Podcast appearances and mentions of helen dewitt

Ahead of her new book What's So Great About the Great Books? coming out in April, Naomi Kanakia and I talked about literature from Herodotus to Tony Tulathimutte. We touched on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Scott Alexander, Shakespeare, William James, Helen deWitt, Marx and Engels, Walter Scott, Les Miserables, Jhootha Sach, the Mahabharata, and more. Naomi also talked about some of her working habits and the history and future of the Great Books movement. Naomi, of course, writes Woman of Letters here on Substack.TranscriptHenry Oliver: Today, I am talking with Naomi Kanakia. Naomi is a novelist, a literary critic, and most importantly she writes a Substack called Woman of Letters, and she has a new book coming out, What's So Great About the Great Books? Naomi, welcome.Naomi Kanakia: Thanks for having me on.Oliver: How is the internet changing the way that literature gets discussed and criticized, and what is that going to mean for the future of the Great Books?Kanakia: How is the internet changing it? I can really speak to only how it has changed it for me. I started off as a writer of young adult novels and science fiction, and there's these very active online fan cultures for those two things.I was reading the Great Books all through that time. I started in 2010 through today. In the 2010s, it really felt like there was not a lot of online discussion of classic literature. Maybe that was just me and I wasn't finding it, but it didn't necessarily feel like there was that community.I think because there are so many strong, public-facing institutions that discuss classic literature, like the NYRB, London Review of Books, a lot of journals, and universities, too. But now on Substack, there are a number of blogs—yours, mine, a number of other ones—that are devoted to classic literature. All of those have these commenters, a community of commenters. I also follow bloggers who have relatively small followings who are reading Tolstoy, reading Middlemarch, reading even much more esoteric things.I know that for me, becoming involved in this online culture has given me much more of an awareness that there are many people who are reading the classics on their own. I think that was always true, but now it does feel like it's more of a community.Oliver: We are recording this the day after the Washington Post book section has been removed. You don't see some sort of relationship between the way these literary institutions are changing online and the way the Great Books are going to be conceived of in the future? Because the Great Books came out of a an old-fashioned, saving-the-institutions kind of radical approach to university education. We're now moving into a world where all those old things seem to be going.Kanakia: Yes. I agree. The Great Books began in the University of Chicago and Columbia University. If you look into the history of the movement, it really was about university education and the idea that you would have a common core and all undergraduates would read these books. The idea that the Great Books were for the ordinary person was really an afterthought, at least for Mortimer Adler and those original Great Books guys. Now, the Great Books in the university have had a resurgence that we can discuss, but I do think there's a lot more life and vitality in the kind of public-facing humanities than there has been.I talked to Irina Dumitrescu, who writes for TLS (The Times Literary Supplement), LRB (The London Review of Books), a lot of these places, and she also said the same thing—that a lot of these journals are going into podcasts, and they're noticing a huge interest in the humanities and in the classics even at the same time as big institutions are really scaling back on those things. Humanities majors are dropping, classics majors are getting cut, book coverage at major periodicals is going down. It does seem like there are signals that are conflicting. I don't really know totally what to make of it. I do think there is some relation between those two things.Ted Gioia on Substack is always talking about how culture is stagnant, basically, and one of the symptoms of that is that “back list” really outsells “front list” for books. Even in 2010, 50 percent of the books that were sold were front-list titles, books that had been released in the last 18 months. Now it's something like only 35 percent of books or something like that are front-list titles. These could be completely wrong, but there's been a trend.I think the decrease in interest in front-list books is really what drives the loss of these book-review pages because they mostly review front-list books. So, I think that does imply that there's a lot of interest in old books. That's what our stagnant culture means.Oliver: Why do you think your own blog is popular with the rationalists?Kanakia: I don't know for certain. There was a story I wrote that was a joke. There are all these pop nonfiction books that aim to prove something that seems counterintuitive, so I wrote a parody of one of those where I aim to prove that reading is bad for you. This book has many scientific studies that show the more you read, the worse it is because it makes you very rigid.Scott Alexander, who is the archrationalist, really liked that, and he added me to his blog roll. Because of that, I got a thousand rationalist subscribers. I have found that rationalists at least somewhat interested in the classics. I think they are definitely interested in enduring sources of value. I've observed a fair amount of interest.Oliver: How much of a lay reader are you really? Because you read scholarship and critics and you can just quote John Gilroy in the middle of a piece or something.Kanakia: Yeah. That is a good question. I have definitely gotten more interested in secondary literature. In my book, I really talk about being a lay reader and personally having a nonacademic approach to literature. I do think that, over 15 years of being a lay reader, I have developed a lot of knowledge.I've also learned the kind of secondary literature that is really important. I think having historical context adds a lot and is invaluable. Right now I'm rereading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. When I first read it in 2010, I hardly knew anything about French history. I was even talking online with someone about how most people who read Les Miserables think it's set in the French Revolution. That's basically because Americans don't really know anything about French history.Everything makes just a lot more sense the more you know about the time because it was written for people in it. For people in 1860s France, who knew everything about their own recent history, that really adds a lot to it. I still don't tend to go that much into interpretive literature, literature that tries to do readings of the stories or tell me the meaning of the stories. I feel like I haven't really gotten that much out of that.Oliver: How long have you been learning Anglo-Saxon?Kanakia: I went through a big Anglo-Saxon phase. That was in 2010. It started because I started reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. There is a great app online called General Prologue created by one of your countrymen, Terry Richardson [NB it is Terry Jones], who loved Middle English. In this app, he recites the Middle English of the General Prologue. I started listening to this app, and I thought, I just really love the rhythms and the sounds of Middle English. And it's quite easy to learn. So then, I got really into that.And then I thought, but what about Anglo-Saxon? I'm very bad at languages. I studied Latin for seven years in middle school and high school. I never really got very far, but I thought, Anglo-Saxon has to be the easiest foreign language you can learn, right? So, I got into it.I cannot sight read Anglo-Saxon, but I really got into Anglo-Saxon poetry. I really liked the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Most people probably would not like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because it's very repetitive, but that makes it great if you're a language learner because every entry is in this very repetitive structure. I just felt such a connection. I get in trouble when I say this kind of stuff, because I'm never quiet sure if it's 100 percent true. But it's certainly one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Europe. It's just so much older than most of the other medieval literature I've read. And it just was such a window into a different part of history I never knew about.Oliver: And you particularly like “The Dream of the Rood”?Kanakia: Yeah, “The Dream of the Rood” is my favorite Anglo-Saxon poem. “The Dream of the Rood” is a poem that is told from the point of view of Christ's cross. A man is having a dream. In this dream he encounters Christ's cross, and Christ's cross starts reciting to him basically the story of the crucifixion. At the end, the cross is buried. I don't know, it was just so haunting and powerful. Yeah, it was one of my favorites.Oliver: Why do you think Byron is a better poet than Alexander Pope?Kanakia: This is an argument I cannot get into. I think this is coming up because T. S. Eliot felt that Alexander Pope was a great poet because he really exemplified the spirit of the age. I don't know. I've tried to read Pope. It just doesn't do it for me. Whereas with Byron, I read Don Juan and found it entertaining. I enjoyed it. Then, his lyric poetry is just more entertaining to read. With Alexander Pope, I'm learning a lot about what kind of poetry people wrote in the 18th century, but the joy is not there.Oliver: Okay. Can we do a quick fire round where I say the name of a book and you just say what you think of it, whatever you think of it?Kanakia: Sure.Oliver: Okay. The Odyssey.Kanakia: The Odyssey. Oh, I love The Odyssey. It has a very strange structure, where it starts with Telemachus and then there's this flashback in the middle of it. It is much more readable than The Iliad; I'll say that.Oliver: Herodotus.Kanakia: Herodotus is wild. Going into Herodotus, I really thought it was about the Persian war, which it is, but it's mostly a general overview of everything that Herodotus knew, about anything. It's been a long time since I read it. I really appreciate the voice of Herodotus, how human it is, and the accumulation of facts. It was great.Oliver: I love the first half actually. The bit about the Persian war I'm less interested in, but the first half I think is fantastic. I particularly love the Egypt book.Kanakia: Oh yeah, the Egypt book is really good.Oliver: All those like giant beetles that are made of fire or whatever; I can't remember the details, but it's completely…Kanakia: The Greeks are also so fascinated by Egypt. They go down there like what is going on out there? Then, most of what we know about Egypt comes from this Hellenistic period, when the Greeks went to Egypt. Our Egyptian kings list comes from the Hellenistic period where some scholar decided to sort out what everybody was up to and put it all into order. That's why we have such an orderly story about Egypt. That's the story that the Greeks tried to tell themselves.Oliver: Marcus Aurelius.Kanakia: Marcus Aurelius. When I first read The Meditations, which I loved, obviously, I thought, “being the Roman emperor cannot be this hard.” It really was a black pill moment because I thought, “if the emperor of Rome is so unhappy, maybe human power really doesn't do it.”Knowing more about Marcus Aurelius, he did have quite a difficult life. He was at war for most of his—just stuck in the region in Germany for ages. He had various troubles, but yeah, it really was very stoic. It was, oh, I just have to do my duty. Very “heavy is the head that wears the crown” kind of stuff. I thought, “okay, I guess being Roman emperor is not so great.”Oliver: Omar Khayyam.Kanakia: Omar Khayyam. Okay, I've only read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, which I loved, but I cannot formulate a strong opinion right now.Oliver: As You Like It.Kanakia: No opinions.Oliver: Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.Kanakia: Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I do have an opinion about this, which is that they should make a redacted version of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I normally am not a big believer in abridgements because I feel like whatever is there is there. But, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, first of all, has a long portion before Boswell even meets Johnson. That portion drags; it's not that great. Then it has all these like letters that Johnson wrote, which also are not that great. What's really good is when Boswell just reports everything Johnson ever said, which is about half the book. You get a sense of Johnson's conversation and his personality, and that is very gripping. I've definitely thought that with a different presentation, this could still be popular. People would still read this.Oliver: The Communist Manifesto.Kanakia: The Communist Manifesto. It's very stirring. I love The Communist Manifesto. It has very haunting, powerful lines. I won't try to quote from it because I'll misquote them.Oliver: But it is remarkably well written.Kanakia: Oh yeah, it is a great work of literature.Oliver: Yeah.Kanakia: I read Capital [Das Kapital], which is not a great work of literature, and I would venture to say that it is not necessarily worth reading. It really feels like Marx's reputation is built on other political writings like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and works like that, which really seem to have a lot more meat on the bone than Capital.Oliver: Pragmatism by William James.Kanakia: Pragmatism. I mean, I've mentioned that in my book. I love William James in general. I think William James was writing in this 19th-century environment where it seemed like some form of skepticism was the only rational solution. You couldn't have any source of value, and he really tried to cut through that with Pragmatism and was like, let's just believe the things that are good to believe. It is definitely at least useful to think, although someone else can always argue with you about what is useful to believe. But, as a personal guide for belief, I think it is still useful.Oliver: Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw.Kanakia: No strong opinions. It was a long time ago that I read Major Barbara.Oliver: Tell me what you like about James Fenimore Cooper.Kanakia: James Fenimore Cooper. Oh, this is great. I have basically a list of Great Books that I want to read, but four or five years ago, I thought, “what's in all the other books that I know the names of but that are not reputed, are not the kind of books you still read?”That was when I read Walter Scott, who I really love. And I just started reading all kinds of books that were kind of well known but have kind of fallen into literary disfavor. In almost every case, I felt like I got a lot out of these books. So, nowadays when I approach any realm of literature, I always look for those books.In 19th-century American literature, the biggest no-longer-read book is The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, which was America's first bestseller. He was the first American novelist that had a high reputation in Europe. The Last of the Mohicans is kind of a historical romance, à la Walter Scott, but much more tightly written and much more tightly plotted.Cooper has written five novels, the Leatherstocking Tales, that are all centered around this very virtuous, rough-hewn frontiersman, Natty Bumppo. He has his best friend, Chingachgook, who is the last of the Mohicans. He's the last of his tribe. And the two of these guys are basically very sad and stoic. Chingachgook is distanced from his tribe. Chingachgook has a tribe of Native Americans that he hates—I want to say it's the Huron. He's always like, “they're the bad ones,” and he's always fighting them. Then, Natty Bumppo doesn't really love settled civilization. He's not precisely at war with it, but he does not like the settlers. They're kind of stuck in the middle. They have various adventures, and I just thought it was so haunting and powerful.I've been reading a lot of other 19th-century American literature, and virtually none of it treats Native Americans with this kind of respect. There's a lot of diversity in the Native American characters; there's really an attempt to show how their society works and the various ways that leadership and chiefship works among them. There's this very haunting moment in The Last of the Mohicans, where this aged chief, Tamenund, comes out and starts speaking. This is a chief who, in American mythology, was famous for being a friend to the white people. But, James Fenimore Cooper writing in the 1820s has Tamenund come out at 80 years old and say, “we have to fight; we have to fight the white people. That's our only option.” It was just such a powerful moment and such a powerful book.I was really, really enthused. I read all of these Leatherstocking Tales. It was also a very strange experience to read these books that are generally supposed to be very turgid and boring, and then I read them and was like, “I understand. I'm so transported.” I understand exactly why readers in the 1820s loved this.Oliver: Which Walter Scott books do you like?Kanakia: I love all the Walter Scott books I've read, but the one I liked best was Kenilworth. Have you ever read Kenilworth?Oliver: I don't know that one.Kanakia: Yeah, it's about Elizabeth I, who had a romantic relationship with one of her courtiers.Oliver: The Earl of Essex?Kanakia: Yeah. She really thought they were going to get married, but then it turned out he was secretly married. Basically, I guess the implication is that he killed his wife in order to marry Queen Elizabeth I. It's a novel all about him and that situation, and it just felt very tightly plotted. I really enjoyed it.Oliver: What did you think of Rejection?Kanakia: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte? Initially when I read this book, I enjoyed it, but I was like, “life cannot possibly be this sad.” It's five or six stories about these people who just have nothing going on. Their lives are so miserable, they can't find anyone to sleep with, and they're just doomed to be alone forever. I was like, “life can't be this bad.” But now thinking back over it, it is one of the most memorable books I've read in the last year. It really sticks with you. I feel like my opinion of this book has gone up a lot in retrospect.Oliver: How antisemitic is the House of Mirth?Kanakia: That is a hotly debated question, which I mentioned in my book. I think there has been a good case made that Edith Wharton, the author of House of Mirth, who was from an old New York family, was herself fairly antisemitic and did not personally like Jewish people. What she portrays in this book is that this old New York society also was highly suspicious of Jewish people and was organized to keep Jewish people out.In this book there is a rich Jewish man, Simon Rosedale, and there's a poor woman, Lily Bart. Lily Bart's main thing is whether she's going to marry the poor guy, Lawrence Selden, or the rich guy, Percy Gryce. She can't choose. She doesn't want to be poor, but she also is always bored by the rich guys. Meanwhile, through the whole book, there's Simon Rosedale, who's always like, “you should marry me.” He's the rich Jewish