We embark on a cosmic journey through Samuel Delany's 1966 sci-fi gem, Babel-17. This novel by the brilliant self-described “boring old Marxist” (the best kind of person!) has it all: a telepathic poet captaining a star ship, naked space parties, a 10-foot-tall cat-man pilot, and a cosmic throuple guiding the way. And let's not forget the discorpor…

For Halloween 2023, we bring you one of the craziest novels of all time (or certainly of the eighteenth century). Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is a tale of horny Catholics – men and women, in the clergy and not – sexy nuns, ultraviolence, and, as Katie puts it, “dinosaurism.” See, Satan turns into a pterodactyl to open up a can of whoop-ass on t…

Hi again, nerds: we’re back after a long hiatus with more high school English class reads and some Jungianism on the side! JK about that last one, we would never. We’re talking about Aldous Huxley’s 1932 “science fiction” novel Brave New World, which is about how Fordism is bad (yes) but so is being slutty (what? Why?). Shakespeare is Good. Drinkin…

Friends, it's the crossover event of the century - we join our comrades at You're Tall but I'm Standing in Front of You (if you don't know their podcast, it's amazing, hilarious, brilliant, and you should subscribe immediately) for a discussion of Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992). It's a film that dares to ask the question, "What if t…

There is still plenty of spookiness left in the season! To celebrate, this week we are bringing you Stephen King’s The Body from his 1982 collection Different Seasons, also containing Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil. We talk about poverty and violence in rural America, masculinity, class, epic, and the classic Philadelphia …

Happy Halloween, book jerks! Starting our fourth annual spookfest, we’re reading The Stepford Wives, which should actually be called The Stepford Husbands (they’re the scary ones, after all, and credit to Amanda Davis for the appellation). We discuss Ira Levin’s 1972 horror-satire to return to some familiar questions: what are husbands for? Why are…

We couldn’t wait to read the new novel-length version of Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, and it absolutely did not disappoint. Published as a short story in 1944, collected in Eight Men in 1961, and finally published as the novel version last year, the book serves as a major touchstone in Wright’s work, negotiating the space between…

We are back and bringing you The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 historical novel about stepping on twigs and tricking your friends by following them around in a bear costume. We chat about race, the novel's politics, and how an adult man could get tricked by a bunch of beavers. And the French and Indian War! We read the Penguin …

We finish our conversation on George Eliot’s 1871-1872 behemoth Middlemarch with an in-depth discussion of the book as an historical novel and the historical contexts of its setting in the early 1830s. We all have different answers to how much we liked-liked reading this massive thing (Tristan is a big fan, Megan and Katie… less so), but we all lov…

For our 100th episode (!!!), it’s only fitting we tackle a Big One. And George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) is certainly that – literally (it’s SO MANY PAGES). Middlemarch tells the stories of several intersecting characters all trying in various ways to find meaning amid the alienation of industrial modernity, and we discuss epistemology, philo…

It’s a journey Out West with the book jerks–we’re reading Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947)! One of the many under-appreciated women’s novels of the midcentury, this account of Molly and Ralph Fawcett and their bonneted, foofy, bunny rabbit sisters Rachel and Leah moves us into a conversation about childhood, gender, and geography in the US.…

All aboard! This week we are bringing you a one way ticket...to murder! It's Agatha Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. We talk about stabby eye-talians, big ole mustaches and detective fiction, and bust out some top-tier French accents. You'll feel like you're riding a bicycle built for two past the Eiffel Tower with a scarf made o…

It has taken your favorite commie book jerks nearly 100 episodes to answer the much-debated question – what is the horniest novel of the British 19th century? Comrades, it’s Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). We absolutely love this brilliant novel about the torrid love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and the mysterious, often sinister, Got…

You’ve been asking for it (and by “you” we mean “nobody”), so here’s Naked Lunch (1959)! It’s almost unfair to accuse Burroughs of having written this “high,” because there’s really no version of a Burroughs novel that isn’t about being absurdly high and abject. This nightmare account of heroin, orifices, evil doctors, and grime gets us talking abo…

To kick off Season 6, we are joined by comrade, friend-of-the-pod, and Indiana University South Bend associate professor of English Benjamin Balthaser to talk about Mike Gold’s amazing proletarian lit masterpiece, Jews Without Money (1930). If you haven’t heard of this semi-autobiographical novel about growing up on the Lower East Side at the turn …

