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Hello and welcome to The Rob Burgess Show. I am, of course, your host, Rob Burgess. On this, our 301st episode, our guest is Carol Snow. Carol Snow is an American author of 10 novels, most recently, “The Girl on the Beach,” a psychological thriller set to be published on June 23. Called “an author to watch” by Booklist, recognition for Snow's previous titles includes: Target Bookmarked Breakout Selection, Amazon Editors' Pick: Best Books of the Month, and Readers' Crown Award Finalist. Foreign rights to Snow's books have been sold to publishers in Germany, Norway, Poland, Indonesia and Hungary. A former contributor to Salon's “Mothers Who Think” column, her writing has also appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Park City Magazine. Carol Snow holds a BA in psychology from Brown University and an MA in teaching English from Boston College. A native of New Jersey, she has lived all over the U.S., as well as in Strasbourg, France, and London. Married with two adult children, she now splits her time between Cape Cod and Southern California. To learn more about Carol Snow and her books, please visit www.carolsnow.com. Follow her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/ashburgess/ and subscribe to her YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2Bis7mhGmekVi0ZioJFOg?app=desktop Follow me on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/robaburg.bsky.social Follow me on Mastodon: newsie.social/@therobburgessshow Check out my Linktree: linktr.ee/therobburgessshow Subscribe to my Substack: therobburgessshow.substack.com/

Davin Malasarn is a writer an author whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Rosebud, Opium Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly and other journals in print and online. His debut novel, The Outer Country, is just out from One World/Random House. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

What does it mean to honor the reader? In this episode, Rey M. Rodríguez joins Jared to discuss why writing is, at its heart, a sacred act. They explore the profound influence Rey's mother had on his creative life, his journey as a writer, and how the Institute of American Indian Arts helped him deepen his understanding of storytelling, identity, and justice. Along the way, Rey reflects on the recent release of his poetry collection, Todos Somos Sagrados / All Are Sacred, and shares how poetry has taught him to weigh every word with care, collapse time on the page, and approach readers with humility and respect.Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and his book of poetry, Todos Somos Sagrados - All Are Sacred just came out with El Martillo Press. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a second-year fiction writing MFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller's Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and U.C. Berkeley Law School.MFA Writers is hosted by Jared McCormack and produced by Jared McCormack, Hanamori Skoblow, and Brié Goumaz. New episodes are released every two weeks. You can find more MFA Writers at MFAwriters.com.BE PART OF THE SHOW— Donate to the show at Buy Me a Coffee.— Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.— Submit an episode request. If there's a program you'd like to learn more about, contact us and we'll do our very best to find a guest who can speak to their experience.— Apply to be a guest on the show by filling out our application.STAY CONNECTEDTwitter: @MFAwriterspodInstagram: @MFAwriterspodcastFacebook: MFA WritersEmail: mfawriterspodcast@gmail.com 

In this episode we are joined by Rob Arcand to discuss his work on Spotify, streaming, and the financialization of culture. We begin with Spotify's emergence as a supposed democratizing force for working musicians, even as its model relied on surveillance and data-trawling. We explore how this data-driven promise — that listener analytics could be leveraged for touring and merch — reshaped the relationship between artists and audiences, often in ways that reinforced precarity rather than alleviated it. From there, we turn to Arcand's comparison of Spotify's ambitions to Uber and Airbnb, situating streaming within the broader logic of platform capitalism. We discuss how corporate consolidation has shaped the power dynamics of the music industry over the past several decades, and how subscription and ad-supported services emerged from a moment of crisis as neoliberal adaptations to instability. Our conversation also examines how disenfranchisement has paradoxically opened space for new labor struggles within the culture industries, and what a more equitable path forward might look like in an industry dominated by monopoly capitalism. We trace Spotify's shift from search-centric functionality to playlist curation, its "Music for every moment" strategy, and its rebranding from a "celestial jukebox" into lifestyle accessories for individual listeners. Arcand helps us unpack Spotify's editorial logic — from "chill" playlists to hyperpop — and how mood-based categorization blurs the boundaries between artistic expression, consumer mood management, and financialized cultural assets. We consider the assimilation of subcultural genres into profit-seeking structures, the emergence of "Spotifycore," and the recalibration of genre itself for algorithmic infrastructures. Rob is a writer, editor, web developer, and PhD candidate at McGill University in Montreal. He's a former staffer at Pitchfork and SPIN, and has published work on music, visual art, books, film, and technology with outlets like n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum, Art in America, The Nation, The Fader, Rolling Stone, Vice, and more. Twitter: @robarcand If you like what we do and want to support our ability to have more conversations like this. Please consider becoming a Patron. You can do so for as little as a 1 Dollar a month and gain access to our Discord. The Same Stream Twice by Rob Arcand  

Show NotesIn this episode, Simon Western speaks with political theorist and author Professor Brad Evans about the collapse of traditional working-class politics and the growing sense of abandonment across post-industrial communities. Drawing on Brad's experiences growing up in the South Wales Valleys, the conversation explores how solidarity, class identity and community structures have been eroded by deindustrialisation, neoliberalism and the rise of precarious labour. They reflect on why many working-class communities no longer feel represented by progressive politics and why populist movements are gaining traction.Simon and Brad discuss the emotional and political consequences of precarity - from Brexit and nationalism to homelessness, resentment and the rise of the “precariat.” Rather than dismissing people drawn toward nationalist or populist politics, they ask what happens when communities lose dignity, voice and recognition. The conversation challenges simplistic binaries of left and right, arguing instead for deeper listening, political humility, and a renewed understanding of interdependence.The episode also turns toward possibility. Simon introduces ideas from his work on “precarious interdependence,” asking how we might learn to live creatively within uncertainty rather than retreat into fear, certainty, and division. They discuss the role of art, culture, dialogue, and political imagination in creating more humane futures - futures grounded not in nostalgia for the past, but in new forms of solidarity and shared becoming.Key Reflections Working-class communities have not simply lost jobs, but also the social bonds and identities that once gave meaning and solidarity. Populist movements gain power when people feel politically abandoned, unseen and culturally dismissed. Precarity can produce fear and division, but it can also open possibilities for new forms of creativity, mutuality and transformation. Nationalism often emerges in spaces where class consciousness and collective identity have collapsed. Real political dialogue begins when we stop demonising opponents and start listening to the conditions shaping their lives. Art and culture are not luxuries; they are essential for reimagining society and creating empathetic futures. KeywordsPrecarity, Working Class, Nationalism, Populism, Brexit, South Wales, Political Violence, Class Identity, Labour Party,Identity Politics, Mutuality, Interdependence, Neoliberalism, Community, Deindustrialisation, Arts & Politics, Political Agency, Democracy, Social ChangeBrief BioBrad Evans is a Professor of Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath, United Kingdom. He is the author of 20 books and edited volumes, along with over 150 academic and international media articles. Brad has written extensively on the state of international affairs, while making major theoretical contributions to the understanding of violence. He has previously held positions at the Universities of Bristol and Leeds, and has also taught at Columbia University in New York.Brad is widely known for bringing critical theory into public conversation through projects with The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and American Book Review. His recent work explores the politics of disappearance, bridging art, academia, and policy through exhibitions, public events, and global collaborations. He is also the founder of the internationally recognised Histories of Violence project, which connects critical research and public dialogue across more than 140 countries.A frequent speaker at institutions including Harvard, NYU, Columbia, UCLA, and the Guggenheim, Brad's work moves between philosophy, politics, art, and lived experience. He is also the author of the acclaimed semi-biographical book How Black Was My Valley, reflecting on growing up in poverty in South Wales. His work and commentary have featured across major global media including the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Newsweek.