guy. He's like, “you should marry me. I will give you lots of money. You can do whatever you want.”Everybody else kind of just sees her as a woman and as a wife; he really sees her as an ally in his social climbing. That's his main motivation. The book is relatively clear that he has a kind of respect for her that nobody else does. Then, over the course of the book, she also gains a lot more respect for him. Basically, late in the book, she decides to marry him, but she has fallen a lot in the world. He's like, “that particular deal is not available anymore,” but he does offer her another deal that—although she finds it not to her taste—is still pretty good.He basically is like, “I'll give you some money, you'll figure out how to rehabilitate your reputation, and later down the line, we can figure something out.” So, I think with a great author like Edith Wharton, there's power in these portrayals. I felt it hard to come away from it feeling like the book is like a really antisemitic book.Oliver: Now, you note that the Great Books movement started out as something quite socially aspirational. Do you think it's still like that?Kanakia: I do think so. Yeah. For me, that's 100 percent what it was because I majored in econ. I always felt kind of inadequate as a writer against people who had majored in English. Then I started off as a science fiction writer, young adult writer, and I was like, “I'm going to read all these Great Books and then I'll have read the books that everybody else has read.” In my mind, that's also what it was—that there was some upper crust or literary society that was reading all these Great Books.That's really what did it. I do think there's still an element of aspiration to it because it's a club that you can join, that anyone can join. It's very straightforward to be a Great Books reader, and so I think there's still something there. I think because the Great Books movement has such a democratic quality to it, it actually doesn't get you to the top socially, which has always been the true, always been the case. But, that's okay. As long as you end up higher than where you started, that's fine.Oliver: What makes a book great?Kanakia: I talk about it this in the book, and I go through many different authors' conceptions of what makes a book great or what constitutes a classic. I don't know that anyone has come up with a really satisfying answer. The Horatian formulation from Horace—that a book is great or an author is great if it has lasted for a hundred years—is the one that seems to be the most accurate. Like, any book that's still being read a hundred years after it was written has a greatness.I do think that T. S. Eliott's formulation—that a civilization at its height produces certain literature and that literature partakes of the greatness of the civilization and summarizes the greatness of the civilization—does seem to have some kind of truth to it.But it's hard, right? Because the greatest French novel is In Search of Lost Time, but I don't know that anyone would say that the France in the 1920s was at its height. It's not a prescriptive thing, but it does seem like the way we read many of these Great Books, like Moby Dick, it feels like you're like communing with the entire society that produced it. So, maybe there's something there.Oliver: Now, you've used a list from Clifton Fadiman.Kanakia: Yes.Oliver: Rather than from Mortimer Adler or Harold Bloom or several others. Why this list?Kanakia: Well, the best reason is that it's actually the list I've just been using for the last 15 years. I went to a science fiction convention in 2009, Readercon, and at this science fiction convention was Michael Dirda, who was a Washington Post book critic. He had recently come out with his book, Classics for Pleasure, which I also bought and liked. But he said that the list he had always used was this Clifton Fadiman book. And so when I decided to start reading the Great Books, I went and got that book. I have perused many other lists over time, but that was always the list that seemed best to me.It seemed to have like the best mix. There's considerable variation amongst these lists, but there's also a lot of overlap. So any of these lists is going to have Dickens on it, and Tolstoy, and stuff like that. So really, you're just thinking about, “aside from Dickens and Tolstoy and George Eliot and Walt Whitman and all these people, who are the other 50 authors that you're going be reading?”The Mortimer Adler list is very heavy on philosophy. It has Plotinus on it. It has all these scientific works. I don't know, it didn't speak to me as much. Whereas, this Clifton Fadiman and John Major list has all these Eastern works on it. It has The Tale of Genji, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Story of the Stone, and that just spoke to me a little bit more.Oliver: What modern books will be on a future Great Books list, whether it's from someone alive or someone since the war.Kanakia: Have you ever heard of Robert Caro?Oliver: Sure.Kanakia: Yeah. I think his Lyndon Johnson books are great books. They have changed the field of biography. They're so complete, they seem to summarize an entire era, epoch. They're highly rated, but I feel like they're underrated as literature.What else? I was actually a little bit surprised in this Clifton Fadiman-John Major book, which came out in 1999, that there are not more African Americans in their list. Like, Invisible Man definitely seemed like a huge missed work. You know, it's hard. You would definitely want a book that has undergone enough critical evaluation that people are pretty certain that it is great. A lot of things that are more recent have not undergone that evaluation yet, but Invisible Man has, as have some works by Martin Luther King.Oliver: What about The Autobiography of Malcolm X?Kanakia: I would have to reread. I feel like it hasn't been evaluated much as a literary document.Oliver: Helen DeWitt?Kanakia: It's hard to say. It's so idiosyncratic, The Last Samurai, but it is certainly one of the best novels of the last 25 years.Oliver: Yeah.Kanakia: It is hard to say, because there's nothing else quite like it. But I would love if The Last Samurai was on a list like this; that would be amazing.Oliver: If someone wants to try the Great Books, but they think that those sort of classic 19th-century novels are too difficult—because they're long and the sentences are weird or whatever—what else should they do? Where else should they start?Kanakia: Well, it depends on what they're into, or it depends on their personality type. I think like there are people who like very, very difficult literature. There are people who are very into James Joyce and Proust. I think for some people the cost-benefit is better. If they're going to be pouring over some book for a long time, they would prefer if it was overtly difficult.If they're not like that, then I would say, there are many Great Books that are more accessible. Hemingway is a good one and Grapes of Wrath is wonderful. The 19th-century American books tend to be written in a very different register than the English books. If you read Moby Dick, it feels like it's written in a completely different language than Charles Dickens, even though they're writing essentially at the same time.Oliver: Is there too much Freud on the list that you've used?Kanakia: Maybe. I know that Interpretation of Dreams is on that list, which I've tried to read and have decided life is too short. I didn't really buy it, but I have read a fair amount of Freud. My impression of Freud was always that I would read Freud and somehow it would just seem completely fanciful or far out, like wouldn't ring true. But then when I started reading Freud, it was more the opposite. I was like, oh yeah, this seems very, very true.Like this battle between like the id and the ego and the super ego, and this feeling that like the psyche is at war with itself. Human beings really desire to be singular and exceptional, but then you're constantly under assault by the reality principle, which is that you're insignificant. That all seemed completely true. But then he tries to cure this somehow, which does not seem a curable problem. And he also situates the problem in some early sexual development, which also did not necessarily ring true. But no, I wouldn't say there's too much. Freud is a lot of fun. People should read Freud.Oliver: Which of the Great Books have you really not liked?Kanakia: I do get asked this quite a bit. I would say the Great Book that I really felt like—at least in translation—was not that rewarding in an unabridged version was Don Quixote. Because at least half the length of Don Quixote is these like interpolated novellas that are really long and tedious. I felt Don Quixote was a big slog. But maybe someday I'll go back and reread it and love it. Who knows?Oliver: Now you wrote that the question of biography is totally divorced from the question of what art is and how it operates. What do you think of George Orwell's supposition that if Shakespeare came back tomorrow, and we found out he used to rape children that we should—we would not say, you know, it's fine to carry on to doing that because he might write another King Lear.Kanakia: Well, if we discovered that Shakespeare was raping children, he should go to prison for that. No. It's totally divorced in both senses. You don't get any credit in the court of law because you are the writer of King Lear. If I murdered someone and then I was hauled in front of a judge and they were like, oh, Naomi's a genius, I wouldn't get off for murder. Nor should I get off for murder.So in terms of like whether we would punish Shakespeare for his crime of raping children, I don't think King Lear should count at all, but it's never used that way. It's never should someone go to prison or not for their crimes, because they're a genius. It's always used the other way, which is should we read King Lear knowing that the author raped children, but I also feel like that is immaterial. If you read King Lear, you're not enabling someone to rape children.Oliver: There's an almost endless amount of discussion these days about the Great Books and education and the value of the humanities, and what's the future of it all. What is your short opinion on that?Kanakia: My short opinion is that the Great Books at least are going to be fine. The Great Books will continue to be read, and they would even survive the university. All these books predate the university and they will survive the university. I feel like the university has stewarded literature in its own way for a while now and has made certain choices in that stewardship. I think if that stewardship was given up to more voluntary associations that had less financial support, then I think the choices would probably be very different. But I still think the greatest works would survive.Oliver: Now this is a quote from the book: “I am glad that reactionaries love the Great Books. They've invited a Trojan horse into their own camp.” Tell us what you mean by that.Kanakia: Let's say you believed in Christian theocracy, that you thought America should be organized on explicitly Christian principles. And because you believe in Christian theocracy, you organize a school that teaches the Great Books. Many of these schools that are Christian schools that have Great Books programs will also teach Nietzsche. They definitely put some kind of spin on Nietzsche. But they will teach anti-Christ, and that is a counterpoint to Christian morality and Christian theology. There are many things that you'll read in the Great Books that are corrosive to various kinds of certainties.If someone who I think is bad starts educating themselves in the Great Books, I don't think that the Great Books are going to make them worse from my perspective. So it's good.Oliver: How did reading the Mahabharata change you?Kanakia: Oh yeah, so the Mahabharata is a Hindu epic from, let's say, the first century AD. I'm Indian and most Indians are familiar with the basic outline of the Mahabharata story because it's told in various retellings, and there's a TV serial that my parents would rent from the Indian store growing up and we would watch it tape by tape. So I'm very familiar with it. Like there's never been a time I have not known this story.But I was also familiar with the idea that there is a written version in Sanskrit that's extremely long. It is 10 times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. This Mahabharata story is not that long. I've read a version of it that's about 800 pages long. So how could something that's 10 times this long be the same? A new unabridged translation came out 10 years ago. So I started reading it, and it basically contains the entire Sanskrit Vedic worldview in it.I had never been exposed to this very coherently laid-out version of what I would call Hindu cosmology and ethics. Hindus don't really get taught those things in a very organized way. The book is basically about dharma, the principle of rightness and how this principle of rightness orders the universe and how it basically results in everybody getting their just deserts in various ways. As I was reading the book, I was like, this seems very true that there is some cosmic rebalancing here, and that everything does turn out more or less the way it should, which is not something that I can defend on a rational level.But just reading the book, it just made me feel like, yes, that is true. There is justice, the universe is organized by justice. It took me about a year to read the whole thing. I started waking up at 5:00 a.m. and reading for an hour each morning, and it just was a really magical, profound experience that brought me a lot closer to my grandmother's religious beliefs.Oliver: Is it ever possible to persuade someone with arguments that they should read literature, or is it just something that they have to have an inclination toward and then follow someone's example? Because I feel like we have so many columns and op-eds and “books are good because of X reason, and it's very important because of Y reason.” And like, who cares? No one cares. If you are persuaded, you take all that very seriously and you argue about what exactly are the precise reasons we should say. And if you're not persuaded, you don't even know this is happening.And what really persuades you is like, oh, Naomi sounds pretty compelling about the Mahabharata. That sounds cool. I'll try that. It's much more of a temperamental, feelingsy kind of thing. Is it possible to argue people into thinking about this differently? Or should we just be doing what we do and setting an example and hoping that people will follow.Kanakia: As to whether it's possible or not, I do not know. But I do think these columns are too ambitious. A thousand-word column and the imagined audience for this column is somebody who doesn't read books at all, who doesn't care about literature at all. And then in a thousand-word column, you're going to persuade them to care about literature. This is no good. It's so unnecessary.Whereas there's a much broader range of people who love to read books, but have never picked up Moby Dick or have never picked up Middlemarch, or who like maybe loved Middlemarch, but never thought maybe I should then go on and read Jane Austen and George Eliot.I think trying to shift people from “I don't read books at all; reading books is not something I do,” to being a Great Books card-carrying lover of literature is a lot. I really aim for a much lower result than that, which is to whatever extent people are interested in literature, they should pursue that interest. And as the rationalists would say, there's a lot of alpha in that; there's a lot to be gained from converting people who are somewhat interested into people who are very interested.Oliver: If there was a more widespread practice of humanism in education and the general culture, would that make America into a more liberal country in any way?Kanakia: What do you mean by humanism?Oliver: You know, the old-fashioned liberal arts approach, the revival of the literary journal culture, the sort of depolitical approach to literature, the way things used to be, as it were.Kanakia: It couldn't hurt. It couldn't hurt is my answer to that question.Oliver: Okay.Kanakia: What you're describing is basically the way I was educated. I went to Catholic school in DC at St. Anselm's Abbey School, in Northeast, DC, grade school. Highly recommend sending your little boys there. No complaints about the school. They talked about humanism all the time and all these civic virtues. I thought it was great. I don't know what people in other schools learn, but I really feel like it was a superior way of teaching.Now, you know, it was Catholic school, so a lot of people who graduated from my school are conservatives and don't really have the beliefs that I have, but that's okay.Oliver: Tell us about your reading habits.Kanakia: I read mostly ebooks. I really love ebooks because you can make the type bigger. I just read all the time. They vary. I don't wake up at 5:00 a.m. to read anymore. Sometimes if I feel like I'm not reading enough—because I write this blog, and the blog doesn't get written unless I'm reading. That's the engine, and so sometimes I set aside a day each week to read. But generally, the reading mostly takes care of itself.What I tend to get is very into a particular thing, and then I'll start reading more and more in that area. Recently, I was reading a lot of New Yorker stories. So I started reading more and more of these storywriters that have been published in the New Yorker and old anthologies of New Yorker stories. And then eventually I am done. I'm tired. It's time to move on.Oliver: But do you read several books at once? Do you make notes? Do you abandon books? How many hours a day do you read?Kanakia: Hours a day: Because my e-reader keeps these stats, I'd say 15 or 20 hours a week of reading. Nowadays because I write for the blog, I often think as I'm reading how I would frame a post about this. So I look for quotes, like what quote I would look at. I take different kinds of notes. I'll make more notes if I'm more confused by what is going on. Especially with nonfiction books, I'll try sometimes to make notes just to iron out what exactly I think is happening or what I think the argument is. But no, not much of a note taker.Oliver: What will you read next?Kanakia: What will I read next? Well, I've been thinking about getting back into Indian literature. Right now I'm reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. But there's an Indian novel called Jhootha Sach, which is a partition novel that is originally in Hindi. And it's also a thousand pages long, and is frequently compared to Les Miserables and War and Peace. So I'm thinking about tackling that finally.Oliver: Naomi Kanakia, thank you very much.Kanakia: Thanks for having me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash is a witty and wry story centered on the enigmatic and ever-entertaining Flynn family. Madeline joins us to talk about world building, puns, humor, character and more with cohost Isabelle McConville. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Isabelle McConville and mixed by Harry Liang.                     New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app. Featured Books (Episode): Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Underworld by Don DeLillo The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt  

