Episode Details

Liza Libes is defending literature like it's under siege, and after this conversation, you will understand why.

Liza went to Columbia wanting to study Tolstoy and came out having read more Edward Said and Sartre she signed up for. We got into how her English degree turned into a theory degree overnight, why Anna Karenina isn't the feminist manifesto her professors taught it as, and why so much of what gets published now has had the backstory and the beauty edited right out of it by agents chasing a formula.

Liza's family fled the Soviet Union, and her grandfather was imprisoned for being Jewish. Watching that same ideology resurface in new packaging on American campuses is terrifying.

Find Liza at PensandPoison.org She also runs Advictus Prep and is shopping her first novel, which is basically a love letter to beauty written in spite of a literary world that's decided beauty is suspect. If you've been meaning to finally pick up that classic on your shelf, this is your sign!

Memorable Quotes:

"I don't think I met anyone in the English department who had the same reaction... A lot of people I think were actively trying to push this agenda because it had been sold to them." — Liza

"Good fiction is inherently moral. That's not to say moral in one specific restricted sense, but good fiction should teach us something about the way to live our lives." — Liza

"A lot of our art today is ironic, nihilistic, cynical, and just downright amoral." — Liza

"If your response to [boredom in a marriage] is I'm just going to abandon this whole thing that gives everyone meaning, then that is going to lead you to a dark place." — Liza, on Anna Karenina

"People will hold onto their identity more than the truth." — Polina, paraphrasing Chase Hughes

"My family kind of went through horrific examples of antisemitism twice, just in our personal lives... and it's horrific that it's happening again." — Liza

"If you're going to make one change in your life to lead a more full and fulfilling life, read classic literature." — Liza

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Episode Time Stamps

• 04:32 — Arriving at Columbia expecting to study literature, getting Edward Said and postcolonial theory on Jane Austen instead
• 06:36 — Same pattern outside the English department — a philosophy class teaching Hegel through the lens of BLM, and why she eventually stepped back from academia
• 08:46 — How Pens and Poison started, and the slow, stuck-at-20K-fol