The Girl on the Beach by Carol Snow“In a world of privilege and pretense, a young girl vanishes. Carol Snow's propulsive and gripping The Girl On The Beach reels you in with a darkly charged love triangle and rich, compelling characters—none of them innocent. Just when you think you understand what happened, a shocking twist upends everything.” —Mary Dixie Carter, author of Marguerite by the Lake and The PhotographerA missing child. A shattered family. And a truth that refuses to stay buried.Acclaimed novelist Carol Snow returns with The Girl on the Beach (Crooked Lane Books; June 23, 2026), a gripping psychological thriller set against the deceptively idyllic coastline of Santa Barbara's “American Riviera.”When four-year-old Roxie Starr disappears into the Pacific Ocean on a perfect summer day, the tragedy destroys her glamorous, high-profile family and leaves their young nanny, Colleen, haunted by guilt. Months later, Colleen returns to the beach house and sees something impossible: a child who looks exactly like Roxie.What follows is a chilling unraveling of memory, grief, and truth as Colleen questions everything she thought she knew about that day and the family she once trusted.With a dual timeline that moves between a sunlit summer and a shadowed aftermath, The Girl on the Beach explores: ● The unreliability of memory ● The psychology of guilt and trauma ● The secrets hidden beneath wealth and privilege Perfect for fans of psychological suspense, the novel builds to a jaw-dropping twist.Carol Snow is an American author of ten novels, most recently THE GIRL ON THE BEACH, a psychological thriller slated for June 2026 publication. Called “an author to watch” by Booklist, recognition for Snow's previous titles includes: Target Bookmarked Breakout Selection, Amazon Editors' Pick: Best Books of the Month, and Readers' Crown Award Finalist.Foreign rights to Snow's books have been sold to publishers in Germany, Norway, Poland, Indonesia, and Hungary. A former contributor to Salon's “Mother's Who Think” column, her writing has also appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Park City Magazine.Carol Snow holds a BA in psychology from Brown University and an MA in teaching English from Boston College. A native of New Jersey, she has lived all over the US, as well as in Strasbourg, France, and London, England. Married with two adult children, she now splits her time between Cape Cod and Southern California.To learn more about Carol Snow and her books, please visit www.carolsnow.com.https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Beach-Thriller-Carol-Snow/dp/B0FSC6XDBNhttps://www.carolsnow.com/https://www.instagram.com/carol_snowhttps://www.goodreads.com/author/show/270463.Carol_Snow

Jacque Gorelick joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up missing a mother, surviving a fractured family and worrying you're broken in unfixable ways, how her husband's medical crisis upended her life as a new mother, letting our inner selves be cared for, protecting a space where a mother should be, owning our story, gathering all the pieces for structure, weaving in backstory to strengthen the stakes, including letters and managing time in memoir, telling the truth as we know it,  taking risks, how we're never finished, and her new memoir Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Finding the Way Home. Also in this episode: -coping strategies -letting our guard down -being once mothered, motherless, and unmothered Books mentioned in this episode:  Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr Fast Draft Your Memoir by Rachael Herron  Jacque's essays about family, motherhood, estrangement, education, and health have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y, Healthy Women, The Washington Post, HuffPost and more.  After spending her fractured childhood in search of home and belonging, Jacque spent her adult life working with children and families. She has a degree in psychology and a graduate degree in education with an emphasis in early childhood development. She has always been fascinated with how family shapes and defines us, and how we ultimately choose to define it for ourselves.  A California native, Jacque has lived all over the West Coast from Santa Barbara to Alaska. Now firmly rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives beside a creek under redwood trees with her husband, two boys, and a mélange of rescues. To find out more about Jacque and her work visit her website at jacquegorelick.com.   Connect with Jacque: Website: https://www.jacquegorelick.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacque.gorelick/ IG @jacgorelick: https://www.instagram.com/jacgorelick/ Threads @jacgorelick: https://www.threads.com/@jacgorelick Substack: Heartmatters https://jacquegorelickheartmatters.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips Purchase book via Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/map-of-a-heart-a-memoir-of-love-loss-and-finding-the-way-home-jacque-gorelick/9daeff1a91645131?ean=9783988322265&next=t – Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.  She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.   More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Subscribe to Ronit's Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

Colin Marshall is a Seoul-based essayist, broadcaster, and public speaker focusing on cities, language, and culture. Through his Substack newsletter, Books on Cities, he writes long-form essay-reviews exploring those very themes. He is the author of the Korean essay collection "한국 요약 금지" (No Summarizing Korea) and "Korean Newtro: Where Youth Meets Tradition". Additionally, he recently contributed a story to the Seoul-set mystery anthology "그날, 서울에서는 무슨 일이." He currently writes a column for the Korean newspaper 동아일보. His essays have appeared in a wide range of outlets, including The New Yorker, Guardian Cities, Open Culture, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Review of Books (where he authored the Korea Blog for six years). Find Him Online Email: colinjmarshall@gmail.com Twitter: https://x.com/colinmarshall Korean Newtro: https://www.amazon.com/Korean-Newtro-Where-Youth-Tradition/dp/156591533X No Summarizing Korea: https://product.kyobobook.co.kr/detail/S000212263515 Discussion Outline 0:00 Introduction 5:30 Writing in Korean for Koreans 13:05 The Korean Language 17:25 Korean Language and Translation 24:30 Park Chan-wook and Spacelessness 34:35 Korean Newtro Book 46:00 Seeing Korean 촌스러워 56:25 The Dabang 1:05:20 Korean Social Taboos 1:19:10 Consumption of Culture 1:25:45 Advice for Korea Thanks to Patreon members: Bhavya, Roxanne Murrell, Sara B Cooper, Anne Brennels, Ell, Johnathan Filbert, Daniela Körppen, Cody Join Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/user?u=62047873 David A. Tizzard has a PhD in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He writes a weekly column in the Korea Times, is a social-cultural commentator, and a musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He can be reached at datizzard@swu.ac.kr. ▶ David's Insta: @datizzard ▶ KD Insta: @koreadeconstructed 

Dickens in Brooklyn is a virtuoso collection of unusual, compelling essays in which critically acclaimed and award-winning author Jay Neugeboren explores experiences that have been central to his life: caring long-term for a brother with mental illness; finding and connecting with long-lost family members; a posthumous lunch with Oliver Sacks; his years as single parent to his three children; his decision as a General Motors executive trainee to violate company policy and hang out with "hourlies;" a thwarted kiss at a teenage summer camp where he was a young Jewish man in exile among Jews.Neugeboren is the author most recently of Whatever Happened to Frankie King and twenty-three other prize-winning works of fiction and nonfiction. His essays have been recently published in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The American Scholar, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tablet, and Commonweal, and are here collected for the first time.

Can obsession turn an impossible dream into reality? In conversation with the master of modern surrealism Mircea Cărtărescu about Theodoros, a novel about the rise of an unlikely emperor.Theodoros is set in the nineteenth century and follows the extraordinary life of the otherwise ordinary Teodor, the son of two servants of a Romanian aristocrat. Raised on stories of Alexander the Great told by his Greek mother, he becomes obsessed with the idea that he too is destined for greatness — and everything else must give way to it. His improbable life path eventually leads him to Ethiopia, where he ascends the throne as Emperor Tewodros II. Theodoros is a surreal epic, written in rich, distinctive prose.About the speakersMircea Cărtărescu (Bucharest, 1956) is considered one of the most important voices in contemporary European literature. His novels and poetry have been widely translated and awarded, and his acclaimed novel Solenoid was hailed by the European press as a masterpiece.Jan Willem Bos (1954) translated more than twenty-five novels, short-story collections, and poetry collections from Romanian. He has also published numerous articles and written several nonfiction books about Romania.Remo Verdickt (1992) is a literary scholar and specialised in Mircea Cărtărescu's work. He wrote several articles about him, including in De Standaard and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in literature at KU Leuven. Programme editor: Ianthe MosselmanModerator: Remo VerdicktIn collaboration with: Roemeens Cultureel Instituut BrusselZie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by photographer Reynaldo Rivera, whose work is featured on the cover of the LARB's spring issue, which celebrates 15 years of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rivera discusses his latest photobook, Propiedad Privada, edited by Lauren Mackler and Hedi El Kholti. Along with essays and stories by writers such as Constance Debre, Brontez Purnell, Colm Tóibín, and Justin Torres, it showcases images from Rivera's personal collection, most of which he never intended to show publicly. The photos are intimate and erotic, full of longing, vulnerability, and hope. They capture Rivera's friends, lovers, his longtime partner Bianco, and Rivera himself, in ephemeral moments of lust and physical connection. Utilizing the close spaces of bedrooms, bars and alleys as their setting, they document private performances, intense intimacy, and moments of charged reflection. Together with Rivera's first book, Propiedad Privada offers a complex portrait of Latinx queer life in the U.S., while also taking its place in the timeless archive of desire.