I'm joined this week by writer and journalist Ilya Gridneff, whose career has taken him from Sydney to South Sudan and now to the Financial Times bureau in Canada. We talk about his first work of fiction, Your Name Here, co-authored with the brilliant Helen DeWitt — a wild, experimental novel with a long, unusual history. We also dive into the ideas and books that shaped him. If you enjoy the episode, please leave a review and follow @litwithcharles.Ilya Gridneff's four books were:2666, by Roberto Bolaño (2004)A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole (1980)Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre (1938)Post Office, by Charles Bukowski (1971)

This week, Mary Beard grapples with a noisy new version of Euripedes at the National Theatre; and Norma Clarke on the mysterious world of Helen DeWitt's new novel.'Bacchae', by Nima Taleghani, after Euripedes, Olivier Theatre, National Theatre, London, until November 1'Your Name Here', by Helen DeWitt and Ilya GridneffProduced by Charlotte Pardy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's been nearly a year since we asked our subscribers to send us questions for a mailbag episode—which they did, with remarkable thoughtfulness and intelligence, for our 100th episode back in September 2024. A lot has happened since then (to say the least), so we wanted to once again open up the mailbag and find out what was on the minds of Know Your Enemy listeners, who sent too many excellent questions for just one episode—so, if you like what you hear, consider subscribing on Patreon to listen our next bonus episode when we'll answer even more of them.In this round of listener questions, we take up how much Trump has kept his campaign promises, our favorite bourbons, the politics of Judaism, St. Augustine and original sin, novelists (gay and straight), and more!Sources and further reading:Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (1945)— A Single Man (1964)Don Bachardy, Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood (1990)Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (2009)— A Boy's Own Story (1982)— The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988)— The Farewell Symphony (1997)— The Married Man (2000)Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (1971)— Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)Henri du Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (1962)Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1949)— Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1968)Sam Adler-Bell, "The Father of All Secrets," The Baffler, Dec 2022. — "The Essential John le Carré," NYTimes, Jul 12, 2023.Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, (1930)Javier Marías, A Heart So White, (1995)Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai, (2000)Percival Everett, Erasure, (2001)...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our bonus episodes!

