Usually books try to make you root for the protagonist. Even if he or she is flawed in some crucial way, most stories try to make you feel something for the person whose mind you're inhabiting. That is not the case in Vladmir Nabokov's Lolita. This week we share with you an uncomfortable discussion about how it feels to read a book told from the perspective of an unrepentant pedophile—how do you feel about him? How do we feel about him? How does he feel about him? The difficult su...
Dec 31, 2014•1 hr
What're the holidays without children's stories? Every year, families gather around their yule rocks and Festivus poles to hear their favorite tales of holidays past -- which means it's rare that anyone discovers a new seasonal story. Enter L. Frank Baum's A Kidnapped Santa Claus and Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel and Trina Schart Hyman. One's a fairy tale about saving Christmas from a bunch of Daemons, the other's about saving Hanukkah from a bunch...
Dec 22, 2014•58 min
Truman Capote's Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood chronicles the mass murder of a family in rural Kansas by two runaway parolees. Inspired by a 300-word newspaper article, it basically created the "true crime" genre, making it the grandpappy to the zeitgeist-conquering podcast Serial. Often times chilling, moving, and morbidly fascinating, In Cold Blood dances back and forth over the line between being a compelling narrative and being exploitative...
Dec 16, 2014•58 min
We hope you like awesome horses and sobbing cowboys, because this week special guest host Casey Johnston is walking us through Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. It's a kind-of-subversive western that blends cowboy archetypes with some Grapes of Wrath-ish wandering. We also talk about the freelancing life, and what happens when you read books because you saw them in your dad's car. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not...
Dec 09, 2014•53 min
For the second week in a row, we've decided to read a book about a dystopian society—Animal Farm was about the oppressed overthrowing and then becoming the oppressors, but The Handmaid's Tale is about an already oppressed group getting even more oppressed. Margaret Atwood has a lot to say about women and feminism in this book, and we've got a lot of things to say about pie and things to misunderstand about Canada. Also on the docket: sexy John Adams, the LongPen, and analogies abo...
Dec 01, 2014•1 hr 3 min
Old Man Stalin Had A Farm...E-I-E-I-O....What happens when you mix the Russian Revolution with a bunch of farm animals and (more than a dash) of dystopian bummers? George Orwell's Animal Farm! Come listen to us learn the joys of rewriting history, selling your friends for whisky money, and holding whips in your trotters. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Nov 25, 2014•1 hr
Have you read Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, or seen the major motion picture currently in theaters? Because if not, you probably should turn back: we're in full-on spoiler mode this week, and this story hinges on its twists. Also on the show this week: Christmas Creep, the writing process, and our brand-new Tickle Me Mario doll. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Nov 17, 2014•58 min
Michael Chabon is no stranger to genre fiction. He has a Lovecraftesque alter ego. He's written essays decrying navel-gazing trends in the short story world. His Pulitzer Prize-winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tackled its larger themes through the lens of two comic book writers. So it should come as no surprise that in the early 2000s, Chabon took a stab at young adult fantasy with Summerland, a sprawling tale that mixes American folklore, Norse myth, and base...
Nov 11, 2014•54 min
Haruki Murakami is a giant of contemporary literature, particularly in his native Japan. However, his books are often rife with references to Western culture - in fact, one of his breakout novels was named after the Beatles song Norwegian Wood. His first-person style marries the fantastic with the private, the epic with the intimate, and his latest novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... is no exception. At least that's what our friend Chris says. Andrew's out this week, so we invited Chris ...
Nov 04, 2014•55 min
Spooktober comes to a close with yet another Choose Your Own Adventure story: Edward Packard's You Are A Monster. If you missed our previous CYA episode, do check it out. We cover the series' inception, as well as discuss its legacy a bit. This week it's all choices, all the time...or so we hoped. Caveat lictor: the audio quality's not up to our usual standard this week. Technical difficulties (boo!) and Andrew's wedding (hooray!) meant that we had to publish the show as is lest we leave you all...
Oct 28, 2014•1 hr 16 min
Spooktober rolls on with this week's story, an Anne Rice novel that's about spooky mummies and the women who love them. For real, though, people in this book have sex with reanimated immortal sexy mummies. And that's not all! The downright Austenian cast of characters has many more adventures in between the mummy sex, and despite being a bit overlong the book at least spins a fairly compelling yarn. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.co...
