Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchLiterary Forgery: From Pseudo-Dionysius to Ern Malley and Mark Hofmann
Episode 11683
In 1985 two people were killed by pipe bombs in Salt Lake City, and the bomber was a man who made fake paper. This episode surveys the bizarre, hilar…
4 days, 16 hours ago
Franz Kafka: The Laughing Insurance Clerk Who Defined Modern Anxiety
Episode 11682
The man whose name became shorthand for inescapable bureaucratic horror used to read his darkest stories aloud to friends and laugh so hard he had to…
4 days, 16 hours ago
Samizdat: Typewriters, Bone Records and the Soviet Underground Press
Episode 11681
A flimsy, blurry stack of tissue-paper carbon copies valued more than any state-published book, and forbidden jazz pressed into discarded medical X-r…
4 days, 16 hours ago
Federico García Lorca: Duende, La Barraca and the Grave Never Found
Episode 11680
Excavations in 2009, 2014 and 2016, guided by eyewitness accounts and ground-penetrating radar, have turned up nothing: no bones, no clothing, no bul…
4 days, 16 hours ago
Edith Wharton: Gilded Age Rebel, WWI Relief Worker and Pulitzer Pioneer
Episode 11679
The phrase keeping up with the Joneses traces back to a real New York family, and one daughter of that family decided the last thing she wanted was t…
4 days, 16 hours ago
Dorothy Parker: Algonquin Wit, Hollywood Blacklist and a Civil Rights Legacy
Episode 11678
The defining wisecracker of the 1920s spent 17 years after her death as unclaimed ashes in a lawyer's filing cabinet. This episode looks past the gin…
4 days, 16 hours ago
Clarice Lispector: From Ukrainian Refugee to Brazil's Literary Revolutionary
Episode 11677
A wealthy woman in a 1960s Rio penthouse opens her maid's wardrobe, finds a cockroach, crushes it and puts a piece of it in her mouth. That scene fro…
4 days, 16 hours ago
Geoffrey Chaucer: Spy, Customs Controller and Father of English Literature
Episode 11676
Forget the dusty scholar in a stone tower. The Geoffrey Chaucer found in medieval tax audits, royal ransom notes and a 2022 archival discovery was a …
4 days, 16 hours ago
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Rest Cure, The Yellow Wallpaper and Eugenics
Episode 11675
Imagine seeking help for severe depression and being ordered never to touch a pen, pencil or paintbrush again. That was the rest cure prescribed to C…
4 days, 16 hours ago
Charles Dickens: Child Labor, Celebrity and the Making of Christmas
Episode 11674
The man who gave us the cozy, moral, family-centered image of Christmas lived a life that looked nothing like a greeting card. This episode follows C…
4 days, 16 hours ago