In our Season 5 wrap-up, we try to stir up a little controversy amongst Yr Worships’s favorite book commies by rerunning Pilgrim’s Progress as a series of debates about the Greatest Hits (™) from past pods. A fierce argument breaks out over whether we have to lose Tristram Shandy or Ulysses from our boat to make it through the Slough of Despond – u…

You all demanded it, so we delivered! Delivered you from evil. Today we have The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) otherwise known as John Bunyan’s Excellent Ambien Adventure. It’s about his dream of a Christian named Christian who sets off on a little journey to the Celestial City where the grass is green and the girls are into religious allegory. We foll…

Today in “men are trash,” and enslaving, colonialist white men are the trashiest of trash, we bring you Sir Richard Steele’s 1711 Spectator retelling of the “Inkle and Yarico” story. For 150 years, versions of Inkle and Yarico were among the most famous narratives of British colonialism in the Americas, and we discuss a few of the most important ex…

Even we, three very experienced Book Jerks, weren’t really prepared for the nightmare that was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, aka Dicks out for Fash. One of us is Bolshier than ever, another has a distracted but still Polish mind, and the third is just a broken woman. We hope that you have your loins thoroughly girded, because this episode is sure to pun…

If you like dunking on useless aristocrats, novels brimming with the psychological tension of unfulfilled desire, and ships, have we got a great one for you! Persuasion (1818) is Jane Austen’s last completed novel, and as it involves boats, it is obviously Tristan’s favorite. We talk changing class forms, the novel’s interest in bodies and time, an…

Modernist grouch, Bloomsbury group member, Freud-to-tea-haver, and Great Novelist Virginia Woolf takes center stage in our discussion of Mrs. Dalloway (1925). We recommend this book if you like books or good writing, and we discuss interwar anxiety, shell shock, gender trouble, and class. This episode also features some discussion of real nerd shit…

Friend, comrade, fellow podcaster, and University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate Devin Daniels joins us to discuss Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)! Devin is the co-host of You’re Tall but I’m Standing in Front of You, and he’s with us for a fun romp about an ordinary guy who likes maps and trips to Italy and is in no way weird …

Wrapping up our two-parter on Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852), we talk about religion, the mind bending plot, what Melville was doing with these characters, writing and publishing, and a splash of Transcendentalism. We also consider the eternal question: what are ladies for? Tristan delivers a discourse on sea clocks and why sailors used to just ha…

This week we are bringing you what the people want, and have always wanted, Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852)! Wait, you don’t want to read a book about a guy who breaks up with his mom for his sister? But you haven’t even heard about his dad yet! Technically it’s more of a painting of his dad, but the painting has a mischievous stare that lets you k…

This week, we bring you the OG ACAB novel, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). We very much stan Godwin, awesome radical, proto-anarchist, Mary Wollstonecraft wifeguy AND Mary Shelley daughterguy. Caleb Williams is about a rich dude who really does mean well, but does that matter? Of course not! It’s structure, structure, structure, so he does …

Closing out this year’s Halloween episodes, we have the much-requested Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) by Oscar Wilde. You probably know the story. Magic picture gets old while dude the picture is of stays young, dumb, and, uh, dtf? And smoking lots of opium, for it is late Victorian London, and what else does one do? We talk queerness and sexuali…

The next installment in our Halloween fright fest comes from the guy who brought us classics like “the rest cure” and a book called Fat and Blood: It’s Silas Weir Mitchell’s 1866 short story “The Case of George Dedlow.” The noted Philadelphia physician gave us this fine tale of a Civil War doctor(ish) who loses all of his limbs in a series of event…

Friends, it’s our third annual Halloween series! We’re talking about Stephen King’s horror classic Carrie (1974), which is about a teenage girl with telekinesis, which the “scientists” cited in the novel conveniently refer to as “TK.” We discuss King’s uneven canon and its political resonances (lots of liberal stuff, but we obviously deliberately m…

Hey comrades! We’re back with more swears, random Frankfurt School references, and messy book takes. In our Season 5 opener, UChicago PhD candidate, friend of the pod, and union organizer Josh Stadtner talks with us about Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), which is about an amateur dentist and his obsession with a concertina. We establish that Frank N…

We are capping off Season 4 with a tribute to next season’s two-parter, Herman Melville’s sister-boinking polycule classic Pierre. We inhabit the mind of Melville and create a Frankenstein Pierre using some old favorites. All we have to do is find a mom with no chill, a theme for our polycule, a “man-child invincible,” a sister to pine after, a for…