Gretchen Rubin is one of today's most influential observers of happiness and human nature. In addition to hosting the award-winning podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, where she shares practical strategies for building a happier, healthier, more creative life, Gretchen is also the bestselling author of The Happiness Project, The Four Tendencies, Better Than Before, Life in Five Senses, and now Secrets of Adulthood, a delightful collection of her signature aphorisms—concise, thought-provoking truths gathered from her own experiences and reflections on human nature. Today, Gretchen shares a wealth of bite-sized, digestible truths with Jen and Amy that acknowledge problems everyone faces.  “What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.” “Outer order contributes to inner calm.” “A strong voice repels as well as attracts.” “Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.” And our personal favorite, “Choose the bigger life.” Gretchen also delves into the Four Tendencies and helps Jen and Amy unpack their profiles to better understand whether they are an Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, or Rebel.  Anyone want to take bets? Thought-provoking Quotes: “Happier people are  more interested in the problems of the world. And they're more interested in the problems of the people around them. They're more likely to volunteer. They're more likely to vote. They're more likely to donate their time or their money. They're more likely to help out if someone needs a hand. When we're happier, we're able to turn outward and to think about the problems of the world.” – Gretchen Rubin “Action is the antidote to anxiety.” – Gretchen Rubin “There's really no more eloquent way to put this: one of the best ways to make friends is to make friends with the friends of your friends.” – Gretchen Rubin “When we're doing something hard, it feels like the times are hard." – Gretchen Rubin Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Camino de Santiago Pilgrimage - https://santiago-compostela.net/ Secrets of Adulthood: Simple Truths for Our Complex Lives by Gretchen Rubin - https://amzn.to/4kq8TzF The Happier App - https://thehappierapp.com/ David Sedaris The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin - https://amzn.to/3S9OXox The Four Tendencies Quiz - https://gretchenrubin.com/quiz/the-four-tendencies-quiz/  The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt - https://amzn.to/43iUOgg The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt - https://amzn.to/43tjDaF 5 Things Making Me Happy Newsletter - https://gretchenrubin.com/newsletter/5-things-making-me-happy-september-16-2022/ Sandwich: A Novel by Catherine Newman - https://amzn.to/4m9KGiy Guest's Links: Website - https://gretchenrubin.com/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/gretchenrubin/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/GretchenRubin Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/GretchenRubin TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@gretchenrubin Connect with Jen!Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/ Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmakerJen's Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/ Jen's Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmakerJen's YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lion by Sonya Walger is an autobiographical novel detailing the life and loss of her complicated and charismatic father. Walger joins us to talk about writing themes of grief and love, crafting her own experience into fiction, nonlinear storytelling and more with cohost, Jenna Seery. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.                     New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app. Featured Books (Episode): Lion by Sonya Walger On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Her First American by Lore Segal Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh Scoop by Evelyn Waugh The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt's debut novel "The Last Samurai" almost didn't get published, but since then has become a cult classic, and it also made the now infamous NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list.In today's episode we break down the book, which we read for our January book club, and Andy gives us his feelings on finally reading a book written by a woman.Become part of our growing book community!patreon.com/LifeonBooksJoin the Life on Books mailing list to stay up to date on all of our latest book giveaways, projects, and more!https://linktw.in/BRYAnVhBooks mentioned in this episode:The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitthttps://amzn.to/4hsDhI6https://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780811...Galapagos by Kurt Vonneguthttps://amzn.to/4hOqVdhhttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780385...Mother Night by Kurt Vonneguthttps://amzn.to/40Lh5CmSlaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonneguthttps://amzn.to/3CEfE0phttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780440...Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonneguthttps://amzn.to/41109cihttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780385...The Tunnel by William H. Gass2666 by Roberto Bolanohttps://amzn.to/3CuyE1rhttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780312...Between Parentheses by Roberto Bolanohttps://amzn.to/4k1ztjhhttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780811...The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolanohttps://amzn.to/4hJHfMyUnknown University by Roberto Bolanohttps://amzn.to/4jOlM76Something Happened by Joseph Hellerhttps://amzn.to/40Fnui8https://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780684...Troll by Dave Fitzgeraldhttps://amzn.to/3CvVR3ahttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9781952...Red Sorghum by Mo Yanhttps://amzn.to/42LI5nDhttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780140...The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Feihttps://amzn.to/4hfJjw1The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolanohttps://amzn.to/4aDElqdhttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780312...Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchonhttps://amzn.to/4hNGMsChttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780143...Invisible Man by Ralph Ellisonhttps://amzn.to/415ibKDhttps://bookshop.org/a/103053/9780679...Aputure Light Domehttps://amzn.to/3WptlGkRode Wireless Micshttps://amzn.to/3YpavBWShure SM7Bhttps://amzn.to/46vyQbk

Did you know that YOU can teach YOURSELF ANCIENT GREEK? In this week's episode of The Infinite Library, John and Ben are discussing "The Last Samurai" by Helen DeWitt. Topics of conversation include autodidacticism, sleazy British men, and the value of the humanities in troubling times.

Note: This episode was recorded at the end of December, hence all the chat about the new year & related resolutions. In the grand scheme of things, it still is the new year, so I don't wanna hear it. This was also recorded before we revised our publishing schedule to make actual sense, so ignore all the confusing discussion about when the books are being read vs. discussed. Look to our instagram as your guide. XOXO January's book: The Waves by Virginia WoolfEve's 2025 planner is from New Chapter Studio Special shout out to AppointedOther books: Anything by Helen DeWitt. She's literally a goddess. The Last Samurai, The English Understand Wool, Some Trick Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron Our Instagram: somethingwereadpodOur email: somethingweread@gmail.comFebruary's book: White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky Closing poem: “At the New Year” by Kenneth Patchen Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Irish author Claire Keegan is generally considered to be one of the finest writers working today. ‘Every word is the right word in the right place, and the effect is resonant and deeply moving' said Hilary Mantel, of her work, while for Colm Toiíbín ‘Claire Keegan makes her moments real – and then she makes them matter.' Praise indeed, but what did our brand new podcast book club make of So Late in the Day, her most recently published short story? We'll be reporting back. And we're also rounding up a few stand-outs from our recent reading piles, from J. L. Carr's meditative classic A Month in the Country to V.E. Schwab's latest fantasy novel The Fragile Threads of Power. Book list So Late in the Day and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt, The Road to the City by Natalia Ginsberg in the Storybook ND series Tom Lake, Bel Canto and The Dutch House by Ann Patchett The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer The Secrets of Sir Richard Kenworthy by Julia Quinn Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey A Month in the Country, by J. L. Carr Soldier, Sailor by Claire Kilroy The Fragile Threads of Power by V.E. Schwab Join us on Patreon Here's the link for all the details, find out what extras you'll receive. Connect with us Find us on Instagram or Facebook @bookclubreviewpodcast On X at @bookclubrvwpod or email us at thebookclubreview@gmail.com, we love to hear from you

Chris and Jenny chat upcoming book to movie/tv adaptations in today's episode as well as the usual current and recent reads. Join our Patreon for an extended version of the episode (all Oppenheimer chat).Get in touchInstagram | TikTok | Voice message | Substack | Patreon | Ko-fiBooks mentionedWestern Lane by Chetna MarooStudy for Obedience  by Sarah BernsteinWe Have Always Lived in the Castle  by Shirley JacksonThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati RoyThe Last Samurai by Helen DeWittFairy Tale by Stephen KingParis: The Memoir by Paris HiltonAmerican Prometheus by Kai Bird and ‎Martin J. SherwinAre You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy BlumeThe Wheel of Time series by Robert JordanWicked! by Gregory MaguireLessons in Chemistry by Bonnie GarmusThe Doll Factory by Elizabeth MacnealDune  by Frank HerbertKillers of the Flower Moon by David GrannThree Women by Lisa TaddeoThe Night Circus by Erin MorgensternTomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabriella ZevinBuriel Rites by Hannah KentThe Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins ReidCirce by Madeleine MillerOther stuff mentionedVulture article - Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai Is the Best Book of the Century (for Now)Literary Disco PodcastJury Duty (tv series)Mississippi Burning (film)Support The Bookcast ClubYou can support the podcast on Patreon. Our tiers start at £2 a month. Rewards include early access to the podcast, 'close friends' feed on Instagram, monthly bonus episodes, tailored book recommendations and books in the post.  You can now try our bonus tier FREE for 7 days. If you would like to make a one-off donation you can do so on Ko-fi.  A free way to show your support is to mention us on social media, rate us on Spotify or review us on Apple Podcasts.NewsletterSign up to our monthly newsletter on Substack for more book recommendations, reviews, new releases, podcast recommendations and the latest podcast news.  Come and chat to us in the comments.Support the show

Author and cultural critic Olivia Laing, whose books include The Lonely City, Funny Weather and Everybody, is joined by fashion writer and curator Charlie Porter, of What Artists Wear and Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, and presenter Harriett Gilbert, to talk about the books they love. Olivia recommends Bad Blood by literary critic Lorna Sage - a memoir of her eccentric childhood and adolescence in 1940s rural Wales. Charlie loves Honey From A Weed by Patience Gray, a cookbook which exalts local knowledge and seasonal cooking, taking readers to a time and place far removed from modern life. And Harriett brings The English Understand Wool, a 2022 novella by American author Helen DeWitt, which takes unexpected twists and turns and which Harriett argues, merits reading more than once. Comment on instagram: @agoodreadbbc Produced by Eliza Lomas for BBC Audio

