “I never feel more myself than when I am by myself feeling just like a little lonely,” he told Anna. “That is like my optimal state of being.” But Brandon found community online in chat rooms, roleplaying communities, and on message boards for the books and TV shows he loved as a teenager, like the anime show Dragon Ball Z, Pokémon, or the Harry Potter series. And as an adult, the Real Life and The Late Americans author is figuring out how to share his excitement of literature and popular culture on and offline, which doesn't always resonate with people in real life. In this episode, Brandon tells Anna about managing money on his own, what he likes about being single, and his evolving relationship with the Internet.

For Writers & Company's final original episode, Eleanor Wachtel is interviewed on-stage by Matt Galloway, host of CBC Radio's The Current. She then speaks with American authors Brandon Taylor and Gary Shteyngart, and receives surprise greetings from the likes of Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith.

In this week's bumper podcast, George Berridge assesses the legacy of Cormac McCarthy; Toby Lichtig on this summer's ideal reads; and an interview with American novelist Brandon Taylor.'The Late Americans', by Brandon TaylorProduced by Charlotte Pardy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gottlieb, who died last week at age 92, edited Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, John le Carré and, for more than 50 years, Robert Caro. He went on to become editor of The New Yorker. We'll listen to our recent interview with Gottlieb, and we'll hear some of our interview recorded in 2000 with Gottlieb and musical theater expert Robert Kimball. They co-authored a book on some of the best lyricists of the last century.Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Brandon Taylor's, The Late Americans, and Andre Dubus III's novel, Such Kindness.

Acclaimed writer Brandon Taylor is back with a new novel. In The Late Americans, a group of artists and friends in Iowa City head to a cabin to celebrate their last days all living in the same city... where a revelation might change their relationships forever. Taylor joins us to discuss the novel.

This week, host Brittany Luse chats with author and culture critic Brandon Taylor about his latest novel, The Late Americans. The book is set in Iowa City and follows several characters pursuing love, art and the promise of prosperity. They discuss what's so American about The Late Americans, and how it's a departure from what's currently seen as fashionable in fiction.You can follow us on Twitter @ItsBeenAMin or email us at ibam@npr.org.

Is A.I. really taking over the world? Probably. Brandon Taylor from Hurrdat innovations is back to talk about it. We talk about how ChatGPT is changing the way we work, what it's going to look like in 10 years, and many reasons NOT to be scared of it. #ChatGPT #OpenAI #AIChatbot #LanguageModel #VirtualAssistant #ArtificialIntelligence #AI Thanks to our podcast partner Centris Federal Credit Union! Get our email newsletter! --> HERE You can rep our show! Buy some Pat and JT Podcast swag HERE! Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode! Also follow up on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram A Hurrdat Media Production. Hurrdat Media is a digital media and commercial video production company based in Omaha, NE. Find more podcasts on the Hurrdat Media Network and learn more about our other services today on HurrdatMedia.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices