The Big Book Project

Compass by Mathias Énard, from the inside: translator Charlotte Mandell joins Lori Feathers to talk about inhabiting Franz Ritter's sleepless mind and carrying Énard's digressive prose into English. Charlotte has translated more than 50 books from French and is Énard's longtime English translator. She works without reading ahead, so Compass unfolded for her page by page, the way it...

James Elkins returns to the show for his third visit to talk with Lori about Stories Like Illnesses , out October 6 from Unnamed Press. It is the first book or volume of his Five Strange Languages novel ( though the third to be published), and Jim is careful to say these books are not a series, but rather a single novel, over twenty years in the making. Each of its five books ( Weak in Comparison...

Anxieties of Experience , with Professor Jeffrey Lawrence Lori talks with scholar, translator, and novelist Professor Jeffrey Lawrence about his book Anxieties of Experience:The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño.  Lawrence's thesis is that authors in the United States have traditionally written from experience, ala the mantra, “write what you know.” Look at Ernest Hemingway o...

Translator David McKay returns to the show fifteen months after his last visit when we discussed Daanje's The Remembered Soldier , which would go on to win the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize. McKay's latest collaboration with Daanje is another monumental novel, The Song of Stork and Dromedary, out now from FSG. In Daanje's home country the Netherlands this novel did something...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject Lori is joined by Jose Vergara, Associate Professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College, for a deep dive on Sasha Sokolov, the great destabilizing stylist of Soviet literature and a true writer’s writer. Together they read through Sokolov’s first two novels, A School for Fools (New York Review Books Classics) and Between Dog and Wolf (Columbia University Press),...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject https://www.instagram.com/thebigbookproject/ Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer is a 700 page novel about a man who wakes in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact but no memory of who he is or how he got there. On this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers chats with Jim to celebrate the 10th Anniversary Edition of his expansive novel, one o...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject Effingers by Gabriele Tergit is an 800-page German Jewish family saga published by New York Review of Books Classics, and this week NYRB publicist Nick During joins me to talk about what makes it so special. Nick and I follow three generations of the Effinger family from a watchmaker’s bench in small-town Bavaria to the grand houses and Sunday lunches of Ber...

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus is a puzzling novel, and in this episode of The Big Book Project host Lori Feathers and guest Chad W. Post take on the first two hundred pages featuring an unreliable narrator, an unorthodox musical prodigy, and the transformation of art making into conformity to a systematized order. The Big Book Project was created as a forum to share ideas about challenging novels,...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject (Lori recorded this interview on a different device, and we apologize for the poor quality of her audio.) For five decades Steven Moore has been one of the most thoughtful champions of the kinds of novels we read at The Big Book Project — the abundant, stylistically ambitious works that reward slow attention. He is the foremost scholar on William Gaddis, the...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject Watch the full episode on youtube:  As we continue reading The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Richard Bailey joins me to talk about Part Two of the novel. Richard is my fellow bookseller at Interabang Books and simply, one of my favorite people to talk to about books, ideas, and the creative process. As we continue to try to understand who Kristian...

The name Fernando Del Paso was new to me two and a half years ago when author, publisher, and Dalkey Archive Press alum Martin Riker introduced me to Palinuro of Mexico . What a revelation this late Mexican novelist! Here was an author who wrote wildly, exuberantly, and explored consciousness, memory, and the ineffable mysticism of the world in such a compelling way. It didn’t take me any time at...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject Chad W. Post, publisher at Open Letter Books and translation studies instructor at the University of Rochester joins Lori Feathers on The Big Book Project to discuss the first 145 pages of Karl Ove Knausgåard's The School of Night. They explore Knausgaard's ouvre, the companion novels in his The School of Night constellation, as well as some of the...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is too much—too many characters, too many plot points, too much chaos—and that’s exactly what makes it extraordinary. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers sits down with Professor Michael Sexton, a devoted reader now on his fourth reading of the novel, to dig into Part Two, Chapters VII through XII. They talk abo...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow rewards readers willing to move inward — into the psychological depths of a single family across three generations — rather than outward toward the conventional satisfactions of plot and incident. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers is joined by novelist Mark Haber for a rich, searching conversation about o...

