Podcast Episodes
Back to Search58 Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists (with Professor Paul Peppis)
Embattled and arrogant, the novelist and painter Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was deeply immersed in Modernism even as he sought to blast it apart. He w…
9 years, 8 months ago
57 Borges, Munro, Davis, Barthelme – All About Short Stories (And Long Ones Too)
What makes a short story a short story? What can a short story do that a novel can’t? Can a story ever be TOO short? The President of the Literature …
9 years, 8 months ago
56 Shelley, HD, Yeats, Frost, Stevens – The Poetry of Ruins (with Professor Bill Hogan)
In 1818, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley published his classic poem “Ozymandias,” depicting the fallen statue of a once-powerful king whose in…
9 years, 9 months ago
55 James Joyce (with Vincent O’Neill)
Vincent O’Neill hails from Sandycove, Dublin, where he grew up in the shadow of the tower made famous by the opening chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses…
9 years, 9 months ago
54 The Greatest Books Ever (Part 2)
What books are essential? Who has the authority to choose them, and what is their selection process? First, Jacke and Mike continue their look at the…
9 years, 9 months ago
53 Romeo and Juliet
In 1964, the Oxford professor John Barrington Wain wrote: “…Romeo and Juliet is as perfectly achieved as anything in Shakespeare’s work. It is a flaw…
9 years, 9 months ago
52 Recommend This! The Best 101 Books for College-Bound Readers
What works of literature are essential? When we start reading literature, where do we begin? The College Board, an organization that prepares standar…
9 years, 10 months ago
51 Coleridge, Kubla Khan, and the Person from Porlock – A Literary Mystery
In 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge took two grains of opium and fell into a stupor. When he awoke, he had in his head the remnants of a marvel…
9 years, 10 months ago
50 Othello
One of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (ca. 1603) is perhaps the most difficult of them to watch. The …
9 years, 10 months ago
49 MFA Programs – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
For decades, the Master of Fine Arts degree has quietly dominated the American literary scene. There are now over 100 programs where professors and s…
9 years, 10 months ago