Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchWeeping for Gogol
"Gogol was a strange creature," said Nabokov, "but genius is always strange." Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809 – 1852) rose from obscurity to a brilli…
6 years, 8 months ago
Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (with Yuval Taylor)
Episode 188
They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Their names w…
6 years, 8 months ago
The Brontes
Although their lives were filled with darkness and death, their love for stories and ideas led them into the bright realms of creative genius. They w…
6 years, 8 months ago
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894) went from a childhood in the western islands of Scotland to the heights of literary popularity and success, belo…
6 years, 9 months ago
Marcel Proust
Episode 185
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) did little of note until he turned 38 years old - but from that point forward, he devoted the rest of his life to writing a…
6 years, 10 months ago
George Eliot
Episode 184
Perhaps the greatest of all the many great English novelists, George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. Her fa…
7 years, 1 month ago
Samuel Beckett
Episode 183
We're back! A newly reenergized Jacke Wilson returns for a deep dive into the life, works, and politics of Samuel Beckett. Yes, we know him as one of…
7 years, 2 months ago
182 Darkness and Light (with Jessica Harper)
Jessica Harper has had the kind of life it would take ten memoirs to capture. Born in 1949, she went from a childhood in Illinois to a career as a Br…
7 years, 2 months ago
181 David Foster Wallace (with Mike Palindrome)
Frequent guest Mike Palindrome takes the wheel for another solo episode on David Foster Wallace, including a deep dive into Wallace's unfinished manu…
7 years, 3 months ago
179 The Oscars by Decade (with Brian Price)
Screenwriter and film scholar Brian Price (author of Classical Storytelling and Contemporary Screenwriting: Aristotle and the Modern Screenwriter) jo…
7 years, 3 months ago