What have Julie and Eve been reading lately? Find out in this new bonus episode, in which Eve talks about the legacy of her dad, a constant reader, the brilliance of Helen Dewitt (again), the searing poetry of Louise Glück, and a light and highly readable beach read. Meanwhile, Julie's been pursuing a reading vision, discovering the propulsive, mind-expanding books—and book recommendations—of S. A. Cosby. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to Book Dreams, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Lit Up's final episode of 2022, Angie and Ruby (a brilliant colleague who works on the Sugar23 Books imprint, and spent a past life as a bookseller at New York City's iconic Three Lives & Company), catch up about their year in great books, titles they've loved, what's topping their list for winter break marathon reading sessions, and recommended book gifts for all the avid readers in your lives this holiday season. Books we talk about on this ep include: The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-english-understand-wool-helen-dewitt/17643357?ean=9780811230070 The Midcoast by Adam White Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus Acne: A Memoir by Laura Chinn The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness by Ingrid Fetell Lee Fly Girl: A Memoir by Ann Hood Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain The World of Natural Wine: What It Is, Who Makes It, and Why It Matters by Aaron Ayscough Catch up on any episodes you missed this year at https://www.lituppodcast.com/ (or wherever you like to listen!). More to come in the shiny new year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welche Geschichten erzählt die Gegenwartsliteratur? In der letzten Podcast-Folge des Jahres ziehen wir Bilanz und diskutieren mit Marie Schmidt und Carlos Spoerhase narrative Trends und Konjunkturen, die sich in jüngerer Zeit abgezeichnet haben: Welche Kritik gibt es am Trauma-Plot? Kennt die neuere Literatur noch klassische Liebesgeschichten? Wollen Leser:innen von Belletristik nur gefälliges Entertainment in Form altbekannter Stile und Motive? Und ist der Bedarf an autofiktionaler Literatur irgendwann gedeckt?Marie Schmidt ist Literaturkritikerin bei der Süddeutschen ZeitungCarlos Spoerhase ist Literaturwissenschaftler in München.In der Januar-Folge sprechen wir mit Aaron Lahl über Ethnopsychoanalyse.Literatur: Annie Ernaux, Der junge Mann. Aus dem Französischen von Sonja Finck, Suhrkamp, im Erscheinen.Benoîte Groult, Salz auf unserer Haut, Knaur 2017.Christian Kracht, Eurotrash, Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2021.Hanya Yanagihara, Ein wenig Leben, Hanser Berlin 2015.Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool, New Directions 2022.Hervé Le Tellier, Die Anomalie, Rowohlt 2021.Honoré de Balzac, Glanz und Elend der Kurtisanen, aus dem Französischen von Rudolf von Bitter, Hanser 2022.Laureate J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, Viking Press 2003.Lea Ypi, Frei. Erwachsenwerden am Ende der Geschichte, aus dem Englischen von Eva Bonné, Suhrkamp 2022.Leif Randt, Allegro Pastell, Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2020.Martin Kordić, Jahre mit Martha, S.Fischer 2022.Moritz Baßler, Populärer Realismus, Vom International Style gegenwärtigen Erzählens, C.H. Beck 2022.Natasha Brown, Assembly, Penguin Books 2021.Parul Sehgal, The Case Against the Trauma Plot, in: The New Yorker (2022); 10, online unter https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot (18.12.2022).Sebastian Fitzek, Mimik, Droemer 2022.Thea Sternheim, Tagebücher 1903–1971, herausgegeben und ausgewählt von Thomas Ehrsam und Regula Wyss, Wallstein Verlag 2011.Virgina Woolf, On Being Ill, in: The Criterion (1926), January.Kontakt: podcast@his-online.de Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join our hosts Frances, Dorian, and Rebecca as they discuss TO WRITE AS IF ALREADY DEAD by Kate Zambreno, and chat about their recent reading. For our next episode, we will discuss DUCKS by Kate Beaton.  Books mentioned:  To Write As If Already Dead by Kate Zambreno To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Herve Guibert Drifts by Kate Zambreno Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, translated from the French by Frank Wynne A Barthes Reader edited by Susan Sontag The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd Written Lives by Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain Indelicacy by Amina Cain The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt 3 Streets by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett Ducks by Kate Beaton Check out other relevant links in our blogpost. Visit us online at onebrightbook.com. Browse our bookshelves at Bookshop.org. Comments? Write us at onebrightmail at gmail Find us on Twitter at @pod_bright Frances: @nonsuchbook Dorian: @ds228 Rebecca: @ofbooksandbikes Dorian's blog: https://eigermonchjungfrau.blog/ Rebecca's newsletter: https://readingindie.substack.com/ Our theme music was composed and performed by Owen Maitzen. You can find more of his music here: https://soundcloud.com/omaitzen.

In this episode, we get excited about two new book releases: 'The Most Likely Club' by Elyssa Friedland and 'The English Understand Wool' by Helen DeWitt. Then Mel tells the twisty story of 'Rebecca The Musical' on Broadway.  BOOKS The Most Likely Club by Elyssa Friedland https://bit.ly/3dSlbnG The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt https://bit.ly/3y4cr4J ** DISTRACTION OF THE WEEK ** Reddit explainer https://bit.ly/3RnFZkP The Guardian on the fraud https://bit.ly/3RnEiU8 Documentary https://youtu.be/roIueOG7_N4 Promo video for Broadway https://youtu.be/B-SZOwrhTds Promo video for Vienna https://youtu.be/W_zJ0vOWQRg Transcript of this episode https://bit.ly/3SpYkPe The Library of Lost Time is a Strong Sense of Place Production! https://strongsenseofplace.com Do you enjoy our show? Want access to fun bonus content? Please support our work on Patreon. Every little bit helps us keep the show going and makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside - https://www.patreon.com/strongsenseofplace

The second novel by by literary wunderkind, Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods is probably the most challenging book we've yet featured on Backlisted. Usually described as a satire on American capitalism, it is the diasarmingly upbeat and funny tale of Joe, a struggling salesman, who develops a new office product that he believes serves an urgent need in modern corporate life. Quite what that product is and how it works requires a delicacy in description and a warning for listeners: this is not one for family listening. We are joined by returning guests, novelist and playwright Marie Philips and writer and performer, Ben Moor. The episode also features Andy rediscovering a lost folk horror classic from the 1970s - The Autumn People (also known as The Autumn Ghosts) by Ruth M. Arthur while John is blown away by the force of Sarah Churchwell's incandescent and incisive account of an American classic: The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells

Seth on Twitter @wastemailing Instagram @wastemailinglist wastemailinglist@gmail.com https://wastemailinglist.substack.com Gateway Books: House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer 2.Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan 3.Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Currently Reading: 1. Anniversaries: A Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl by Uwe Johnson, translated by Damion Searls 2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Anticipated Reads: 1. William T Vollmann 2. Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter 3. Blinding: The Left Wing by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter 4. A Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine translated by Ralph Manheim 5. Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet 6. Devil House by John Darnielle 7. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt 8. Malina by Ingborg Bachman translated by Philip Boehm 9. The Complete Works of Primo Levi compiled by Ann Goldstein Top 10: 10. I'm Thinking of Endings Things by Iain Reid 9. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 8. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 7. Satantango by László Krasznahorkai, translated by George Szirtes 6. The Burrow by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann 5. In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan 4. Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter 3. Story of the Eye by George Bataille, translated by Joachim Neugrochal (Correction (1:11:30) - Seth refers to the narrator's love interest as Marcelle where he meant to say Simone. Marcelle is a secondary character in the story.) 2. The Recognitions by William Gaddis 1. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

This week the Spine Crackers, along with OMEGA SPECIAL GUEST Daniel from the Viva La Dude podcast, tackle Helen DeWitt's genre and form-bending chonky boi novel about family and the nature of genius The Last Samurai (no not that one you rubes).

What we read in this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.  Books: The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett; Field Work, Mischa Berlinski; I Remember You, Yrsa Sigurdardóttir; Kindred, Octavia Butler; The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton; This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone; Cleanness, Garth Greenwell; The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Suzanne Collins; Red Rising trilogy, Pierce Brown; The House in the Cerulean Sea, T.J. Klune; An Extraordinary Union, Alyssa Cole; Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich; Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell; Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life, Nina Stibbe; The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt; Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, Francine Prose; The Sally Lockhart series, Phillip Pullman; Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; The Gifted School, Bruce Holsinger; The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, M. John Harrison; Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, Anna Wiener; Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia; The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard; The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin.  Articles: John le Carré obit (NYT) Barbara Cartland (Jezebel)

Episode 44! The year of 2019 in review - which books and podcast episodes did we enjoy reading / making the most? Marc and Trevor pick their Top 5...Trevor read "Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh and Marc read "The Last Samurai" by Helen DeWitt

This week, Julia, Rider, and Tod discuss Helen Dewitt’s novel The Last Samurai, which, they are compelled to point out, has nothing to do with the horrible Tom Cruise movie of the same name. Recently named the Best Book of the 2000s by Vulture, the Literary Disco trio debates the novel’s current relevance, the pressure of child prodigies, and how we deal with the family we’re given. Will they recommend the book? Listen to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