Wendy C. Ortiz joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about the English teacher who preyed on her when she was thirteen, writing about the person we are now when writing about our past, placing the reader in the physical and psychological experience of character-you, how important the opening pages are in setting the stakes, feeling fear and shame, taking care of yourself when writing about traumatic events, reminding ourselves who we were before abuse, growing up feeling comfortable keeping secrets, art as means to recovery, when your press goes out of business, when a predator asks you not to write about them but you do, and her new memoir Excavation.   Also in this episode: -interstitial chapters -university presses vs. small presses -taking care of ourselves when writing about trauma   Books mentioned in this episode: -Firebird by Mark Doty -Truth Serum by Bernard Cooper -The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch   Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook: Essays, and Bruja: A Dreamoir, all of which were reissued in Spring 2025 by Northwestern University Press. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine online, The New York Times' “Modern Love,” Joyland, FENCE, DIAGRAM, and Pleiades, among others. She was awarded a Tin House residency to continue working on her next book. Her current project is Mommy's El Camino, a weekly online newsletter. Wendy is a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles.    Connect with Wendy: Website: https://www.wendyortiz.com Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wendyortiz.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wendy.c.ortiz Book purchase via Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/excavation-a-memoir-wendy-c-ortiz/21982167?ean=9780810148604&next=t   – Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.  She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Subscribe to Ronit's Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

In a world of misinformation and uncertainty, we're often tempted to think our way out of our problems. But what if more knowledge isn't the answer? In this episode, I talk with philosopher and author James K.A. Smith about his book Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark and why the pursuit of certainty can easily become an idol. We discuss his personal journey discovering the wisdom of silence, solitude, and surrender after a season of depression forced him to confront problems thinking alone couldn't solve. We explore the insights of the medieval mystics, what it means to let go of the need to win arguments, why our bodies matter in spiritual practice, and how discovering our belovedness reshapes the way we live and engage the world.James K. A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin University and author of Make Your Home in this Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Gift of Unknowing (Yale, March 2026). His popular writing has appeared in magazines such as Christianity Today, Christian Century, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He lives in Grand Rapids, MI.James' Book:Make Your Home in This Luminous DarkJames' Recommendation:Mussolini Son of the CenturyConnect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.comGo to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky or YouTubeConsider Giving to the podcast and to the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link below Let the Art Speak: About Hope conference on April 10 & 11 in Madison, WIJoin artists & creatives at the 5th Let the Art Speak conference — a celebration of hope.Support the show

In Part 2 of our discussion on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, editor Dora Zhang returns to discuss the original cover and the design of the Norton Library edition, her first encounter with Woolf's writing during college, and a few of her favorite moments in the text. Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which studies the works of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and, centrally, Virginia Woolf in order to reinvigorate our understanding of the ubiquitous but undertheorized category of novelistic description. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Chronicle Review, and The Point.To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of A Room of One's Own, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393893991. Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Jason Crawford is Professor of English at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, where he teaches and writes about early modern literature and culture, with secondary interests in ancient drama and epic. He's the author of several academic books and articles, and his work has also appeared in such venues as the Los Angeles Review of Books. …

“We read so as not to feel alone.” — C.S. Lewis (possibly)Dan Turello is a cultural historian of medieval Italy, a much published photographer, and the author of the new Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans. I'm sceptical. Especially the promise (or illusion) of better humans. But Turello's definition of technology goes back further than most — all the way to the original fig leaf. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, the first thing they did, he reminds us, was cover their bodies. Technology, then, in Turello's framing, is everything that extends beyond the human body. Clothing is technology. Double-entry bookkeeping is technology. The iPhone is just the latest chapter of our technology story that began at the beginning.His most surprising argument is that our current tech anxiety has medieval roots. St. Francis of Assisi was what he calls a trust-fund kid “avant la lettre” — his father being a wealthy 13th century silk merchant at a time when northern Italy was Silicon Valley. Francis sold some of his dad's silk, gave the money away, stripped naked before a bishop, and founded a counterculture movement. The first tech backlash, Turello suggests, wasn't against AI. It was against double-entry bookkeeping. Dante, writing a generation later, idealised an earlier, simpler Florence — what scholars call “paleolithic chic.” No makeup, no ornate clothing, no fleeing to immoral cities. Sound familiar?On AI, Turello goes a bit Saint Francis on us. Large language models, he fears, generate material without lineage — you can't trace where the ideas came from, can't triangulate the sources, can't validate against reality. Technology is about power, Turello argues — about who controls the storyline. Making us better humans, then, requires recovering a sense of agency. Thus he argues that we should stop outsourcing our thinking, our writing, our photography to machines. Dante wrote the entire Divine Comedy without Claude. These days, we can barely write an email without a little help from our friends at ChatGPT. Machiavelli donned the robes of the past to think and write. We might try putting ours on too. But then isn't that a tech solution too? Five Takeaways•       St. Francis Was a Trust-Fund Kid Who Invented Counterculture: His father was a wealthy silk merchant in 13th-century Italy, at the dawn of Europe's commercial revolution. Francis sold his father's silk, gave the money away, stripped naked before a bishop, and founded an order that rejected the mechanisms of early capitalism. The first tech backlash wasn't against AI. It was against double-entry bookkeeping.•       Technology Is Everything Beyond the Naked Human Body: Turello's definition goes back to Genesis. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, the first thing they did was cover their bodies. Fig leaves are technology. Clothing is technology. The iPhone is just the latest iteration of a metaphysical problem that's been destabilising us since the Fall.•       Dante Wrote the Divine Comedy Without Being Able to Edit: He penned an entire macrocosm of the medieval world from memory, without the ability to rewrite in any meaningful way. Turello thinks Dante would be concerned that we're losing our memories, our ability to tell a coherent narrative for our lives, and that our existence has become too fragmented. We can barely write an email without ChatGPT.•       LLMs Generate Material Without Lineage: Technology is about power — about who controls the storyline. Large language models produce text without traceable sources, without verifiable origins, without lineage. You can't triangulate where the ideas came from. That's not intelligence. That's a crisis of provenance.•       Agency Still Matters: Turello's hope for humanity is that we recover a sense of agency — the belief that our choices, friendships, relationships, and communities are ours to shape. The alternative is technological determinism: the machine decides. Machiavelli donned the robes of the past to think and write. We might try putting ours on too. About the GuestDan Turello is a writer, cultural historian, and photographer. A Technology and Humanity Fellow at Florida Atlantic University's Center for Future of Mind, AI & Society, his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans is published by Columbia University Press.References:•       Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans by Dan Turello (Columbia University Press, 2026) — the book under discussion.•       Episode 2840: What Came First: Stories or Language? — Kevin Ashton on storytelling preceding language, a natural companion.•       Episode 2839: Have Our iPhones Eaten Our Brains? — Nelson Dellis on memory, cognitive atrophy, and outsourcing our minds.•       Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — referenced in the conversation on technology and power.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: has technology made you a better human? (03:22) - The iPhone vs. the decisive moment: Bresson and photography (05:39) - The orange cushion: an ode to imperfection (06:27) - St. Francis of Assisi: the first tech critic (07:22) - 800 years of tech anxiety: from double-entry bookkeeping to AI (11:27) - Žižek, capitalism, and the love-hate relationship with technology (13:50) - Fig leaves to iPhones: technology as everything beyond the naked body (15:00) - Marinetti, Svevo, and the mammoth: technology as relationship (17:54) - Walter Benjamin, The Matrix, and who controls the storyline (20:51) - Bresson's decisive moment vs. Nietzsche's blow it up (22:25) - Agency under attack: reclaiming embodied experience (25:47) - Machiavelli donning the robes of the past (28:44) - Nost...