Oct 21, 2014•56 min
If you've ever heard of a Cthulu, read about the Necronomicon, or been creeped out by sleepy towns in New England, you likely have H.P. Lovecraft to thank. At the Mountains of Madness (1935), a tale of an Antarctic expedition gone wrong, fits squarely into two literary genres Lovecraft helped to define: cosmicism and weird fiction. Man is rendered insignificant by the ancient forces of the cosmos, and supernatural beings that are neither ghosts nor aliens abound. Suffice to say, things...
Oct 13, 2014•55 min
Our spooky October (Spooktober?) continues this week with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, a book about broken trust and creepy new neighbors and Satan babies and a bunch of other stuff. It's a laugh a minute! This book (and the successful film based on it) serves as a predecessor to just about every horror film where a happy young family moves into a new house only to discover that it's haunted, or where a woman marries a new guy only to find that he's actually a crazy killer, or where ki...
Oct 06, 2014•59 min
Washington Irving - aka Jonathan Oldstyle, Abner Knickerbocker or Geoffrey Crayon - is widely regarded as the First American writer. Born just after the Revolutionary War, he broke ground as a satirist in the early 1800s before moving to England (ironically enough) and gaining international recognition as a teller of tales. You may have heard of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The Headless Horseman, Ichabod Crane, Tarry Town, pumpkins: these likely ring a bell. But did you know that Ichabod&nb...
Sep 30, 2014•57 min
The stuff in these show notes is just as important as the stuff that isn't in these show notes. At least, that would be the case if they were written by Harold Pinter. Andrew wasn't quite on board with Pinter's classic The Homecoming, but he was coming around a little bit by the end. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Sep 24, 2014•52 min
We're trying something a little different this week on Overdue. To hear more, turn to page 44. To go back, turn to page 56. OK, this episode listing doesn't actually have branching paths based on page numbers, but this week's episode does! We both decided to navigate through Edward Packard's The Mystery of Chimney Rock on-air this week, and in doing so we encountered some scary cats, old ladies with metal claw-hands, and fat-faced groundskeepers. Will we make it out alive, or will we f...
Sep 15, 2014•1 hr 11 min
Safecracker, prankster, bongo drummer, painter, teacher. Richard Feynman was many things in addition to being a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and he seemed to enjoy the incongruities of his varied interests. His collection of anecdotes Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! chronicles some of these pursuits, while also shedding light on Feynman's years at Los Alamos working on the atomic bomb in the company of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr and others. Join us this week to find out how...
Sep 08, 2014•53 min
This week's story, This Is How You Lose Her, is a loosely connected collection of short stories that blurs the line between protagonist and author. Junot Díaz's upbringing and personal history are clearly related to that of Yunior, the character the book spends the most time with. But how much of Díaz is in Yunior, and how does that affect the way we feel about them both? Also on the docket: back-to-school, some talk about how your gender may affect how you come at this book, and lots of ot...
Sep 02, 2014•58 min
"I'm a hairy ape, get me? And I'll bust youse in de jaw if you don't lay off kiddin' me." When Eugene O'Neill wants to get his point across, he leaves nothing to chance. In his 1922 work of expressionist theatre, The Hairy Ape, the four-time Pulitzer Prize winner spells out exactly how you're supposed to feel about the dehumanizing effects of Capitalism and industry. Men resemble gorillas, crowd after crowd spurn individuals, and a chilling ending leaves us wondering where any of us belong....
Aug 25, 2014•57 min
There's a fair chance that you're familiar with Piper Kerman's Orange Is The New Black through the award-winning Netflix drama. This week we wanted to go to the source material and read the original memoir, not just to compare and contrast the book and the show but so we could separate fact from fiction and learn more about what's really going on in women's prisons. Like the show, the book is sometimes funny, often sad, and occasionally bleak. Kerman's stance against mandatory minimum ...