White Whale time! Specifically George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Yes, Michael actually read the damn thing and Hannah read it for like the 60th time. Get their feelings about the book, some background on George herself, and a dose of what H & M are *actually* reading. Thank you for a great season two!! Books mentioned: My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead; The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt; Lethal White, Robert Galbraith. Resources: Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker, Henry James negging Middlemarch. Email us at thatbookpod@gmail.com. Friend us on Goodreads and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Lydia Kiesling tricked herself into writing a novel by starting with small vignettes about her feelings as a new parent and setting them in a northern California that's rarely explored in literature. The result of tying those scenes together is her excellent debut, THE GOLDEN STATE. She and James talk about her work as editor of THE MILLIONS, spreadsheets, local newspapers, present tense, and barfing toddlers. Plus, Shuchi Saraswat from Brookline Booksmith talks about the Transnational Literature Series and book sales.  - Lydia Kiesling: http://www.lydiakiesling.com/ Lydia and James Discuss:  CAL SUNDAY MAGAZINE  Sarah Smarsh  Hamilton College  OFF COURSE by Michelle Huneven  MODOC COUNTY RECORD  David Lodge  Sarah Blackwood  LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis  Tobias Wolff  Brandon Taylor  THE MILLIONS  Laura van den Berg  Emily Bell  Charles Dickens  THE GRADUATE dir by Mike Nichols  C. Max Magee  THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt  - Shuchi Saraswat: https://www.shuchisaraswat.com/ Shuchi and James discuss:  Brookline Booksmith  The Transnational Literature Series  KINGDOM OF OLIVE AND ASH ed by Chabon & Waldman  THIS IS NOT A BORDER ed by Soueif & Hamilton  Ru Freeman  Khury Petersen-Smith BEACON PRESS  Tom Hallock  HILLBILLY ELEGY by J.D. Vance  VISITATION by Jenny Erpenbeck  GO WENT GONE by Jenny Erpenbeck  Laura van den Berg  DISORIENTAL by Negar Djavadi POSO WELLS by Gabriela Aleman Coolidge Corner Theatre  PERSEPOLIS dir by Marjane Satrapi  Words Without Borders  The Forum Network  Bob Woodward  EXIT WEST by Mohsin Hamid  HOME FIRE by Kamila Shamsie  PACHINCO by Min Jin Lee  THE INCENDIARIES by R.O. Kwon  THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner  CIRCE by Madeline Miller  SONG OF ACHILLES by Madeline Miller  BookScan   - http://tkpod.com / tkwithjs@gmail.com / Twitter: @JamesScottTK Instagram: tkwithjs / Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tkwithjs/

