MADAM, today we have the first of two episodes on Tristan’s *favorite novel ever,* Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman . This behemoth, published in nine honking volumes between 1759 and 1767, is filthy, and silly, and brilliant, and absolutely delightful. Yes, dick jokes abound (good ones! for the most part). But Tristram Shandy is also about challenging, important, and baffling questions: What does it mean to write a life? Have you ever noticed how weird an ob...
Sep 27, 2020•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 49
It’s taken us a while to get to James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which is too bad because it is delightful. We wander the many paths of this novel’s points of view, and talk about Pentecostalism, midcentury black literary debates (who’s mad at who among Wright, Baldwin, Himes, Ellison, Redding, et al.), and why Baldwin is enjoying a bit of a Moment. Following some of our many Pod Themes, we talk about bad dads and awesome aunts -- and the process of coming (out) to Jesus. We re...
Sep 20, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 48
Get ready to give those bootstraps a nice firm tug, because we are opening Season 3 with Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick ! We discuss what critics have called the Dunkaroo of American literature. We chat about how much fun it is being a Very Good Boy living in a box on the streets of nineteenth-century New York City, the dangers of large Irish children, labor, finance capital, and why you should read this instead of Lean In . We read the Norton edition edited by Hildegard Hoeller, which i...
Sep 13, 2020•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 47
For our Season 2 finale, we do a round of roasts and toasts. Hear us dunk more on the readership of The New Yorker , marvel at the dipshit failsonery of Horace Walpole, wonder why the f*ck Hester Prynne was so hot for Arthur Dimmesdale, and much much more! We still disagree sharply about how much one might cry while reading Little Women and not be embarrassed about it (don’t listen to Megan -- there’s no such thing as too much crying in the sentimental novel), but we very much agree that Billy B...
Jul 26, 2020•45 min•Ep. 46
Our friend and comrade Hilary Strang joins us this week to discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and we’re talking about anarcho-communism and utopia. Hilary is the director of the MA Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the co-host of the podcast Marooned on Mars with Matt and Hilary , about the works of Kim Stanley Robinson and leftism: https://anchor.fm/marooned-on-mars . The book is about the physicist Shevek and his encounters on the planet Urras, where h...
Jul 19, 2020•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 45
It’s a real weeper this week: we’re reading S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) and talking about tough, dangerous, sensitive teenagers and the readers who love them. You might be familiar with this book if you like teen melodrama (you should) or the 1983 movie with the entire Brat Pack. The book is about a 14-year-old greaser, Ponyboy Curtis, who is both School and Cool, his brothers Sodapop and Darry, and their gang of buddies, who range in charisma from Steve (who?) to Dally (why, Matt Dillon ...
Jul 12, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 44
Have you ever tried to ride out a plague by welding yourself and 1,000 of your closest friends in a psychedelic castle for some depravity and debauchery? Only to have some ASSHOLE decide to show up to the party dressed as the plague? Except it turns out it’s not some asshole but the actual plague, and then all of you bleed out at once? It’s Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) on the podcast today, and we’re talking symbols, aristocracy, and psychoanalysis. And, you know, more ...
Jul 05, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 43
Not sure why we wanted to talk about Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) in the middle of a global pandemic -- let’s just say we needed some light reading. Sorry folks, we’re commies, and historicists, and literature helps us think about f*cked up structures of the past, and of the present, and that’s what we’re doing today. We get into the Puritan/Dissenting theology behind Defoe’s historical novel about the 1665 Great Plague of London. But we also discover that he got a lot of thi...
Jun 28, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 42
It’s everyone’s favorite book from freshman English, John Steinbeck’s novella-play Of Mice and Men , which is about two migrant ranch workers in the 1930s and the incidents that befall them during one of their awful temp jobs. We do find the one moment of hilarity in this book, which concerns a very special asshole called Curley who keeps one of his hands in a big glove full of Vaseline to “keep it soft for his wife,” so there’s a little levity. We get into religion, class, loneliness, and the p...
Jun 21, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 41
On this episode, we talk environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, and racism in the 2020s. If any of that sounds awfully familiar, stay tuned, because we are diving into Parable of the Sower , Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel about the long, slow end of the world. We get into class, the family, religion, the biblical parable (which we definitely all knew and did not have to google), race, and metaphor. We also chat about our cool, tall protagonist—a Black teenager who starts her own religion—and...
