Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
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Top 10 Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Episode 76: Silas Marner
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
07/11/21 • 84 min
The Bible says something somewhere about children who are worth their weight in gold. Well, George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) explores what would happen if we took that proverb super literally! (Or figuratively? Mythically! That’s it. Or is this more of a fable? Wait, it’s a realist novel???) Silas Marner is about a linen weaver in the Midlands countryside whom the village folk assume is Gandalf (natch) and who adopts a daughter who mysteriously appears at his door. But, as with everything Eliot wrote, it’s also about, uh, everything -- industrialization, capital, parentage, class, religion and modernity, epistemology, and much much more.
We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Juliette Atkinson. For an excellent discussion of how Silas Marner critiques materialist/financial forms of value, see Mary Poovey’s influential Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. And for a landmark study of how the English novel was shaped by -- and critiqued -- the emergence of the capitalist market, as always, we recommend Deidre Shauna Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning.
*Note to our listeners -- Megan is off this episode. She’ll be back next week.
Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
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Episode 75: The Great Gatsby
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
07/04/21 • 80 min
If you’re one of those try-hards who read this for the AP Lit test (and we are), you’ll be pleased to see us finally take this one on. This week we have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, which is about extremely non-embarrassing things like throwing enormous parties so your ex-girlfriend will notice you. We talk about Fitzgerald’s accounts of sex and money, gender and sexuality, and Long Island guys who are really transplants so they go particularly hard.
We read the Scribner edition with introduction by Jesmyn Ward. For a wild ride, read Gore Vidal’s “Scott’s Case,” published in the May 1 1980 issue of The New York Review of Books, as it contains some truly wacky bon mots, like “All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars,” which... probably not?
Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
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Episode 67: The Journalist and the Murderer
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
05/09/21 • 93 min
Friend of the pod Sebastian Stockman joins us for the second episode in our three-part series on The New Journalism. Sub is a teaching professor in English at Northeastern University, and a journalist and essayist. We discuss Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), a book about another book -- Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision, for which the subject (convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald) sued McGinniss for fraud. We take up the whole idea of the “nonfiction novel,” Malcolm’s interest in psychoanalysis as a lens for thinking about the journalist-subject relationship, and the ethics of writing about real people. Tristan also gets to dunk on William F Buckley (his favorite thing), and Sub shares some tips on good work habits via Tom Wolfe -- we’ll get to him next week.
We read the Vintage edition. For more Malcolm, you can read In the Freud Archives, which Sub talks about on the show. That book spawned its own famous lawsuit, an experience Malcolm discusses in The Journalist and the Murderer and which, in part, frames her discussion of the McGinniss case.
You should also check out Sub’s newsletter! You can find it -- and subscribe! -- here: https://sebastianstockman.substack.com.
Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Sub on Twitter @substockman, Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
Episode 77: No-No Boy
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
07/18/21 • 76 min
It’s a drizzly day in Seattle in John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), and we’re feeling the mood. No-No Boy is about Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese-American man who refused military service after being drafted from an internment camp and was imprisoned for it. He careens around Seattle and Portland, turning down jobs (always a good instinct) and connecting and disconnecting from his friends and family (including his rather... conspiratorially-minded mother.) We discuss war-era masculinity, citizenship, and racialization. We get into the absolutely wild publication history of this novel, which was (re)found, (re)published, and then published without the estate’s permission.
We read the University of Washington Press edition with forward by Ruth Ozeki, introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada, and afterward by Frank Chin. We recommend King-Kok Cheung’s Articulate Silences as a foundational work in Asian-American literary studies, and Jeffrey Santa Ana’s Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion for a recent study of Asian-American literature/affect studies.
*Note to our listeners -- Katie is off this episode. She’ll be back next week.
Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
Episode 78: Lucy
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
08/01/21 • 77 min
After devoting much of this podcast to the pressing topic of Dads Who Are A**holes (and have failsons), here’s our second back-to-back episode on Moms Who Are A**holes (this time with a success daughter). We love Jamaica Kincaid, and we especially love her 1990 novella Lucy about a young West Indian woman who comes to work as an au pair for clueless bourgie white people in the United States. We’re talking race and colonialism, capital, gender and sexuality, and, yes, mothers. We also plunge into the pressing question: why do rich white sh*theads love claiming to be “Indian” so much?
We read the Ferrar, Straus and Giroux edition. There are two pieces of scholarship we talk about on the show which we highly recommend. For how Lucy explores outsider-ness as a way of disrupting white, bourgeois structures, check out Jennifer J. Nichols’s “‘Poor Visitor’: Mobility as/of Voice in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy” in MELUS. And for more on Lucy’s sexual adventures as strategies of resistance and becoming, see Gary E. Holcomb’s “Travels of a Transnational Slut: Sexual Migration in Kincaid’s Lucy” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
Episode 17: Rosemary's Baby
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
10/27/19 • 84 min
We’re back to one of our usual themes this week--creepy babies! We take on Ira Levin’s 1967 genre novel Rosemary’s Baby, which asks if pregnancy, neighbors, or husbands are the most creepy (they’re all creepy AF.) The DEVIL HIMSELF shows up in the form of a tin whistle in this episode, and there is much discussion of (maybe poison) smoothies, the terror domestic, and HIPAA regulations (turns out they’re useful).
