Podcast Episodes

Twelve Lives: Creating Literary Community with Raymond Williams, PhD

From the moment I began working with the New Books Network, my vision was bigger than author interviews. I envisioned my platform one where people co…

2 months, 1 week ago

Decolonizing the Novum

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the …

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Ted Goossen on translating Hiromi Kawakami’s “Third Love”

Translator Ted Goossen talks about everything from first landing in Japan in 1968 to the differences between translating Haruki Murakami and Hiromi K…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Ed Simon, "Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainl…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Namwali Serpell, "On Morrison" (Hogarth, 2026)

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowe…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Fiction’s Lost Ambition with Writer Sam Kahn

Fiction has “lost its ambition,” and not only that, “its centrality to the culture,” Sam Kahn says in a recent piece on “Castalia,” his popular Subst…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

In Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Leslie Barnes examines the ambivalences that mark S…

2 months, 3 weeks ago

Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – …

2 months, 3 weeks ago

Eleanor Houghton, "Charlotte Brontë's Life in Clothes" (Bloomsbury 2026)

Eleanor Houghton, in conversation with Duncan McCargo and Alexis Wolf

Meet the real, thinking, feeling woman that was Charlotte Brontë, as told in t…

2 months, 3 weeks ago

Asif Iqbal, "Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation" (Routledge, 2025)

Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation (Routledge, 2025) illuminates individual and collect…

2 months, 3 weeks ago