Jun 14, 2020•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 40
We recorded this episode before the police murder of George Floyd and before the nationwide protests against structural racism and police terror. We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and with all those fighting against white supremacism, capital, and the carceral state. This week, we take up a novel that deals with one specific scene in the long history of empire and anti-Black violence. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) concerns the early years of Britain’s formal colonization ...
Jun 07, 2020•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 39
We have made--and stand by--the claim that the whale is the most dangerous game of all. Well, apparently Richard Connell felt differently, because he wrote “The Most Dangerous Game” (1924), all about a Russian aristocrat and his human-hunting playground, Ship Trap Island, which is actually called that, and has a swamp called Death Swamp, which is actually called that. The story’s hero is also a giant dope, who falls off a yacht (?) smoking a pipe in the middle of the ocean because he’s super coo...
May 31, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 38
Once upon a time, Jack Kerouac got very drunk, taped a 120-foot roll of paper together, and started typing for three straight weeks. He ended up with On the Road (1957), in which Kerouac is “Sal Paradise,” his BFF Neal Cassady is “Dean Moriarty,” and which recounts their travels across the United States and Mexico -- full of cool musings on how wives are a drag, man, and how they call beer “cerveza” in Spanish. OK, we find plenty to dunk on in this famous Beat novel (e.g. misogyny, ambivalent-to...
May 24, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 37
If you thought porn originated in 1972 or 2017 or with the invention of the pizza delivery man, goodness madam are you mistaken. We’re reading John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748/49), which reminds us that porn has existed ever since the media to make it have been around (see also: the very hornt paintings from Pompeii ca. 79 CE). Our young heroine Fanny boinks her way through this touching novel, revealing a staggering knowledge of profuse pubes and metaphors for penetration. We discuss the bildung...
May 17, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 36
Regrettably, we bring our discussion of this whale of a tale to a close today. That's right, we are wrapping up Moby-Dick (1851). We talk labor, the environment, liberalism, and that chapter where they all get together and...uh...you'll see. We also get into why Ahab and Elizabeth Holmes might be more alike than you think. Unless you already think they are very much the same. In which case, they are exactly as alike as you'd expect. We read the Norton Critical Edition edited by Hershell Parker a...
May 10, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 35
Continuing our Melville spectacular, we bring you the first of two episodes on Moby-Dick (1851). Yes, this is Melville’s famous, uh, novel? romance? manifesto? -- let’s say “book” and leave it at that -- about a megalomaniacal sea captain’s obsession with a really big whale. But did you know that whales are in fact fish? Honest, it’s in the book, people. Moby-Dick is about everything -- ontology, nature, society, the nation, race, ethnicity, queerness, and so much more. And we’re going to do our...
May 03, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 34
This week, we begin our three-part Melville spectacular with our friend, comrade, and very first guest host, Peter Coviello, Professor of American literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pete is a scholar of Melville, empire, intimacy, and queer theory, and he’s a fellow traveler on the good ship San Dominick where everything is regular and normal! On this episode we shoot the salty sea breeze about Melville’s 1855 novella Benito Cereno , where Melville takes on racism, slavery, imp...
Apr 26, 2020•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 33
We can’t believe that we occasionally get to read books by real-deal leftists on this podcast, given the time we spend dunking on politically terrible novels, but Richard Wright is truly a fellow traveller. We discuss his 1940 novel Native Son , which is the story of a young Black man in Chicago and also the story of every diabolical and white supremacist institution of capital. So a lot of fun. We discuss the questions of determinism and naturalism, the form and possibilities of form in politic...
Apr 19, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 32
Here at Better Read than Dead we are here to tell you that work sucks and we should seize the means of production! But in the meantime, one job we definitely wouldn’t recommend is haunted house governess. Sure, the pay is good but the benefits package is just a bunch of ghosts and two very unnerving children. Henry James knew that too, which is why he wrote his 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw . We talk about why James named his characters such mean things (Fanny Assingham, anyone?), the upst...
Mar 15, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 31
If you were to write an historical novel about the Scottish hero-outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor, you’d probably make it about Roy Roy, right? Well, you are an amateur, because that, comrades, is just not how Walter Scott rolls -- which actually shows us why his theory of history is pretty sophisticated. His sprawling Rob Roy (1817) is in fact about a failson named Francis Osbaldistone, with world-historical figures and Rob Roy himself sword-fighting, kilt-wearing, and doing other manly-man things arou...