We read the Pegasus Books edition, with an introduction by Otto Penzler. We mention Sophie Lewis’s spectacular Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, published this year by Verso Books, which argues for a utopian notion of communal and communist belonging against blood parenthood and nuclear familial ties. If you’re into this sort of thing, we also recommend Shulamith Firestone’s manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex.
Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
Episode 15: Little Women
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
10/13/19 • 86 min
Put your crying pants on, because it’s time for Little Women (1868)! We talk about why Jo is so cool, whether it’s bad to steal a lady’s glove so you can sniff it in private (it is), and whether Beth—the shy sister who suffers from noted 19th-century ailment “paleness”—is actually the biggest psycho of them all. We get deep into how Megan lost her soul and ability to feel, as she found herself unmoved by the many touching and ennobling scenes in this book. We also discuss class (boy are they classy!), marriage (hooray!), the Civil War (serious.), and religion (hallelujah!).
On the show, we read the Norton Critical Edition edited by Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein. For more on Little Women and the religious novel, check out Katie’s favorite work of literary criticism ever, Gregory S. Jackson’s The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism. If you still can’t get enough of Pilgrim’s Progress in American history after this episode, we also recommend Jackson’s article “A Game Theory of Evangelical Fiction.”
Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
Episode 16: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
10/20/19 • 84 min
There are few things Better Read than Dead enjoys more than owning dipsh*ts/watching dipsh*ts get owned, which is why we were so psyched to read Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). Irving’s spooky (no, hilarious) short story is about a tall dipsh*t who gets owned by a Headless Horseman. Or a pumpkin? Or, really, just the Dutch version of Gaston. Also, did you know Irving was the OG flat-earther?? He sure was! Chemtrails -- google it, folks. We’re talking genre, colonial histories, Cotton Mather, and more.
We read the version of "Sleepy Hollow" in the Oxford edition of The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., edited by Susan Manning. We don’t get into this aspect on the show all that much, but David Anthony’s article “‘Gone Distracted’: ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ Gothic Masculinity, and the Panic of 1819” offers an interesting reading of the connections between Irving’s treatment of gender and the story’s immediate historical context.
Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
Episode 14: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
10/06/19 • 87 min
We’re such goths (apparently), we didn’t even realize we were doing a Halloween month when we recorded this episode on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Stevenson’s novella is about an insufferable prick who invents a potion that turns him into a tiny psychopath -- and then he gets stuck like that. What did your (deranged, race-sciencey) grandmother tell you about the dangers of making a face of THE CRIMINAL TYPE? Lots of great discussion on Victorian anxieties about “the criminal” and the city, epistemology, and, once again, phrenology.
We read the Penguin Classics edition edited by Robert Mighall. Chris Baldick’s In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing puts Stevenson in conversation with several C19th authors (including Shelley, Melville, and Conrad!) working through the political in horror/early science fiction.
Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
Episode 29: The Lottery
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective
03/01/20 • 83 min
Megan is back to lead our discussion of Shirley Jackson’s most famous work, “The Lottery” (1948), and hoo boy, do we talk about how mad the readers were when this was published. The New Yorker famously lost like a billion subscriptions and got a grazillion angry letters from their readership of middlebrow prudes, who wondered, “is it based on reality? Do these practices still continue in back-country England, the human sacrifice for the rich harvest? It’s a frightening thought.” Even though Shirley Jackson, in her essay “Biography of a Story,” claims “it’s just a story I wrote,” we discuss totalitarianism, the terror of the rural, the expanded family, and the history of strange rites in literature (and movies for, like, a minute.) We also talk about how we all read it in high school and what a trip it was to read with our peers.
We read The New Yorker’s archival version. While there is scant academic writing on Jackson, we recommend Ruth Franklin’s biography A Rather Haunted Life, and suggest checking out Elaine Showalter’s review of it in The Washington Post, where she reminds us that “behind her cheery masks, Jackson was hiding an angry, vengeful self, dreaming of divorce and flight to a place where she could be alone and write,” which is truly our kind of broad.
Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective have?
Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective currently has 109 episodes available.
What topics does Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective cover?
The podcast is about Podcasts, Books and Arts.
What is the most popular episode on Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective?
The episode title 'Episode 75: The Great Gatsby' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective?
The average episode length on Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective is 84 minutes.
How often are episodes of Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective released?
Episodes of Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective?
The first episode of Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective was released on Jul 9, 2019.
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