Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

Slightly less snark than usual in this episode on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966). Capote’s “non-fiction novel” (sure) is about the investigation of a 1959 murder of a family in Kansas and the trial and execution that followed. We discuss midcentury magazine culture and why The New Yorker sucks, how awful it must be to be a prodigy like Capote, and the fact that true crime is both the most fu...

All aboard, it's time to sail the high seas with Herman Melville's Billy Budd (1924)! Melville's posthumously published tale is about a very hot dumb guy who is kidnapped into the navy, then executed for reasons that involve mutiny, gossip, and soup. We talk about how a lot of things on this ship are described as erect, which is definitely just a coincidence, and what hundreds of sailors sleeping...

We have conflicting opinions about Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Megan for some reason finds a book about a dude making lists of every single item he builds, finds, or otherwise encounters on a desert island boring, while Tristan and Katie recognize that as a hallmark of Very Fine Literature (™). There’s lots of good conversation about empire, race, and the novel’s fraught and often quite...

A slight verge from previous eps in that we spend a lot of time on this one talking Bad Takes. We’re still not sure why neoliberals, conservatives, and libertarians spend so much time citing the work of literal ANTIFA George Orwell, but hey--we’re just average book-loving sh*theads, not psychologists. We debate the merits of coveralls and yet again encounter child monsters. There is some discussio...

It’s Pride and Prejudice ! Jane Austen’s beloved 1813 novel about two jerks who discover that they’re hot for each other. We talk about character and the novel, as well as economies of desire and of the social, and we discuss the relative awfulness of the bourgeoisie vs. the aristocracy. We also wonder who even is Mary Bennet and grow concerned that Kitty Bennet might be secretly alt-right. On the...

We discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and everyone’s favorite religious extremists — Puritans! We’re talking adultery, history and the novel, and whether children are evil. (Of course they are. How is this a question?) We also talk about how much Hawthorne hated work and how that makes us love him even more. On the show, we read the Norton edition edited by Leland S. Person. F...

Are you sick of novels that are way too chill with their symbolism? Do you want a novel that has no chill at all? That blasts its symbolism on pretty much every page? Then Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) may be the book for you. We talk masculinity and the phallus, the First World War, bullfighting, and whether Hemingway was for real with this thing. (Answer: yeah, probably?) Also, Me...

We continue our Creature Feature and discuss Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). We get to the important stuff here, trying to figure out why blood transfusions are so very sexy and who you should pick if your dating choices are doctor, lawyer, lord, cowboy, or insane Dutch scientist. We wonder what it might take to transform any one of us into a “train fiend.” We read the Oxford edition, edited by Roge...

Frankenstein On the inaugural episode of Better Read than Dead, we talk about why three jerky socialist academics wanted to do a books podcast. We also talk about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and answer every leftist’s burning questions about it. What does this novel have to do with political revolution? Why is the 1831 edition so much more anti-science than the 1818 edition? And is this nov...