Mar 08, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 30
Megan is back to lead our discussion of Shirley Jackson’s most famous work, “The Lottery” (1948), and hoo boy, do we talk about how mad the readers were when this was published. The New Yorker famously lost like a billion subscriptions and got a grazillion angry letters from their readership of middlebrow prudes, who wondered, “is it based on reality? Do these practices still continue in back-country England, the human sacrifice for the rich harvest? It’s a frightening thought.” Even though Shir...
Mar 01, 2020•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 29
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) allows us to take up a crucial question -- is it a ship or a boat? Well, it’s actually a raft, on a river, but even Tristan doesn’t hold that against this blistering satire of Antebellum American society. We talk about the novel’s fraught racial politics, its scathing critiques of the plantation class, and its interesting (and troubling) commentary on nineteenth-century constructions of childhood. We also talk about the Mississippi River and...
Feb 23, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 28
Eliza Haywood doesn’t get read much today outside of eighteenth-century lit classes, which is a shame because she’s 1) as important to the English novel as Defoe or Fielding and 2) great and weird in all all the right ways. We’re discussing Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725), a novella all about feminine desire and agency, subjecthood, and Enlightenment discourses of “identity.” (That is, how do you know that you’re a distinct, legible person in the world? Maybe you don’t! Maybe you change you...
Feb 16, 2020•1 hr 15 min
Calling all gumshoes! Get ready to hear how Sherlock Holmes cracks the case of a magical glow-in-the-dark dog who eats aristocrat failsons in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901/1902)! He ate Sir Charles Baskerville, and if Sherlock and Watson don’t help him, his boring nephew who can’t keep track of his shoes might be next!!! We talk righteous supernatural canines, unsettling butterfly-net-wielding neighbors, sexy butlers, racist boneheads, and the greatest mystery of all: can Tristan pass the ...
Feb 09, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 26
As previously noted on the classic Better Read than Dead Christmas Carol show, Katie and Tristan are both fans of Charles Dickens. So needless to say, we had, uh, great expectations about this episode! Before you delete us for that horrible dad pun (thanks, Tristan), may we just point out that the phrase “great expectations” appears about 400 million times in Great Expectations (1861). Which actually makes a lot of sense. This novel is all about contingencies, and the unseen and often unknowable...
Feb 02, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 25
In 1985, Doc Brown and Marty McFly traveled into the distant future of 2015, where we all had flying cars and hoverboards, wore our pockets inside out, and Pepsi cost $50. But Doc Brown and Marty were chumps, because real time travelers don’t mess with a few decades. Real time travelers say, “hey, I wonder what the year 802,701 is like” -- and hoooo boy is it f*cked. This week, we’re bringing you H. G. Wells’s 1895 novella, The Time Machine . We talk about the radical potentials of sci-fi and ot...
Jan 26, 2020•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 24
We here at Better Read than Dead do not care for fascists. So when we had the chance to kick off our 2020 season with an historical novel that dunks on fascists and their fascist f*ckery, well, let’s just say you didn’t need to ask us twice. Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934) is about a lot of things. The early Roman Empire, gender, political intrigue (including powerful grandmas who poison people -- we didn’t know that was one of our favorite character types, but we do now, and not just because...
Jan 19, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 23
Katie says, “bah humbug,” but Tristan says, “oi guv, Bob’s your uncle an’ bless us all, every one” to this most beloved of Victorian Christmas kitsch. We’re diving into Charles Dickens this week with A Christmas Carol (1843) and all kinds of lighthearted topics for the holidays -- like child labor, poverty under industrial capital, killer smog, and reactionary political economy (we want to go on the record as being very much against all those things). We do some admirable BOTHSIDES analysis of D...
Dec 01, 2019•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 22
Our apologies to Stephen Dedalus. Previously, we referred to him as King F*ckboy, but that’s grossly unfair to both Stephen and perhaps literature’s Kingest F*ckboy of them all -- Hamlet. This week, we discuss William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1599? 1602? no one is sure, but it’s something like that) in all its beautiful, bonkers glory. We have many pressing questions. Like, why is this so long? (Four hours, at least -- Billy S needed an editor.) How should we read its ...
Nov 24, 2019•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 21
Welp, friends, we made it through all eleventy billion pages of Ulysses and are the better for it. (Better Read than Dead 1, Mayor Pete 0.) And we all agree that the second half of the book is delightful. From Chapter 15 (“Circe”), a 150-page play about… kink? the nation? gender? all of that? to Chapter 17’s catechism, wherein Bloom and Dedalus pee together in true Hegelian mutual recognition, to Chapter 18 (“Penelope”), where we finally get to spend some time in Molly Bloom’s head (best charact...
Nov 17, 2019•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 20