In Part 1 of our discussion on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, we welcome editor Dora Zhang to discuss the author's early life in a literary and artistic household, the enduring nature and distinctive prose of Woolf's works, and the argument of certain necessary material conditions for creating art. Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which studies the works of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and, centrally, Virginia Woolf in order to reinvigorate our understanding of the ubiquitous but undertheorized category of novelistic description. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Chronicle Review, and The Point.To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of A Room of One's Own, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393893991. Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Jacque Gorelick looks at life like a pie chart — what's going to fit, and what won't? Don't miss this fabulous conversation on how to rely on yourself as a writer! Jacque Gorelick's essays about family, motherhood, estrangement, education, and health have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y, Healthy Women, The Washington Post, HuffPost and more. Map of a Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Finding the Way Home is her debut memoir. A California native, Jacque has lived all over the West Coast from Santa Barbara to Alaska. Now firmly rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives beside a creek under redwood trees with her husband, two boys, and a mélange of rescues. To find out more about Jacque and her work visit her website at www.jacquegorelick.com Cold Turkey Writer: https://getcoldturkey.com/writer/Map of a Heart: https://amzn.to/4arXT1bThe Byline Bible, Susan Shapiro https://amzn.to/4arXT1bNewsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/husband-newborn-hike-stopped-breathing-cpr-11514533

Notes and Links to Luke Epplin's Work   Luke Epplin is the author of Moses and the Doctor: Two Men, One Championship, and the Birth of Modern Basketball, and Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball.    His writing has appeared online in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, GQ, Slate, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily. Born and raised in rural Illinois, Epplin lives outside of New York City with his wife and daughter. Buy Moses and the Doctor   Wall Street Journal Review of Moses and the Doctor   Luke Epplin's Website At about 1:15, Luke highlights Greenlight Books and Astoria Bookshop as places to find signed books, both online and off- At about 2:15, Luke shares an interesting tidbit about fellow Illinois-ian David Foster Wallace At about 4:40, Luke responds to Pete's question about seeds for Moses and the Doctor, and how his first book figured in At about 8:10, Luke and Pete discuss the book's Prologue and an important Julius Erving “speech” At about 11:15, Luke shares Dr. J's thoughts on this consequential speech and further implications for his relationship with future teammate Moses Malone  At about 12:15, Chapter One is discussed, especially Julius Erving's dazzling time at Rucker Park; Luke ruminates on Julius as “two people at once” At about 17:55, The two discuss Moses Malone as a “prodigy” and how his hometown and upbringing shaped him  At about 21:05, Moses Malone's college search and pro basketball signing are discussed  At about 24:00, Luke responds to Pete's comments and question about the ABA/NBA and generalizations about Julius Erving and other players  At about 26:50, Luke reflects on Julius Erving's free agent demands and travails  At about 28:00, the two discuss Moses Malone's “lost year” as the ABA wilts At about 29:20, Luke references Julius Erving's time in the ABA, and how people who watched him and played with him talk about how the NBA Julius Erving wasn't the same At about 30:55, Luke talks about the ways in which the super-successful Sixers were not hyped as much as teams like Magic Johnson's Lakers and Larry Bird's Celtics At about 31:55, Luke pinpoints a pivotal scene in 1982 that he marks as critical in his book's arc At about 33:15, Luke responds to Pete wondering about the criticism towards Julius Erving before he won a NBA Championship  At about 34:15, The 1977 Finals and the competing styles the two teams brought are discussed, along with the New Jersey Nets' impasse with Julius over his signing At about 37:55, Pete shouts out an incredible dunk from Julius Erving on Bill Walton At about 38:30, Luke expands upon the legendary stories told about Julius from his ABA days At about 39:50, Luke responds to Pete's questions about research processes for the book At about 41:45, Luke reflects on his interactions with and memories of Bill Walton At about 43:15, The two discuss Moses Malone's opening season and NBA Finals' Run with the Rockets At about 45:00, Pete notes a transformational experience for Julius Erving/Dr. J at the end of the 1970s and Luke talks about Julius' injury history and a turning point at age 30 At about 47:30, Luke reflects on a sense of “blessing” and introspection by Julius At about 48:10, Luke reflects on racial and racist more of the 70s and 80s in Philadelphia, including the town ethic and Frank Rizzo's oppressive governing, and how Moses Malone and Julius Erving acted in response and how they were received in Philly At about 52:20, Pete references the Fonde Rec Center and its connection to Moses Malone's “superstardom” At about 53:15, Pete and Luke reflect on key moments and key losses that led to the teaming up with Moses Malone and the winning of the 1983 NBA Championship and Julius Erving opening up emotionally At about 56:25, Pete highlights the power of Luke ending the book in 1983 At about 57:50, Luke discusses Moses Malone's post-NBA career and his choice to live in the “shadows” At about 58:40, Pete catalogs some of the post 1983 foibles and missteps of the 76ers players and brass, and Luke expands on why the buildup to the championship was so “dramatically satisfying” At about 1:00:25, Luke talks about Julius Erving's “legend” and legacy At about 1:01:30, Andrew Toney was a bucket!        You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow Pete on IG, where he is @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where he is @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both the YouTube Channel and the podcast while you're checking out this episode.       Pete is very excited to have one or two podcast episodes per month featured on the website of Chicago Review of Books. The audio will be posted, along with a written interview culled from the audio. His conversation with Jeff Pearlman, a recent guest, is up now at Chicago Review.     Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl      Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting Pete's one-man show, DIY podcast and extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content!    This month's Patreon bonus episode features an exploration of formative and transformative writing for children, as Pete surveys wonderful writers on their own influences.    Pete has added a $1 a month tier for “Well-Wishers” and Cheerleaders of the Show.     This is a passion project, a DIY operation, and Pete would love for your help in promoting what he's convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.    The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.     Please tune in for Episode 324 with Lillian Li, author of the book out as of today, February 17, Bad Asians.  She is also the author of the novel Number One Chinese Restaurant, which was an NPR Best Book of 2018, and longlisted for the Women's Prize and the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Again, the episode airs on February 17, today, Pub Day for Bad Asians.    Please go to ceasefiretoday.org, and/or https://act.uscpr.org/a/letaidin to call your congresspeople and demand an end to the forced famine and destruction of Gaza and the Gazan people.     You can also donate at chuffed.org, World Central Kitchen, and so many more, and/or you can contact writer friend Ursula Villarreal-Moura directly or through Pete, as she has direct links with friends in Gaza.

Narrative verse, or poems that tell a story, has existed for millennia, yet the mode of writing has been neglected by literary publishers, editors, and critics in our own time. This anthology reestablishes the vital relationship of narrative verse to a contemporary readership of poetry. It presents a wide range of specimens from twenty-eight poets who were born since World War II and who published their narrative poems over the past fifty years. Featured poets include Rita Dove, Christian Wiman, Alberto Rios, A. E. Stallings, Bob Dylan, Daniel Mark Epstein, David Mason, Mary Jo Salter, and Dana Gioia, and other exemplary practitioners of the form. In these poems, character, plot, and dialogue turn up as readily as in prose fiction. As John Dryden wrote of Chaucer's works, “Here is God's plenty.” Anecdote, fable, myth, biography, thriller, Western, ghost story―these are among the many different genres of tale collected by poet-critic Sunil Iyengar, who introduces each poet and the anthology itself. Sunil Iyengar is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Call from the Shallows (Finishing Line Press). His poems and/or book reviews have appeared in such periodicals as The New Criterion, Literary Matters, New Verse Review, PN Review, Essays in Criticism, The American Scholar, The Hopkins Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post. He lives outside Washington, D.C., where he works as an arts research director. Daniel Moran's writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Narrative verse, or poems that tell a story, has existed for millennia, yet the mode of writing has been neglected by literary publishers, editors, and critics in our own time. This anthology reestablishes the vital relationship of narrative verse to a contemporary readership of poetry. It presents a wide range of specimens from twenty-eight poets who were born since World War II and who published their narrative poems over the past fifty years. Featured poets include Rita Dove, Christian Wiman, Alberto Rios, A. E. Stallings, Bob Dylan, Daniel Mark Epstein, David Mason, Mary Jo Salter, and Dana Gioia, and other exemplary practitioners of the form. In these poems, character, plot, and dialogue turn up as readily as in prose fiction. As John Dryden wrote of Chaucer's works, “Here is God's plenty.” Anecdote, fable, myth, biography, thriller, Western, ghost story―these are among the many different genres of tale collected by poet-critic Sunil Iyengar, who introduces each poet and the anthology itself. Sunil Iyengar is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Call from the Shallows (Finishing Line Press). His poems and/or book reviews have appeared in such periodicals as The New Criterion, Literary Matters, New Verse Review, PN Review, Essays in Criticism, The American Scholar, The Hopkins Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post. He lives outside Washington, D.C., where he works as an arts research director. Daniel Moran's writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Hello and welcome to The Rob Burgess Show. I am, of course, your host, Rob Burgess. On this our 293rd episode, our guest is Tom Lutz. Tom Lutz is the author of many books on literature and culture, as well as several books of travel writing and two novels. He is an American Book Award-winning cultural critic, University of California Riverside Distinguished Professor Emeritus, and the founder of Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to UC Riverside, he also taught at the University of Iowa, CalArts, University of Copenhagen and Stanford. He now lives in the French countryside with his wife, the writer and critic Laurie Winer, and their two expatriate cats. His latest book, “Chagos Archipelago” was published by Red Hen Press in October 2025 and is the follow-up to his novel “Born Slippy,” which was published by Repeater Books in 2020. Follow me on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/robaburg.bsky.social Follow me on Mastodon: newsie.social/@therobburgessshow Check out my Linktree: linktr.ee/therobburgessshow Subscribe to my Substack: therobburgessshow.substack.com/