Aug 18, 2014•1 hr 1 min
Things get a little hot and heavy on this week's episode dedicated to Philip Roth's 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint. We do, however, start off with some reactions to our Pride and Prejudice episode before diving headlong into the mishmash of sex, psychoanalysis, and American Jewish life that is Portnoy and his titular complaint. Caveat Lector: This book necessitated discussing some rather graphic subject matter, so we decided to slap the "Explicit" tag on the episode. Not only did this ...
Aug 12, 2014•1 hr 3 min
This week, we take another run at Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice is, in Andrew's words, "a book where a bunch of people eventually get married to each other. "It's also more than that, of course—it gives us an opportunity to talk about class, wealth, social standing, love, the institution of marriage, Milton Bradley jingles, and one Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy (Fitzy to his friends). See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#...
Aug 05, 2014•1 hr
Go Tell It on the Mountain, the first novel by revered American author and essayist James Baldwin tackles a whole host of serious issues ranging from slavery to the Great Migration, religion to racism, and Southern oppression to broken Northern promises. Naturally, we break up our earnest discussion of these weighty subjects with frequent admissions of our own perpetual ignorance, as well as a few tangents on Very Important Topics such as Orange is the New Black, erotic wrestling, Wilson fr...
Jul 29, 2014•1 hr 6 min
This week's book, Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring, is historical fiction that purports to tell the story of the painting of the same name. If that's not a good elevator pitch for a book, we haven't heard one. Join us for a discussion of art and artists, historically accurate historical fiction, and what happens when you take the sex scenes out of romance novels. We also kick the show off with a discussion of Amazon's new Kindle Unlimited and its possibly negative effects on self-publ...
Jul 22, 2014•51 min
Bernhard Schlink's The Reader was published just five years after the reunification of Germany, and the ways in which it explores the country's troubled history were quite verboten while the wall still stood. A young man falls in love with an older woman, a woman with a number of secrets, and their tempestuous relationship becomes an allegory for Germany's relationship with itself - with its history, its people, and its uncertain future. Join as we admit our lack of German book-learnin...
Jul 14, 2014•53 min
Robin Sloan's debut novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, tackles the literary world's imminent digital future with an adventure tale that Andrew describes as "like a Dan Brown book but good." Through the eyes of a recently unemployed college graduate, Sloan shows us a world where Googlers and ancient cryptographers race to discover a centuries-old secret. It's a world where data visualization is sexy, search engines are evil all-powerful, and Aldus Manutius is on the tip of everyone's tongue...
Jul 07, 2014•56 min
Tina Fey is a prolific, talented, outspoken comedian with a track record to rival the best in the business. She’s also a keen observer of the human condition, and her 2011 memoir/essay collection Bossypants covers with wit and humor a wide range of topics including the ins and outs of television comedy writing, motherhood, and becoming a woman in the late 20th century. Just as her infamous 2008 portrayal of Sarah Palin sparked many a cable news conversation (some productive, some frustrating), B...
Jul 01, 2014•50 min
Agatha Christie is the owner of numerous superlatives: best-selling novelist, influential mystery writer, criminally successful playwright. Also, did we mention she's a dame? Her novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written in the 1930s, endures not only for its fanciful cast of characters (including the lovable detective Hercule Poirot) but also for its subversion of the murder mystery genre. In short: read this one. We spoil the heck out of this one's ending. Discussion...
Jun 24, 2014•50 min
More than a year after reading Middlesex for Episode 12, this week we return to Jeffrey Eugenides' oeuvre to check out 2011's The Marriage Plot. It's a more focused, less-sprawling book than Middlesex, but as in his previous book Eugenides spends a lot of time here talking about growing up with a difficult condition. Intentional or not, there's also some subtle sexism here that we try to walk ourselves through—it's complicated by both authorial intent and the time the book is...
Jun 17, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Dorothy Parker was a prolific Jazz Age writer who rose to prominence during her days as a member of the Algonquin Round Table - a group of writers, critics and actors who liked to spend lunch cracking wise and practically joking. A celebrated poet, Parker also churned out dozens of short stories, earning herself an O. Henry Short Story Prize for "Big Blonde" which we discuss on today's show. We also cover her biting portrait of newlyweds "Here We Are," the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter, and h...
Jun 09, 2014•52 min