This week we are thrilled to bring you Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland. It’s about a guy who gets tricked by a ventriloquist into murdering his family and—we can’t stress this enough—not anybody else. Not another soul was present. There was absolutely no other character involved in this situation. Even to suggest it would be ridiculous.…

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 clueles…

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 an…

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 co…

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 …

It is time to ride the worm and ask the eternal question “what’s in the box?” This week we have Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic about a future where drugs have replaced computers, the nuns are magic and scary, money is worm [redacted], and the East India Company rules space. We chat about this book’s politics, and we get into religion, time, an…

If you like feckless boobs who are also giant crysacks (Megan does not), do we have a book for you! Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is a classic sentimental novel with all the trimmings -- a useless protagonist who thinks crying is hot and who can’t stop getting conned by every sharp, coxcomb, and failson in London. It’s a delightfully …

We close up our discussion of Lolita and try not to reflect too much on what has brought us to this point. We consider what sort of people would read this as a morality play, and what in the actual eff is wrong with them (everything). We talk about the road novel as a genre, the doppelgänger (doing a Freud while simultaneously hating the Good Docto…

Our Season Four two-parter is on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and there’s some truly gruesome material here. If you’ve ever wondered where a Vulgar Marxist and an As*hole with Fussy Modernist Aesthetics might diverge in opinion, it’s over this one. We talk about noveliness, comedy, being a reader (bad and good), and the book’s review genealogy…

Friend of the pod, cultural critic, and Northwestern University professor of African American literature Lauren Michele Jackson joins us for our discussion of George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931). If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to read a wacky-ass novel written by a socialist-turned-right-wing nut, have we got the one for you. Schuyler’s …

Got a sister? Are you SURE you don’t have a sister? Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902-1903) explores this important question along with mesmerism, race, the legacy of American slavery, colonialism and imperialism in Africa, and--somehow--much more. In this episode we simply marvel at the adventures of our protagonist, doctor, anti-colonialist In…

Are you on the bus or off it, man? The book commies, dear listener, are decidedly off it. Or rather, we’re punching, clawing, screaming, and fighting our way out of this goddamn thing, past balls-trippin’ Ken Kesey, speed-addled Neal Cassady, the rest of the Merry Pranksters, and the 400+ freaking pages Tom Wolfe decided to write about them. It’s T…

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…

DID YOU MISS US? Reading with Reds returns for Season Four, and we’re talking about Joan Didion’s The White Album as the first of a three-part series on The New Journalism. We discuss Didion’s recording and perception of the 1960s, non-fiction writing and style, reactionary politics, and why you have to take a bottle of bourbon on all your travels.…

Join us as we revisit some of our favorite fail-lords of the season and conduct a highly scientific and professional grading meeting! We discuss the dastardly deeds of professors and shrubbery as we take a look back at Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) to determine final grades for “Evil STEM 207.” Then we get into Shirley Jackso…

If you’ve been listening to Better Read for a bit, you’re probably aware that Megan’s favorite genre of novel is "brother hearts sister but in a distressing sex way." In that vein, we present one of the absolute classics of the genre, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, which is 300 pages but feels longer. A lot longer. The novel features an upwa…

In keeping with Better Read than Dead’s mission of bringing you literature’s greatest failsons -- and Tristan’s favorite genre of novel, “feckless boob goes on a trip” -- may we present Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and its hero, Horatio M. (We assume he just forgot the rest of his last name.) Horatio is an English aristocrat whose da…

If you need some salty tears in your fruitcake, have we got the one for you. We’re talking about Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” originally published in Mademoiselle in 1956. It’s his semi-autobiographical short story about a young boy’s friendship with his way-older cousin in 1930s Alabama and their alienation from the rest of the adults in …

Ho ho ho! Or in Welsh, cywnwn cywnwn cywnwn! (Probably. Or definitely not, we don’t speak Welsh). For the first of two Christmas episodes this year, we’re getting all poetic-like -- or rather, prose fiction that follows TONS of poetic conventions -- with Dylan Thomas’s 1952 A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Whether you love Christmas or hate it, this i…

This week we descend into the bowels of hell to bring you C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (1942), a Christian epistolary novel about what happens when your demon uncle is also your boss and you’re both very concerned with meeting the Dark Lord’s soul quota for professional reasons. We talk about religion, Anglicanism, Lewis’s politics (confusing…