Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchDan Sperrin, "State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Episode 173
Satire is a funny, aggressive, and largely oppositional literature which is typically created by people who refuse to participate in a given regime’s…
1 year, 1 month ago
Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)
Episode 61
In an essay about her recent book Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncann…
1 year, 1 month ago
Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir, "Ghosts, Trolls, and the Hidden People: An Anthology of Icelandic Folk Legends" (Reaktion, 2025)
Episode 54
Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Ghosts, Trolls, and Hidden People: An Anthology of Icelandic Folk Legends (Reaktio…
1 year, 1 month ago
Carrie Helms Tippen, "Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
Episode 174
The cookbook genre is highly conventional with an orientation toward celebration and success. From glossy photographs to heartwarming stories and adj…
1 year, 1 month ago
Pāṇḍitya: Mapping Sanskrit Texts Online
Episode 590
Tyler Neill discusses the new platform Pāṇḍitya, an online graph visualization tool illustrating connections between works and authors in the Pandit …
1 year, 1 month ago
Noel Rubinton, "Looking for a Story: A Complete Guide to the Writings of John McPhee" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Episode 120
John McPhee has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965 and has written more than thirty acclaimed books that began on the magazine's pages…
1 year, 1 month ago
Steve McCauley on Barbara Pym: The Comic Novel Explored and Adored (JP)
Back in 2019, John spoke with the celebrated comic novelist Stephen McCauley. Nobody knows more about the comic novel than Steve--his latest is You O…
1 year, 1 month ago
James B. Haile III, "The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Episode 505
An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom (Columbia Unive…
1 year, 1 month ago
Daniel Behar, "Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
Episode 300
Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity (Edinburgh UP, 2025) examines a poetic movement that rose from under official state discourse in 1970s Syria
…1 year, 1 month ago
Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Episode 347
The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic …
1 year, 1 month ago