“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, including its emphasis on individualist achievement within communitarian organizations and the actorly tension between psychological interiority and external action when building a character. In following the life of this concept, Butler reveals the impossibly charming, ambitious, questionable cast of characters that have defined the terms of Western acting in the twentieth century. In the process, he clears up many of the public misunderstandings around Method as an approach and as a style. In this discussion, Butler details his first career in the theater as a professional actor, explores how Constantin Stanislavski's “system” of acting was the farthest thing from systematic, explains the difference between method and Method, and divulges the many rivalries and hostilities between American M/method practitioners and instructors at mid-century. Isaac Butler is the coauthor (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. Butler's writing has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, the Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process. His work as a director has been seen on stages throughout the United States. He is the co-creator, with Darcy James Argue and Peter Nigrini, of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times and has been adapted into a feature-length film. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, including its emphasis on individualist achievement within communitarian organizations and the actorly tension between psychological interiority and external action when building a character. In following the life of this concept, Butler reveals the impossibly charming, ambitious, questionable cast of characters that have defined the terms of Western acting in the twentieth century. In the process, he clears up many of the public misunderstandings around Method as an approach and as a style. In this discussion, Butler details his first career in the theater as a professional actor, explores how Constantin Stanislavski's “system” of acting was the farthest thing from systematic, explains the difference between method and Method, and divulges the many rivalries and hostilities between American M/method practitioners and instructors at mid-century. Isaac Butler is the coauthor (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. Butler's writing has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, the Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process. His work as a director has been seen on stages throughout the United States. He is the co-creator, with Darcy James Argue and Peter Nigrini, of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times and has been adapted into a feature-length film. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

José and Dion read "Entrance" by Rainer Maria Rilke and then from José's new book Haunt Me. José Enrique Medina earned his BA in English from Cornell University. His book Haunt Me won the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize. His second book, Man Without a Skirt, was selected by Ellen Bass as the runner-up for the 2025 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in USA Today Hispanic Living Magazine, Best Microfiction 2019, The Los Angeles Review, Redivider, and other publications. He is a VONA fellow and the founder of the Chickens & Poetry Residency for Writers. You can connect with him on Instagram @MedinaWrites or at www.MedinaWrites.com.

Kavita Das is a an author and mother who has worked for social change for close to fifteen years, addressing issues ranging from community and housing inequities, to public health disparities, to racial injustice. Her first book Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar tells the life story of Grammy-nominated Hindustani singer Lakshmi Shankar.Kavita has been a regular contributor to NBC News Asian America, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus. In addition, her work has been published in Salon, WIRED, Poets & Writers, Catapult, LitHub, Tin House, Longreads, Kenyon Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Guernica, McSweeney's, Fast Company, Quartz, Colorlines, Romper, and elsewhere. Kavita created the popular “Writing About Social Issues” nonfiction seminar, which inspired Craft and Conscience, and has taught at the New School and continues to teach across multiple venues and serve as a guest lecturer. Kavita Das is currently a Masters in Fine Arts candidate in creative nonfiction and screenwriting at Antioch University where she is the Eloise Klein Healy Scholar. Previously, she received a B.A. in Urban Studies from Bryn Mawr College. She lives in her hometown of New York City and tries to keep up with the city that never sleeps and her six-year-old daughter Daya.

The Decade Project is an ongoing One Heat Minute Productions Patreon exclusive podcast looking back at the films released ten years ago to reflect on what continues to resonate and what's ripe for rediscovery. The third year being released on the main podcast feed is the films of 2015. To hear a fantastic chorus of guests and I unpack the films of 2016 in 2026, subscribe to our Patreon here for as little as $1 a month. In the latest episode, I catch up with a kindred spirit, Scout Tafoya (author of The Black Book: An Anthony Mann Reader), about a profoundly unloved picture, KNIGHT OF CUPS. Scout Tafoya - Buy THE BLACK BOOK hereScout Tafoya is a film critic, video essayist, filmmaker, and author of Cinemaphagy: On The Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the first book-length critical study of the director of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." Originally from Doylestown, PA, he is the creator of RogerEbert.com's The Unloved, the longest-running video essay series on the web, about movies in need of a second look. His writing has appeared in the Village Voice, Film Comment, Nylon Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Film Stage, among others. He is the director of over 25 feature films, including "Eyam," "House of Little Deaths," and "Beata Virgo Viscera," which debuted on RogerEbert.com. His features and his extensive video essay work can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.One Heat Minute ProductionsWEBSITE: oneheatminute.comTWITTER: @OneBlakeMinute & @OHMPodsMERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/en-au/stores/one-heat-minute-productionsSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/one-heat-minute-productions/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

A BIOGRAPHY OF A MOUNTAIN: The Making and Meaning of Mt. Rushmore, by Matthew Davis (St. Martin's Press), is a powerful comprehensive history of Mt. Rushmore, written in light of recent political controversies, and a timely retrospective for the monument's 100th anniversary in 2025. Davis has penned an impressive work of narrative nonfiction, combining history with reportage, bringing this complicated and nuanced story of the famous, and infamous, mountain to life.ABOUT THE AUTHORMatthew Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter's Tale. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among other publications. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at The Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Davis lives in Washington DC with his wife, a diplomat, and their two young kids.#mtrushmore #authorpodcast #speakingofwriterspodcast

Memoirist and professor Maggie Andersen on turning a Chicago theater coming of age into No Stars in Jefferson Park, translating performance craft to the page, writing honestly about love, loss, and disability with care and permission, and trusting the long arc of a creative life.  You'll learn:Why writing “for others” can be generous without self-erasure (and how to tell the difference). What theater can teach memoirists about scene movement, including emotional marks, entrances, and exits. How to borrow “page-turner” pacing without sacrificing literary depth. What to cut or keep when you're thinking like a live audience rather than a solitary reader. How to shape a memoir around friendship and time, even when you're learning the form as you write. What “truth with care” can look like in memoir, including permission, restraint, and choosing what must be faced on the page. Ways to involve the people you're writing about early, so the work stays accountable to real humans. Why your definition of “making it” may change, and how timing, fit, and rejection can still lead to publication.  Resources and Links:No Stars in Jefferson Park About Maggie AndersenMaggie Andersen has published fiction and nonfiction in magazines such as Salt Hill, Blood Orange, the Los Angeles Review, Creative Nonfiction, Grain, Cutbank, and DIAGRAM. She has been a finalist for the Montana Prize for Nonfiction and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She is an Associate Professor of English at Dominican University and an ensemble member at the Gift Theatre. Her debut memoir, No Stars in Jefferson Park, was published by Northwestern University Press in October 2025.   For show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit: podcast.londonwriterssalon.com.For free writing sessions, join free Writers' Hours: writershour.com.*FOLLOW LONDON WRITERS' SALONTwitter: twitter.com/​​WritersSalonInstagram: instagram.com/londonwriterssalonFacebook: facebook.com/LondonWritersSalonIf you're enjoying this show, please rate and review this show!