Americans love a child prodigy: Shirley Temple, Bobby Fischer, Henry Cowell … the list goes on. There’s just something about kid geniuses that enchants us—fascination at how differently they must see the world, and envy at how they've got it made. But in her new book, Off the Charts, Ann Hulbert looks at a range of children who've made a splash over the past century, and whose lives have informed our approach to child-rearing and education. Nature versus nurture is just the start of the debate—and it turns out there’s no model for raising any kind of child, genius or not, and no guarantee of success, whatever that means.Go beyond the episode:Ann Hulbert’s Off the Charts: The Hidden lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies (and read an excerpt here)Ann Hulbert lists her top five books on precocious childrenOur top book for a glimpse into the life of a precocious child? Helen DeWitt’s cult novel, The Last Samurai“Promethea Unbound,” by Mike Mariana, about a child genius raised in poverty whose life was nearly destroyed by violenceAt the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik puts Off the Charts in conversation with a slate of other books on childrearing in “How to Raise a Prodigy”Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Americans love a child prodigy: Shirley Temple, Bobby Fischer, Henry Cowell … the list goes on. There’s just something about kid geniuses that enchants us—fascination at how differently they must see the world, and envy at how they've got it made. But in her new book, Off the Charts, Ann Hulbert looks at a range of children who've made a splash over the past century, and whose lives have informed our approach to child-rearing and education. Nature versus nurture is just the start of the debate—and it turns out there’s no model for raising any kind of child, genius or not, and no guarantee of success, whatever that means.Go beyond the episode:Ann Hulbert’s Off the Charts: The Hidden lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies (and read an excerpt here)Ann Hulbert lists her top five books on precocious childrenOur top book for a glimpse into the life of a precocious child? Helen DeWitt’s cult novel, The Last Samurai“Promethea Unbound,” by Mike Mariana, about a child genius raised in poverty whose life was nearly destroyed by violenceAt the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik puts Off the Charts in conversation with a slate of other books on childrearing in “How to Raise a Prodigy”Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The co-creator and co-writer of the #1 international hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale and New York Times bestselling co-author of the novel of same name, Jeffrey Cranor, dropped by the show to talk about the importance of collaboration, deadlines, and bad writing. In addition to producing and touring with the theater ensemble The New York Neo-Futurists, the playwright and author tours with live shows for the Night Vale Presents production banner, co-created with Joseph Fink. Night Vale Presents now produces four podcasts that regularly sit at the top of the charts — including Within the Wires, also created by the author — and recently published two volumes of episode transcripts that include extras for fans of their original show. Welcome to Night Vale has been described as “NPR meets The Twilight Zone,” a sci-fi broadcast about a small desert community where strange mythologies abound, and all conspiracy theory is potentially real. If you’re a fan of The Writer Files, please click subscribe to automatically see new interviews. If you missed the first half you can find it right here. In Part Two of this file Jeffrey Cranor and I discuss: The power of productive procrastination How ‘making the familiar strange’ produces great writing Why it’s really hard to be good all the time How the battle against expectation can surprise readers The art of great audiobooks as performance Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Audible is Offering a Free Audiobook Download with a 30-day Trial: Grab Your Free Audiobook Here – audibletrial.com/rainmaker Welcome To Night Vale Welcome To Night Vale on Facebook Night Vale Presents Jeffrey Cranor on Amazon Jeffrey Cranor’s website NY Neo-Futurists Theater Company Jeffrey Cranor on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter The Transcript How #1 Hit Podcast Welcome to Night Vale Co-Creator Jeffrey Cranor Writes: Part Two Voiceover: Rainmaker FM Kelton Reid: And welcome back to the Writer Files. I’m still your host, Kelton Reid, here to take you on yet another tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of renowned scribes. In part two of this file, the co-creator and co-writer of the number one international hit podcast, Welcome to Night Vale, and New York Times best selling co-author of the novel of the same name, Jeffrey Cranor, returned to talk to me about the importance of collaboration, deadlines, and bad writing. In addition to producing and touring with the theater ensemble, The New York Neo-Futurists, the playwright and author tours with live shows for the Night Vale Presents production banner, co-created with Joseph Fink. Night Vale Presents now produces four podcasts that sit atop the charts, including Within the Wires, also created by the author. They’ve recently published two volumes of episode transcripts that include extras for fans of their original show. Welcome to Night Vale has been described as NPR meets The Twilight Zone, a sci-fi broadcast about a small desert community where strange mythologies abound and all conspiracy theory is potentially real. In part two of this file, Jeffrey and I discuss the power of productive procrastination, how making the familiar strange produces great writing, why it’s really hard to be good all the time, how the battle against expectation can surprise readers, and the art of great audio books as performance. If you’re a fan of the Writer Files, please click subscribe to automatically see new interviews as soon as they’re published. If you missed the first half of this show, you can find it in the archives on iTunes, on WriterFiles.FM, and in the show notes . This episode of The Writer Files is brought to you by Audible. I’ll have more on their special offer later in the show, but if you love audiobooks or you’ve always wanted to give them a try, you can check out over 180,000 titles right now at Audibletrial.com/Rainmaker. The Power of Productive Procrastination Kelton Reid: That’s cool, I like that. Do you lean into procrastination or do you kind of have some tricks for beating it? Jeffrey Cranor: Oh, I definitely lean into procrastination. I’m really bad at procrastination. I think the number one thing that helps me with procrastination is allowing myself to put something off, as long as I am doing something else productive in its stead. I think that if I find myself, I don’t know, spending too long, just like, “Oh, you know what? I’m just going to hang out and play a game while listening to a podcast,” or something, like really unproductive things. Not that those are bad for you, but over too much time, they do become unproductive because they’re taking away from writing time or actual work. But I think there’s always some business to be done as a writer. For Joseph and me doing Night Vale Presents, there’s a lot. It’s a business, right? So we do have to respond to emails, and do make decisions, and go back and forth. A lot of times I’ll take some time away from writing to just get myself in front of a computer, do those little things. Return some emails, check everything, play the game of, Can I get to inbox zero? Stuff like that. Those are good procrastination things, because they’re in front of the computer, which is where you should be writing. They’re still kind of writing, even if they’re not finishing the novel or the new episode, but just kind of get your body into the framework of what you should be doing. Those are the main things. Because sometimes, I don’t know. Sometimes you just look at your computer from 20 feet away and you’re like, “I don’t want to go near that thing. I just am not feeling it. I don’t want to do that.” Kelton Reid: Yeah, and your brain likes those little victories, doesn’t it? I think Austin Kleon, and I’m sure lots of other people, call it productive procrastination, where you’re just switching modes so your brain can focus on something else in the background, do that incubation stuff that it likes so much. Cool, man. I’d love to pick your brain a little bit about creativity if you’ve got some more time. Jeffrey Cranor: Sure. How Making the Familiar Strange Produces Great Writing Kelton Reid: How do you define creativity in your own words? Jeffrey Cranor: I think it’s just, for me, it’s about original expression. Creativity is, I guess, a combination of finding your own voice within the confines of everything else that helped to shape it. So I think, for me, creativity is walking that balance of creating an original thing, something that is all yours, but using all of the tools and all of the components and tropes and devices that have come before. It is kind of like recycling, in some ways. You’re taking old soda bottles and melting them down and repacking them as something else. I think you can’t be truly creative without having consumed a lot of other art in the past. You have to have a lot of that experience and know how to make a certain thing. But there’s always a part of you that is truly unique and original. Everybody grows up differently. We may have a lot of similar experiences, but everybody has their own unique take on the world. Creativity, to me, is taking your standard mystery novel or your standard sitcom, or whatever your real, like set structure, and then adding your own unique viewpoint inside of that whenever you write that yourself. I think, to me, it’s building out structures that are familiar, and then finding a new way to present them that the people haven’t done before. Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. You definitely do that with Welcome to Night Vale, and I’ve heard it described as NPR meets The Twilight Zone. It definitely has that. Has anyone ever used the adjective phantasmagoric? Jeffrey Cranor: I don’t know. Kelton Reid: Okay, good. Jeffrey Cranor: Yeah, that’s good. Kelton Reid: I want to be the first. Jeffrey Cranor: Do it. Kelton Reid: I don’t know why it came to mind, but it’s got those elements of the Theater of the Absurd meets kind of like X-Files, and then procedural, and then beautiful, small-town NPR stuff, which is all just an amazing remix of stuff we know, but it’s so different. It’s truly brilliant. Sorry to digress there back to that. When do you think you feel the most creative? Jeffrey Cranor: That’s a really good question. I feel the most creative … The cheeky way of saying that, I think, is after I’ve created something really good, then I look back and say, “Oh, I was in a really creative mood! I was really, really feeling it then.” It’s a little bit true that a lot of times I don’t know how creative I feel until later, after I’ve made a thing. Then I can look back on it and sort of feel that. Because some days, I don’t know. Some days I feel like I just created lackluster garbage. That’s harsh, that’s not what I meant to say. Some days I feel like I created something that just isn’t as special as other days. Then, when I go back and look at it later, I’m like, “Oh, this is fine. This is good. This is completely usable. I like this.” And feel like, “Oh, I was feeling very creative.” Some days you feel like, “Man, I’m really killing this!” And you go look at it later and you’re like, “Wow, this is completely overwrought. Super overwritten.” It is a little tough. I think usually the feeling itself of feeling creative usually happens about half an hour to an hour into working on something. It usually, if I feel myself on a roll … A couple days ago I really cranked through like 6,000 words, and I did it over a course of a long stretch of an afternoon. I just felt, “Man, I’m really, really working through this. This is flowing really, really well. Man, I just had a really good joke to insert into this paragraph,” and, “Oh, this really feels good.” A lot of it is just getting into a rhythm, and if I can get myself into the rhythm, I’m feeling very creative. Now, whether or not that stuff is any good I’ll know a few days later when I go look at it again. Kelton Reid: I think sci-fi author Andy Weir had a very similar thought on it, and it was just that he looks back on these … He just makes sure that he writes it. He doesn’t always feel awesome when he’s writing it, but looking back, it didn’t matter. That those things were equally as important to the process. That’s cool. Do you have a creative muse at the moment? Jeffrey Cranor: I don’t. Oh, no. I really don’t. I try to put myself in an environment that feels ergonomic and positive, like a good energy. I just finished setting up an office space. We have a guest bedroom that’s pretty large and it faces out towards the trees and the hills out here in Hudson Valley, New York, so I have a really nice view of the mountains from where I sit, which is really great. It provides a nice thing of every now and then you just look up and you’re like, “Oh, look, there’s a blue jay! That’s really great. I think for me, my muse is mostly just having a positive environment. It’s very hard for me to write when I am traveling. We tour a lot for Welcome to Night Vale. In tour times, Joseph and I have gotten to the point now where, we have written things on tour, but on tour we’ve learned to not pretend like we’re going to get anything done when we’re traveling. Because when you’re on an airplane, airplanes are inherently uncomfortable and stressful. It’s hard to sit and write in that little tiny cramped seat where somebody leans back into your lap. Hotel rooms, equally so. Especially when what you’re doing is touring, so you arrive at a hotel at three in the afternoon. You have an hour and a half before you then have to go the theater and do soundcheck. Then you’re backstage at a theater, and while you’re not on stage the whole time, you’re just around a bunch of people and eventually you’re going to have to pack everything up, Maybe go out and meet fans. By eleven o’clock that night you’re like, “Well, I got to go to sleep and get up at nine in the morning and do this all over again.” It’s really hard to find that time to be like, “I have this really relaxing positive environment to really focus.” Yeah, so my muse is quiet and peace. Why It s Really Hard to Be Good All the Time Kelton Reid: Nice, nice. What do you think, in your estimation, makes a writer great? Jeffrey Cranor: Doing it a lot. I think more than anything else, that’s it. I remember reading … Oh, God, I’m going to forget the name of it … Steve Martin’s last book, basically his memoir about his stand-up career. He has some moment in it where he talked about doing stand-up comedy, and he didn’t do it for very long and he was great at it. But he did talk about the idea of greatness. He says if you’re naturally inclined to comedy and you’re really good at it, you will find that it becomes easy to be great. What’s really hard is being good all the time, because in doing your stand-up act, you can’t just be great and have a great show and then the next night be okay. Everybody there needs to laugh. That’s the whole point of your job. So you need to find a way to be good all the time. I think that comes from constant experience. In fact, when I’ve gone to see stand-up comedy … I remember going one night to the Comedy Cellar in New York City, and I remember the night that I was there there was some really great comedians. Aziz Ansari performed, and Amy Schumer performed that night. This was a couple years ago. They were great. I really love them. They’re super funny. But I remember at the end of the night, the last comedian was a guy named Allan Havey, who I’ve never seen in person before but I knew who he was. He’s in his 50’s, if not 60. He’s been at it since I was a kid. I remember him on Short Attention Span Theater and Comedy Central when I was in High School. He was amazing! I think what made him amazing wasn’t the jokes, because if you’re going to ask comedians of that night to write down their jokes, I’m probably gravitating towards Aziz Ansari and Amy Schumer, and just the quality of the craftsmanship of the joke. But what made Allan Havey great is that he could tell you any joke and it would have been brilliant, because he knew how to work the crowd. He was doing a full-on performance. I think that’s the sign of a really, really great comedian that can do that night after night, no matter the crowd that he’s in. He knows what people are saying and what people are doing, and how to use their energy back at them. I think with a writer, while it’s not performative, I think being able to write all the time and publish as much as you can, even if it’s just a blog, even if it’s just jokes on Twitter, just getting something out there and constantly making a thing is really, really vital. I think when you do that a lot, you get really, really good at it. Even if you’re not making best selling hits, right? Even if you’re not creating the next Gone Girl, or Between the World and Me, or something. You are still creating great things that people will truly enjoy reading. Kelton Reid: Those authors wrote some bad stuff at the beginning. All writers do. Jeffrey Cranor: Sure. Kelton Reid: To start out, it’s that iterative process. You got to ship to know what you’re dealing with and forge that. Jeffrey Cranor: It’s a very hard career to come at late. I mean, most careers are hard to come at late, but it’s not one you can easily fake. It’s like weight lifting. You can’t just suddenly be an offensive linemen. You really have to work for years and years to do that. Kelton Reid: That’s crushing my dream, but yeah, no, it’s true. The overnight successes we hear about in any of the major writing fields, so often have cut their teeth, even if they’re just the best selling debut novelist in their 40s or 50s, they cut their teeth in writing, but maybe not in a way that you might imagine it. They weren’t writing novel after novel. They might have been copywriters, or journalists, or playwrights, or whatever. But you see that so often, that kind of, “Oh, overnight success! Debut novelist! Jeffrey Cranor: Nope! And sometimes, even if it’s a very first novel they’ve ever written, which there’s a lot of people who, in their first novel, have a huge success with it, but I would also counter that, yeah, just like you said, they’ve probably done a lot of other things prior to that. In addition to that, I bet that novel took a lot of iterations to get right. Kelton Reid: Absolutely. Jeffrey Cranor: There’s just a lot that goes into it. Kelton Reid: So many novels start with a short story, or just an idea, and obviously become take on a life of their own. We will be right back after a very short break. Thanks so much for listening to The Writer Files. This episode of The Writer Files is brought to you by Audible, offering over 180,000 audiobook titles to choose from. Audible seamlessly delivers the world’s both fiction and nonfiction to your iPhone, Android, Kindle or computer. For Rainmaker FM listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook download with a 30 day trial to give you the opportunity to check them out. Grab your free audiobook right now by visiting Audibletrial.com/Rainmaker. I just hopped over there to grab Stephen King’s epic novel 11/22/63, about an English teacher who goes back in time to prevent the assassination of JFK. You can download your pick or any other audiobook free by heading over to Audibletrial.com/Rainmaker. To download your free audiobook today, go to Audibletrial.com/Rainmaker. How the Battle Against Expectation Can Surprise Readers Kelton Reid: Do you have a couple favorite authors sitting on your nightstand, or playing in your headphones? Jeffrey Cranor: Let me try to answer that. I’m going to turn to my left and look at my shelf. I do. One of my favorite authors is a playwright named Will Eno. I love Will Eno’s work, and I feel like, when we write and when we first start really getting into writing, or a style of writing, we like to emulate other writers, and Will Eno’s a person I think I’ve always wanted to emulate. He writes plays, he writes dialog plays, but he also has a whole bunch of monologue pieces. The first of those that I read was a play called Thom Pain (based on nothing), and it is a solo performance. It was originally performed in New York by the actor James Urbaniak, who’s been on Welcome to Night Vale since, which is really exciting for me. Will Eno’s work has this ability to be, when you look at it on a page, it’s very simple. The writing structure is simple, but it’s deeply poetic, and very introverted, and it uses the audience really, really well. He’s very confrontational without saying controversial things. There’s some of that in there, but mostly he just always, always makes the audience battle against expectations. He does some really fascinating things with his writing in Thom Pain. There’s a moment when he asks a member of the audience to come up on stage, “I need you for something. Just stand right there.” Then proceeds to continue out the rest of the show without ever using them. So just leaves the person on stage throughout the rest of the show without anything to do, always expecting something about to happen. It’s kind of, you’re used to the improv comedian or the magician needing a volunteer to come up and do a thing, and then you find yourself never used again, and it becomes this really amazing thing for the rest of the audience to watch that happen. Another writer I really, really love is Helen DeWitt. She wrote one of my favorite books of all time, called The Last Samurai. Do you know this book? Kelton Reid: I do, yeah. It’s one I found when I was in creative writing school, and I think it had a limited release, right? Then it went out of print and then it came back. They republished it recently. Jeffrey Cranor: Oh, it might have. I have no idea. I bought it way back in 2003, I think. But yeah, I didn’t know if it went out of print or not. I found out after I read it back then that it was big, hot stuff in the literary world. As in like, here’s a first time novelist and here’s this brilliant novel. All these publishers really want it. And it took her a long, long time to write a second book. Last Samurai, I thought, was so beautiful and immersive. I think it does a similar thing to what Will Eno does, which is to create a fairly simple vocabulary, a fairly simple language. Describing things in not lavish detail, but in enough detail to allow you as the reader, or the viewer in the case of Will, to build out your own world. Some of the really heartfelt moments, or the really scary moments in both of those writers’ work is what they’re not telling you, and what they’re not revealing. Anyways, but yeah, I felt Last Samurai was absolutely beautiful and stunning. Kelton Reid: For sure. Jeffrey Cranor: I just read last year, for the first time, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino. It was brilliant. I’ve never read Calvino’s work and I finally got around to reading it, so I can’t claim him as a favorite author, but that was one of the best things I ve ever read, and it’s tremendous. So welcome to me finally discovering Italo in 2015. Kelton Reid: Yeah, Calvino’s fantastic. And so is Helen DeWitt, and I look forward to checking out the other author you mentioned. Do you have a favorite quote? A lot of writers have a quote just kind of floating over their desk somewhere, or memorized. Do you have one you want to share with writers? Jeffrey Cranor: I do. I guess people still do this with email. I don’t know if you do this with your email or anything. I don’t really notice signatures on email anymore because Gmail usually truncates that stuff, but back in the day people kind of devised a personalized signature at the bottom of their emails and a lot of times it would be a quote. Especially all of my writer and theater friends would have a quote from somebody at the bottom. My friend Joey Rizzolo, who was a member of The New York Neo-Futurists theater company, had a quote at the bottom of his. So when you’d get an email from Joey Rizzolo you’d have the email, and he’d just put ‘Joey,’ and then at the bottom, it would have this quote. The quote said, “We’re writers. Why are we always quoting some other writer? We’re writers, after all. -Joey Rizzolo.” That’s my favorite quote. Kelton Reid: I hope Joey hears this and takes a bow. Jeffrey Cranor: It’s tremendous, and it was so good I wanted to steal it and knew that I couldn’t, and that made me sad. Kelton Reid: Love it. It’s too meta, so I’m going to have to steal it and put it over my desk now. The Art of Great Audiobooks as Performance Kelton Reid: I know we need to wrap here pretty quick. I got a couple fun ones for you. I have this question; do you prefer paper or eBook? I guess I should add, or audiobook? Do you have a preference? Jeffrey Cranor: I love audiobooks. I’ve always loved radio. I’ve always loved listening to things. I hope that’s not heretical to say, but I love audiobooks. There’s a real distinct art to them. I’m much more willing to give up on an audiobook then I am on a printed book, because a printed book, it’s all your fault if you can’t get it right. Whereas the audiobook, sometimes they just don’t translate well for me. Sometimes the performance is just not quite there, or the book doesn’t work as an audiobook. I think, guaranteed, getting a good quality is going to be much better in a book book than in an audiobook, because there’s just so many other moving parts to audiobooks. I just love them. It’s so great when you find great narrators, like Robertson Dean, or George Guidall. There are just so many really good narrators out there that do a fantastic job. Definitely prefer a printed book over an eBook, just because it’s more lasting. It feels more memorable to me. There’s the physical weight and the touch of the pages. I don’t even think I’m being romantic when I say that, I think that’s just physiology. I just think your body is more likely to hold on to information that’s tangible, that you’ve actually touched. That being said, I’m not opposed to eBooks. I travel a lot, so I definitely have to go eBook quite a bit. That’s fine. They’re great. They’re super excellent for travelling, because I don’t have to have five pounds of books in my bag. Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. Hybrid medium is the message. Jeffrey Cranor: Add Marshall McLuhan to my list of people I really love as writers. Kelton Reid: Oh, yeah. The Medium is the Massage. Jeffrey Cranor: Yes. I have that book, too. It’s great. Kelton Reid: My mom recently gave me a vintage copy of that, and I was like, “I think they spelled it wrong. Oh wait, that was intentional.” All right, if you could choose one author from any era for an all-expense paid dinner to your favorite spot in the world, who would you choose and where would you take them? Jeffrey Cranor: That’s a great question. I feel like I might I would one of two things. Partially, there’s a person like Will Eno that I just mentioned a little bit ago, who’s living, not that far from my own age, maybe we’re ten years apart. That’s somebody that I just think, professionally, I would just love to meet, because he’s had such a profound influence on my life. That being said, I don’t know how comfortable I am with meeting people I’m a big fan of. There’s a lot of people I enjoy meeting that I really appreciate their work, but sometimes when you reach the level of “I’m a fan of you,” you just can’t not have shake-voice when you do actually meet them. So I feel like maybe that would be counterproductive. I would be really interested in someone like Jane Austen, if only for the fact of, you have a person who managed to write quite a bit given the time-frame she wrote in, but did not write for a very long time. I think I’m always curious about the level of writing that she was at, which was, we’re talking the upper echelon of Western writers. She was absolutely brilliant. And of that era, there’s so little known. There’s a lot know, but there’s so much that’s been repressed about women’s histories in the history of humankind, and I think that we’re missing so much of her story because we didn’t canonize women the same way we did men. Like, any average man from then. Some just spare Earl or Viscount gets pages in an encyclopedia, and there’s so many women who did not. I think we’re missing a lot of her life, and I would be very interested to know more about her, and more about her writing process, and about who she was during that era. Kelton Reid: Interesting. And where would you go for dinner? Jeffrey Cranor: That’s a great question. Oh, man, there’s a really great restaurant and brewery in Athens, New York, called Crossroads that I really, really enjoy. They always have really excellent stuff, so maybe we’ll go there. My knowledge of restaurants in England is much more limited. Kelton Reid: I skipped over one earlier, but maybe before we get to your writing advice for fellow scribes, you could tell us how Jeffrey Cranor unwinds at the end of a long writing day.? Jeffrey Cranor: I’ll tell you what I did last night after the end of a long writing day, which was, my wife Jillian had gone to the store and got some food, and I finished up right around the time she got home and started making dinner, so I went upstairs and helped make dinner. Chopped up some peppers, and grated some cheese, and made some bread. We poured some wine and had a go at making a flourless chocolate cake, which we hadn’t tried before. I think we over baked it a little bit, but for the most part came out really tasty. It wasn’t super dense, which was really great, if only slightly dry on top. That was a problem. But yeah, cooking and having wine, or a bourbon, something like that. I can’t do that every night, make a flourless chocolate cake and throw back a bunch of wine, stuff like that. I think cooking, having an evening to just cook and have nice food, and things like that, is one of my favorite things to do to unwind. Kelton Reid: Well, to wrap it up here, do you have some advice for your fellow writers on how to keep the ink flowing and cursor moving? Jeffrey Cranor: I think you have to make opportunities for yourself. Self publish, self produce whenever you can. Always give yourself a reason to have to make a thing. Not just you want to make a thing, but make a path that you have to make a thing. If you have a blog, tell people that you put out a new post every 48 hours. At noon every other day, or at Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at three PM, you will have a brand new post about this subject. Make those paths for yourself. Make yourself have to make a thing. When you do that, you feel like you are indebted to more than just yourself. I think that’s the number one thing. Kelton Reid: Lock, stock, and barrel with Jeffrey Cranor, best-selling author, co-creator Welcome to Night Vale and Night Vale Presents worlds. Lots of stuff going on to find out there. Is the best way to connect with that world at welcometonightvale.com? Jeffrey Cranor: I think that’s the best way. Also, we put a lot of updates on our Facebook page and Twitter account, too. Look for all that there. Kelton Reid: I will link to all of those in the show notes. Congrats on the new show Within the Wires, which is fantastic. You can find those wherever fine podcasts are consumed. Does that sound awful? Jeffrey Cranor: That’s great. Wherever you get podcasts. iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever. Kelton Reid: Yeah, absolutely. There’s so much out there to find. What’s your next stop in the live show, the tour? What’s next for you? Jeffrey Cranor: We just started a Europe tour. We’re two shows in. I’m not on that tour yet, but they just did a show in Paris on Monday night and a show in Madrid last night. Tomorrow night they’ll be in Cologne and going on over to Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Prague, Warsaw, and then I’m going to join up on October 20th in Dublin. We’re going to go to Dublin, Brighton, London, and Manchester to close out the month. Kelton Reid: Amazing. Amazing. Jeffrey Cranor: It’s really exciting. Kelton Reid: Seems like you have fans all over the world, and congratulations on all of your successes. I really appreciate you chatting with us about your process. Feel free to come back any time. Jeffrey Cranor: Thanks so much, Kelton. Kelton Reid: Thank you so much for joining me for this half of a tour through the writer’s process. If you enjoy The Writer Files podcast, please subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or a review on iTunes to help other writers find us. For more episodes, or to just leave a comment or a question, you can drop by WriterFiles.FM. You can always chat with me on Twitter @KeltonReid. Cheers. Talk to you next week.

