Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchPaul Chrystal, "Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome" (Reaktion, 2025)
Episode 47
Both humorous and shocking, Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome (Reaktion, 2025) by Paul Crystal is filled with astonish…
1 year, 1 month ago
Monika Amsler, "The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Episode 49
The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023) argues that the Talmud must be read and understood in the broader context of…
1 year, 2 months ago
Tithi Bhattacharya, "Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal" (Duke UP, 2024)
Episode 344
In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghos…
1 year, 2 months ago
Shailendra Kumar Singh, "Between Resistance and Conformity: Premchand’s Fiction in Colonial North India" (Routledge, 2024)
Episode 345
Shailendra Kumar Singh’s Between Resistance and Conformity: Premchand’s Fiction in Colonial North India (Routledge, 2024) examines the questions of c…
1 year, 2 months ago
Polly Jones, "Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin" (Bloombury, 2024)
Episode 301
Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (Bloombury, 2024) is a unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour…
1 year, 2 months ago
Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)
Episode 61
In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked hi…
1 year, 2 months ago
Alexandra Popoff, "Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century" (Yale UP, 2019)
Episode 93
Memory and truth are malleable and nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union. To be a writer in that country was to face an ongoing dilemma: conform …
1 year, 2 months ago
Eike Exner, "Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
Episode 58
Japanese comics, commonly known as manga, are a global sensation. Critics, scholars, and everyday readers have often viewed this artform through an O…
1 year, 2 months ago
Geoffrey Roberts, "Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books" (Yale UP, 2022)
Episode 222
In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read…
1 year, 2 months ago
Ignat Solzhenitsyn, ed., "We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn" (U Notre Dame Press, 2025)
Episode 299
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (U Notre Dame Press, 2025) brings together ten of Nobel Prize–winner …
1 year, 2 months ago