Follow the Lemon Racing Dynasty Take a ride through the raucous racing circuits and strip malls of South Georgia in the new novel, Can't Shake the Dust, by St. Augustine author C.H. Hooks.  Throughout the year, we offer programs like Lit Chat Author Talks and Writer's Lab workshops to spotlight our local author community and inspire others to follow in their literary footsteps.  "Can't Shake the Dust is a singular addition to the South's raucous storytelling tradition. As much about aging as coming of age, Can't Shake the Dust takes you beyond-the-track and into the blue-collar lives of those who can't quit this beautiful, DIY sport. At once hilarious, strange, and tender—this brilliant novel you won't soon forget..."—Caleb Johnson, author of Treeborne Q11 Lit Chat Interview with C.H. Hooks C.H. Hooks was in conversation with Shep Shepard on Monday, July 28, 2025, at the Willow Branch Library. C.H. Hooks is the author of the novels Can't Shake the Dust and Alligator Zoo-Park Magic. His work has appeared in print and online publications including: The Los Angeles Review, American Short Fiction, Four Way Review, The Tampa Review, The Bitter Southerner, and Burrow Press. He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar and Contributor at Sewanee Writers' Conference, and attended DISQUIET: Dzanc Books International Literary Program. He teaches at Flagler College, and lives in St. Augustine.  C.H. Hooks was also one of the many talented local authors who contributed a short story or essay to 15 Views of Jacksonville : Short Stories from a Bold City. The full list includes Sohrab Homi Fracis, Laura Lee Smith, Mark Ari, Teri Youmans Grimm, Tim Gilmore, Marcus Pactor, Michael Wiley, Hurley Winkler, Solon Timothy Woodward, Duncan Barlow, Tiffany Melanson, Jackie Hutchins, Nan Kavanaugh, Alex Ender and Shane Hinton. --- Never miss an event! Sign up for email newsletters at https://bit.ly/JaxLibraryUpdates  Jacksonville Public LibraryWebsite: https://jaxpubliclibrary.org/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaxlibrary Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JaxLibrary/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaxlibrary/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaxpubliclibraryfl Contact Us: jplpromotions@coj.net 

Early winter weather has us pondering an alternate definition of “slush pile,” albeit the mucky, grey residue remaining after a city snowfall. Our Slush Pile is far more fresh, but still a wintry mix as we discuss the short story “Catherine of the Exvangelical Deconstruction” by Candice Kelsey. You might want to jump down the page and read or listen to it in full first, as there are spoilers in our discussion!   The story is set on the day of the Women's March, following 2017's Inauguration Day, but only references those events in the most glancing of ways. Instead the protagonist glances away to an array of distractions: Duolingo, a Frida Kahlo biography, a bat documentary, European architecture, banjo music, a stolen corpse flower, daydreaming, and actual dreaming. In the withholding of the protagonist's interiority, Sam sees a connection to Rachel Cusk's Outline, while Jason is reminded of early Bret Easton Ellis. The editors discuss how fiction might evoke the internet's fractioning of our attention, by recreating the fractioning or reflecting it?   We'd like to offer congratulations to Sam whose debut book of short stories, “Uncertain Times,” just won the Washington Writers Publishing House Fiction Prize. As always, thanks for listening!   At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, and Lilllie Volpe (Sound Engineer)   Listen to the story “Catherine of the Exvangelical Deconstruction” read in its entirety by Dagne Forrest (separate from podcast reading) (Bio): Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a bi-coastal writer and educator. Her work has received Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and she is the author of eight books. Candice reads for The Los Angeles Review and The Weight Journal; she also serves as a 2025 AWP Poetry Mentor. Her next poetry collection, Another Place Altogether, releases December 1st with Kelsay Books. (Website): https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/ (Instagram): @Feed_Me_Poetry   Catherine of the Exvangelical Deconstruction Catherine's thumb hovers over Duolingo's question, her mind dim from doom scrolling, chest dead as TikTok. The green owl stares. She swears its beak is twitching.  “Got 5 minutes?”  She swipes Duo, that nosy bastard, and his taunting French flag icon away. “Non.” The apartment is dim, the air too still. Days feel hollow and unhinged, as if she's Edmond Dantès tossed off the cliff of Chatêau d'If, a brief and misplaced shell weighted to the depths of the sea. So much for learning a language to calm the nerves. Frida Kahlo's face stares from the page of a book she hasn't finished reading. “I should just return this already.” There are days she commits to her syllabus of self-education and days she resents it. Kahlo's eyes pierce her, and giving up feels like large-scale feminist betrayal—how she has shelved the artist, her wounds, tragic love, and all. But even sisterhood is too much this January 21st, and of all people, Kahlo would understand. Catherine opens her laptop and starts a documentary about bats instead. Chiroptera. A biologist with kind eyes speaks of their hand-like bones, the elastin and collagenous fiber wings. The chaos of nature is its own magic realism. She learns bats are vulnerable like the rest of us. Climate disruption and habitat loss. Plus white nose syndrome and the old standby, persecution by ignorant humans who set their caves aflame. In the documentary, there is a bat with the liquid amber eyes of a prophet. Maybe that's what this world has had too much of, she begins to consider. Mid-deconstruction of decades in the white, evangelical cesspit of high control patriarchy, Catherine sees the world as one big field day full of stupid ego-competitions like cosmic tug-a-wars. And prophets were some of the top offenders. King Zedekiah, for one, had the prophet Jeremiah lowered into a well by rope, intending he sink into the mud and suffocate. All because he warned the people of their emptiness. Her mind wanders to Prague, to art, to something far away that might fill her own cistern life. “Maybe next summer,” she whispers. “Charles Bridge, St. Vitus.” The rhythm of bluegrass hums through the speakers, enough to anchor her here, in this room, in this thin sliver of a world she cannot escape. “That could be the problem; I need to learn Czech. No, fuck Duo.” J'apprendrai le français. J'irai à Prague. Je verrai les vieux bâtiments. But then, something strange. The banjo's pluck feels different, deeper, its twang splitting the air. She Googles the history of Bluegrass, and the words tumble from the page, layering like the weight of a corpse settling into the silt off the coast of Marseille. The banjo isn't Appalachian in origin but rather West African—specifically from the Senegalese and Gambian people, their fingers strumming the akonting, a skin drum-like instrument that whispered of exile, of worlds ripped apart. American slavers steeped in the bitter twisting of scripture trafficked them across the Middle Passage, yet in the cruel silence of the cotton fields, they turned their pain into music. How are we not talking about this in every history class in every school in every state of this nation? The akonting, an enslaved man's lament, was the seed of a gourd that would bloom into the sounds of flatpicking Southerners. Still, the banjo plays on in Catherine's apartment. A much more tolerable sound than Duolingo's dong-ding ta-dong. But she can't quite cleanse her mind of the French lessons, of Lily and Oscar. Il y a toujours plus. Her voice is barely a whisper, trying to reassure herself. There must be more. A recurring dream, soft and gleaming like a pearl—her hands moving over cool clams, shucking them on a beach house in Rhode Island. It's a faint memory, but no less ever present. Aunt Norma and Uncle Francis' beach cottage and the closest thing to a Hyannis Port Kennedy afternoon of cousins frolicking about by the edge of a long dock lured back by the steam of fritters. But this time, Ocean Vuong stands beside her. He's talking about the monkey, Hartford, the tremors of the world. And the banjo has morphed into Puccini's La Bohème, which laces through the rhythm of Vuong's syntax like a golden libretto. They notice a figure outside the window, a shadow in the sand—the new neighbor? He's strange. A horticulturist, they say. Catherine hasn't met him, but there are rumors. “Did he really steal it?” Vuong asks. She practices her French—it's a dream after all—asks “Le cadavre fleuri?” They move to whispers, like a star's breath in night air. Rumor stands that in the middle of California's Eaton fire, the flower went missing from the Huntington Museum in Pasadena. The Titan Arum, bloated and bizarre in its beauty and stench, just vanished. Fran at the liquor store says the new neighbor, gloves always pressed to the earth, took it.  At night, she hears him in the garden, talking to the roots. She imagines his voice, murmuring something incomprehensible to the moonlight. Like that's where the truth lies—beneath the soil, between the cracks of broken promises, smelling faintly of rot. She recalls the history she once read, so distant, so impossibly rotten. During WWI, when the Nazis swept through Prague, they forced Jewish scholars to scour their archives. They wanted to preserve the so-called “best” of the Jews—manuscripts, texts, holy materials—for their future banjo-twisted Museum of an Extinct Race. She shudders. The music, the wild joy of the banjo, now seems infected with something ancient and spoiled. The act of collecting, of preserving, feels obscene. What do you keep? What do you discard? Whom do you destroy? She wakes from the dream, her phone still alive with French conjugations. The bluegrass hums, but it's heavier, like a rope lowering her into Narragansett Bay. The neighbor's house is dark. But she thinks she can see him, a silhouette against the trees, standing still as a warning. Everything is falling apart at the seams, and she is both a part of it and apart from it. Like each church she left, each youth group and AWANA or Vacation Bible School where she tried to volunteer, to love on the kids, to be the good follower she was tasked with being.  She leans her forehead against the cool glass of the window, closing her eyes. The ache is there, the same ache that never quite leaves. It's sharp, it's bitter, it's whole. The small, steady thrum beneath it all. Il y a toujours plus. Maybe tomorrow she will satisfy Duo. Maybe next fall she will dance down a cobbled street in Prague. Find five minutes to feel human. Perhaps she will be whole enough, tall as St. Vitus Cathedral, to face whatever is left of this America. She closes her eyes to Puccini's Mimi singing Il y a toujours plus and dueling banjos while her neighbor secretly drags a heavy, tarp-covered object across his yard under the flutter of Eastern small-footed bats out for their midnight mosquito snack. A scene only Frida Kahlo could paint.