Helen DeWitt is the author of The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods, and, with Ilya Gridnef, Your Name Here. The Last Samurai, originally released by Miramax Books in 2000, is being released in a new edition by New Directions in May 2016. For many years, the book was passed along in secondhand copies among cognoscenti, and I'm glad to see it back in print. Sibylla, a single mother from a long line of frustrated talents, has unusual ideas about child rearing. Yo Yo Ma started piano at the age of two; her son starts at three. J.S.Mill learned Greek at three; Ludo starts at four, reading Homer as they travel round and round the Circle Line. A fatherless boy needs male role models; so she plays the film of Seven Samurai as a running backdrop to his childhood. While Sibylla types out back copies of Carpworld to pay the rent, Ludo, aged five, moves on to Hebrew, Arabic and Japanese, aerodynamics and edible insects of the world - they might come in handy, if he can just persuade his mother he's mature enough to know his father's name. He is bound for knowledge of a less manageable sort, not least about his mother's past. And at the heart of the book is the boy's changing relationship with Sibylla - contradictory, touching and tender. Today, we talk about how desperation breeds creativity, why we should all be able to choose our own parents, and the ecosystem of Berlin cafes. A small correction: in our discussion of coffee drinks at Neues Ufer, the drink served in a small ceramic bowl was incorrectly identified as Kremkaffee; the correct drink name is Milchkaffee. Show Notes Helen's website Her blog, paperpools Helen on twitter Her Wikipedia entry Her books: People mentioned:   Edward Tufte, data display guru. Emanuel Derman, Wall Street quant and professor. Previous guest of the show. John Stuart Mill, Victorian polymath. David Bowie, modern polymath.  

I hope y'all are ready for an awesome episode with author Helen DeWitt. While born in America, Helen's father was in the foreign service. She grew up all over Latin America and later attended the University of Oxford, which is where she earned her PhD. Helen has written two amazing books, The Last Samuri (which has nothing to do with that Tom Cruise film) and Lightning Rods, which was recently named to the Slate/Whiting Second Novel List. She is currently working on her third.This is the website for Beginnings, subscribe on iTunes, follow me on Twitter.

A book that's less a conventional novel than a working-through of a delightfully absurd premise, plus some satire of American offices and their human resources departments. We're even more full of digressions this week than usual, so, you know, forewarned is forearmed and all. Talking points include: Soup viscosity, proper workshop behavior, sexual politics, glory holes, the ideal material for toilet seats, and sticks. Lots and lots of sticks. For more, check out bookfightpod.com.