A new series on the podcast called Story Time, featuring an author reading aloud from her work. In this debut episode, Jessica Gross reads from her new novel, Open Wide, available from Abrams Books. Open Wide was the November 2025 pick of the Otherppl Book Club. Gross is also the author of the debut novel Hysteria (2020), which Publishers Weekly declared "every bit a page-turner as it is a descent into sexual madness." Hysteria has been optioned for TV development, and Open Wide for film development. Gross's nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lilith, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She has taught writing at The New School and Texas Tech University and currently lives in West Texas. *** ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Otherppl with Brad Listi⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, etc. Get ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How to Write a Novel,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors. Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Brad's email newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support the show on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠proud affiliate partner of Bookshop⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the early twentieth century, the studio has been a constant presence in cinema history, responsible for the creation of acclaimed films, blockbuster brands, and iconic superstars. In The Warner Brothers (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Chris Yogerst follows the siblings from their family's humble origins in Poland, through their young adulthood in the American Midwest, to the height of fame and fortune in Hollywood. With unwavering resolve, the brothers soldiered on against the backdrop of an America reeling from the aftereffects of domestic and global conflict. The Great Depression would not sink the brothers, who churned out competitive films that engaged audiences and kept their operations afloat―and even expanding. During World War II, they used their platform to push beyond the limits of the Production Code and create important films about real-world issues, openly criticizing radicalism and the evils of the Nazi regime. At every major cultural turning point in their lifetime, the Warners held a front-row seat. These days, the studio is best known as a media conglomerate with a broad range of intellectual property, spanning movies, TV shows, and streaming content. Despite popular interest in the origins of this empire, the core of the Warner Bros. saga cannot be found in its commercial successes. It is the story of four brothers―Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack―whose vision for Hollywood helped shape the world of entertainment as we know it. Paying close attention to the brothers' identities as cultural and economic outsiders, Yogerst chronicles how the Warners built a global filmmaking powerhouse. Equal parts family history and cinematic journey, The Warner Brothers is an empowering story of the American dream and the legacy four brothers left behind for generations of filmmakers and film lovers to come. Chris Yogerst is the author of Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures and From the Headlines to Hollywood: The Birth and Boom of Warner Bros. He appeared on the New Books Network to discuss the book in 2020. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of American Culture, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and the Hollywood Reporter. He currently serves as an associate professor of communication in the Department of Arts and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University and an Associate Faculty member at University of Arizona Global Campus. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Growing up at the feet of the Himalayas in northern India, Kumar took for granted her immersion in a lush natural world. After moving to North America as a teenager, she found herself increasingly distanced from more than human life and discouraged by the civilization she saw contributing to its destruction. It was only in her twenties, living in Los Angeles and working on films, that she began to rediscover her place in the landscape—and in the cosmos—by way of watching birds. Tracing her movements across the American West, this stirring collection of essays Conversations with Birds (Milkweed Editions, 2023) brings the avian world richly to life. Kumar's perspective is not that of a list keeper, counting and cataloguing species. Rather, from the mango-colored western tanager that rescues her from a bout of altitude sickness in Sequoia National Park to ancient sandhill cranes in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and from the snowy plovers building shallow nests with bits of shell and grass to the white-breasted nuthatch that regularly visits the apricot tree behind her family's casita in Santa Fe, for Kumar, birds “become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world.” At a time when climate change, habitat loss, and the reckless use of pesticides are causing widespread extinction of species, Kumar's reflections on these messengers from our distant past and harbingers of our future offer luminous evidence of her suggestion that “seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us.” Our guest is: Priyanka Kumar, who is a nationally-acclaimed naturalist and award-winning writer. She is the author of Conversations with Birds, The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit, and her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and Sierra magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an experienced writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: The Light Between Apple Trees In The Garden Behind the Moon The Translators Daughter We Take Our Cities With Us Chasing Chickens The Killer Whale Journals Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Leah, Melissa, and Kate dive into the raging legal battles over redistricting ahead of next year's midterms, Interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan's massive oopsies in her prosecution of James Comey, developments with L'Affaire Epstein, and other assorted legal quagmires and outrages from the Trump administration. Then, Kate chats with University of Minnesota Law Professor Jill Hasday about her book We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality. Check out Leah's review of Justice Amy Coney Barrett's book, Listening to the Law, for the Los Angeles Review of Books here.Favorite things:Kate: Lux, Rosalía; The Unraveling of the Justice Department, Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser (NYT); Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy; The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, Jonathan MahlerLeah: Mature, Hilary Duff; The Pop-Tarts Bowl; Cupcakin' Bake Shop in BerkeleyMelissa: Judith Browne Dianis & Alexei Navalny win the inaugural Kettering Democracy Prize; Meghan's Moment, Kaitlyn Greenidge (Harper's Bazaar); Meet the Veteran Who Chases ICE on a Scooter, Isabela Dias (Mother Jones) Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2025! 3/6/26 – San Francisco3/7/26 – Los AngelesLearn more: http://crooked.com/eventsOrder your copy of Leah's book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad VibesFollow us on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jessica Gross is the author of the novel Open Wide, available from Abrams Press. It is the official November pick of the Otherppl Book Club. Gross is the author of Hysteria (2020), which Publishers Weekly declared "every bit a page-turner as it is a descent into sexual madness." Hysteria has been optioned for TV development, and Open Wide for film development. Gross's nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lilith, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She has taught writing at The New School and Texas Tech University and currently lives in West Texas. *** ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Otherppl with Brad Listi⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, etc. Get ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How to Write a Novel,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors. Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Brad's email newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support the show on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠proud affiliate partner of Bookshop⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Alfred Hitchcock's right-hand woman—that is, to the extent that she is known at all. Christina Lane has written the first-ever book dedicated to the life and art of Joan Harrison, entitled Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, February 2020). Born into a middle-class family in Surrey, Harrison took a secretarial job with Alfred Hitchcock as an aimless twenty-something, only to become a producer on films including Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941). In the 1940s, Harrison branched out, building a solo career producing movies for RKO and Universal Studios, only to return to the Hitchcock fold to run TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962). In this discussion, Lane shares how she uncovered this obscure history, placing this “phantom lady” at the center of her own story. She also discusses the trajectory of Harrison's career and how she adapted her research for a broader readership. Christina Lane is Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami and Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, and on NPR and Turner Classic Movies. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Bestselling author and award-winning podcaster Barbara DeMarco-Barrett spoke with me about producing 20+ years of Writers on Writing, why writers don't retire, and her debut noir short story collection POOL FISHING. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett's first book Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, was an Los Angeles Times bestseller and honored with an American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Book Award. Her latest book of short stories, Pool Fishing, is “... centered around deviant women …. in a world with characters who live on the fringes of society-physically, psychologically, or financially”.  Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is creator, executive producer, and host of the award-winning podcast, Writers on Writing, where she interviews authors, agents, and poets. She taught at the UC-Irvine Extension, where she received a Distinguished Instructors award, and is professor of creative writing at Saddleback College's Emeritus Institute and lecturer at Chapman University. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Coolest American Stories 2022, CrimeReads, Dark City Crime & Magazine, Serial Magazine, Beach Reads, among others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Rowboat,” in Kelp Journal (Dec. 2023). Her essays and articles have also been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Orange Coast Magazine, Westways, The Los Angeles Times, Writer's Digest, and Poets & Writers and many others. [Discover The Writer Files Extra: Get 'The Writer Files' Podcast Delivered Straight to Your Inbox at writerfiles.fm] [If you're a fan of The Writer Files, please click FOLLOW to automatically see new interviews. And drop us a rating or a review wherever you listen] In this file Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and I discussed: Writing Pen on Fire early in her career Why she feeds off of the energy of the writing community How to write a noir short story Hanging out with Raymond Chandler in Beverly Hills Why you need to quit the negative self talk and be a good literary citizen And a lot more! Show Notes: barbarademarcobarrett.com  Writers on Writing podcast Pool Fishing: Stories by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett (Amazon)  Barbara DeMarco-Barrett on Facebook Barbara DeMarco-Barrett on Instagram Barbara DeMarco-Barrett on Twitter Kelton Reid Instagram Kelton Reid on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and reading group meetings — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what's rained into our brains. On our latest installment, we chat with Billboard editor Katie Bain, author of a new history of Coachella, about what the festival's 2026 line-up tells us about where culture is headed, the rise of anti-sellout discourse, and the AI industry's nostalgic, artisanal rebrand. Since our last episode, something historic happened: Zohran Kwame Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, marking the American left's most significant electoral victory since the Bernie movement took off in the 2010s. While his team will credit his win to bold, populist economic policies, there's no denying another factor at play: Zohran's extraordinary command of images. He grew up in a film-director household, rapped as Young Cardamom before pivoting to politics, and hired a crew of indie filmmakers to create a video campaign that unfolded like a documentary love letter to the NYC of halal carts, bodega cats, and ordinary working people. Zohran's media fluency is also why people are calling him the Left's answer to Trump. Which all raises some big questions: Is politics in the information economy becoming indistinguishable from theatrical world-building? And what does that mean for our offline lives?This week's guest, writer and artist Gideon Jacobs, has thought about these questions for years. A former creative director at Magnum Photos, child actor, and native New Yorker, Gideon has explored our cultural relationship to images in outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and Los Angeles Review of Books, for whom he penned an excellent piece earlier this year called “Player One and Main Character,” which contends that political reality, post-Trump and post-Musk, is beginning to bend to the rules of fiction. We talk about the aesthetic politics of the Zohran campaign and what it tells us about what successful counter-programming to MAGA's vision of America might look like. We also discuss what Gideon's study of the role of images in ancient cultures and religions can tell us about navigating the image world of the present, how the rise of populism (on both the left and the right) is inextricable from our current technological moment, and whether Zohran's victory marks the start of a political future more grounded in material conditions—or the next phase of the image arms race.Follow Gideon on InstagramRead Gideon:“Player One and Main Character” (Los Angeles Review of Books)“Trump l'Oeil” (Los Angeles Review of Books)“Thou shalt not make images—but what if AI does?” (Document Journal)“Aliens” (The Drift)Additional reading:“Selling Zohran” by Corey Atad (Defector) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Paula Bomer is the author of The Stalker (Soho Books, 2025), which received a starred Publisher's Weekly, calling it “dark and twisted fun”. She is also the author of Tante Eva and Nine Months, the story collections Inside Madeleine and Baby and other Stories, and the essay collection, Mystery and Mortality. Her work has appeared in Bomb Magazine, The Mississippi Review, Fiction Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Green Mountain Review, The Cut, Volume 1 Brooklyn and elsewhere. Her novels have been translated in Germany, Argentina and Hungary. She grew up in South Bend, Indiana and has lived for over 30 years in Brooklyn. Recommended Books: Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the Day Together Stephanie Wambugu, The Lonely Crowds Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lindsay and Madison continue Spoopy month and discuss Nicola Aubrey, as well as how exorcisms work, that religious wars are awful, and how to get your new religion put on blast by Satan himself. Information pulled from the following sources 2022 All That's Interesting article by Kaleena Fraga 2022 Unam Sanctam Catholicam blog post 2022 Los Angeles Review of Books article by Ed Simon 2020 Esoterx blog post 2013 Gizmodo article by Annalee Newitz Fandom Wiki Granger Historical Picture Archive Our Lady of the Rosary Library article by Father Michael Muller, C.SS.R. Wikipedia Check out our friend Alex's new podcast, Second Guess Everything, that drops October 25, 2025. Send us your listener questions to bit.ly/AskYOC. Become a member on Buy Me A Coffee for as little as $1/month to support the show.  Get your groceries and essentials delivered in as fast as 1 hour via Instacart. Free delivery on your first 3 orders. Min $10 per order. Terms apply. You can write to us at: Ye Olde Crime Podcast, PO Box 341, Wyoming, MN 55092. Leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Spotify, Podcast Addict, Audible, or Goodpods! Don't forget to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kristen Ghodsee reads Cathy Porter's translation of an excerpt from Alexandra Kollontai's autobiography. Reflecting on a visit to Narva, Estonia in March of 1896, when she was just 24-years-old, Kollontai describes the event that radicalized her forever. Recent Writings from Kristen Ghodsee:“Clima y Utopía,” El País Semanal, October 17, 2025“Materialists skewers the dating market – but stops too short,” Jacobin Magazine, July 12, 2025“From Democracy to ‘Safety',” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 3, 2025Recent Interviews with Kristen Ghodsee:Meagan Day, “How Manosphere Content Placates Disenfranchised Men,” Jacobin Magazine, May 1, 2025 (Also in Spanish, French, and German)“Der Sozialismus behandelte Frauen besser,” Konkret Magazin, May 2025: 52-52Meagan Day, “Tradwives are a Harbinger of Systemic Breakdown,” Jacobin Magazine, April 27, 2025 (Also in Spanish)Recent writings about Kollontai:Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: Writings from the StruggleMaria Wiesner, Radikal selbstbestimmt – Ihrer Zeit weit voraus. Was wir von Alexandra Kollontai lernen könnenMridula Manglam, “Across Struggles and Time: If I Could Speak to Alexandra Kollontai.” If you can stomach social media, please request to follow @prof_kristenSend us a textThanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization. If you would like to support the work being done here, please spread the word, share with your friends and networks, and consider exploring the following links.Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books: Everyday Utopia Red Valkyries Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism Second World, Second Sex Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee's free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.comLearn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work: www.kristenghodsee.com Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Palestinian-American Human Rights lawyer Noura Erakat & Palestinian-Dutch analyst Mouin Rabbani talk about the new UN report which found that Israel is committing genocide & whether that even matters or changes anything. Then Due Dissidence's Russell Dobular & Keaton Weiss join to talk about Charlie Kirk, his killer & Kirk's relationship to Israel. For the full discussion, please join us on Patreon at - https://www.patreon.com/posts/patreon-full-139074119 Mouin Rabbani is a researcher, analyst & commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict & the contemporary Middle East. He has among other positions previously served as Principal Political Affairs Officer with the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Head of Middle East w/the Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation, Senior Middle East Analyst & Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine w/the Int'l Crisis Group. Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, & a Contributing Editor of Middle East Report. Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney, Professor of Africana Studies & the Program of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She recently completed a non-resident fellowship of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School & was a Mahmoud Darwish Visiting Professor in Palestinian Studies at Brown University. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law & the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award & the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is co-founding editor of Jadaliyya & an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies as well as Human Geography. She's a co-founding board member of the DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives, as Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee & Residency Rights, & as nat'l organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura has also produced video documentaries, including "Gaza In Context" & "Black Palestinian Solidarity.” Her writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Al Jazeera, & The Boston Review. She's a frequent commentator on CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, BBC, NPR, among others. Her awards include the NLG Law for the People Award (2021) & the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar award (2022). Russell Dobular is a New York native, born & raised in Flushing, Queens. He worked in New York's independent theater scene for over 20 years as a writer, director, producer, & theater owner, drove a Hansom Cab in 3 cities & is a licensed tour guide in both NYC & New Orleans. He is currently the co-host of Due Dissidence podcast. Keaton Weiss is the co-host of Due Dissidence podcast on YouTube, Rumble & Spotify. He also writes occasionally on Substack. ***Please support The Katie Halper Show *** For bonus content, exclusive interviews, to support independent media & to help make this program possible, please join us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/thekatiehalpershow Get your Katie Halper Show Merch here! https://katiehalper.myspreadshop.com/all Follow Katie on Twitter: https://x.com/kthalps Follow Katie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kthalps Follow Katie on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@kthalps

Isaac Butler is an author, critic, theater director, and professor known for his books The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned to Act and The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, co-written with Dan Kois. Butler’s writing has appeared in numerous publications such as New York magazine, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Slate magazine. For Slate, he also created and hosted the podcast “Lend Me Your Ears”, about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts “Working”, a podcast about the creative process. Butler’s work as a theater director has been seen on stages throughout the United States and he is the co-creator of “Real Enemies”, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times. Butler currently teaches Theater History and Performance at NYU Tisch.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.