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is one of those novels that resists easy summary — and that resistance is precisely what makes it so worth discussing. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers is joined by Faulkner scholar Larry Allums for a deep, unhurried conversation about one of Faulkner’s most structurally ambitious and morally searching works. Go Down, Moses occupies a de...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori Feathers is joined by translator Ursula Phillips to discuss her extraordinary translation of Ice, the monumental, genre-defying novel by Polish author Jacek Dukaj. Clocking in at nearly 1,200 pages, Ice is both an alternate-history epic and a philosophical meditation on truth, language, power, and perception. Phi...

In this episode of The Big Book Project , Lori sits down with novelist and philosopher Mark de Silva to explore his monumental 2022 novel The Logos — a thousand-page meditation on art, perception, capitalism, and the visual texture of contemporary life. A writer steeped in philosophy and the visual arts, Mark reveals how The Logos emerged from nearly a decade of research into advertising theory, i...

In this final discussion of Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, Lori is joined once again by Dr. Larry Allums to close out one of the most haunting and inexhaustible novels in American literature. Together, they trace Faulkner’s labyrinth of narration—Quentin and Shreve’s imaginative reconstruction of the Sutpen story—and explore what it reveals about truth, storytelling, and the South’s enduri...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject In this episode of The Big Book Project , Lori Feathers and Dr. Larry Allums delve into Chapter 7 of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! —one of the novel’s most intricate and revealing sections. They trace Thomas Sutpen’s backstory from his rugged Appalachian boyhood to the life-altering moment that shapes his “design.” What begins as a story of social hum...

In this episode of The Big Book Project , host Lori Feathers and literary scholar Dr. Larry Allums continue their deep exploration of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! —turning to the enigmatic and multi-layered Chapter 6. This chapter introduces a new voice into Faulkner’s intricate web of narrators: Shreve McCannon, Quentin Compson’s Canadian roommate at Harvard. Lori and Larry discuss how Fa...

Welcome back to The Big Book Project , hosted by Lori Feathers . In Video 2 , Lori continues her discussion of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! with returning guest Dr. Larry Allums . Together, they unpack the intense drama of Chapters 4 and 5 , where Rosa Coldfield’s narration reveals her humiliation at the hands of Thomas Sutpen — and Faulkner deepens his exploration of race, obsession, and...

In this episode of The Big Book Project , Lori Feathers is joined by Dr. Larry Allums to launch our collective read of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! — one of the most complex and unforgettable novels in American literature. They unpack the biblical and mythological dimensions of the novel, explore its shifting narrators, and discuss how Faulkner used the story of Thomas Sutpen to expose the...

This week on The Big Book Project I’m joined by Nick During , publicist at New York Review Books , for a deep dive into Henrik Pontoppidan’s monumental novel A Fortunate Man translated by Paul Larkin . Pontoppidan, who won the 1917 Nobel Prize in Literature , gives us one of the great portraits of ambition, love, and disillusionment at the turn of the 20th century. His protagonist, Per, dreams of...

Join host Lori Feathers and guest Chad W. Post (Dalkey Archive Press & Open Letter Books) as they dive into the world of Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes, one of the most significant literary voices of the last 50 years. They discuss Antunes’s groundbreaking style—shifting voices, fragmented memory, and narrative consciousness—as well as the political and historical backdrops of his fict...

In this final conversation on The Kindly Ones , I’m joined again by Tom Flynn to explore the last chaotic stretch of Jonathan Littell’s massive and deeply unsettling novel. We talk about the feverish pacing, the bizarre turns, and the chilling final scenes—from Max biting Hitler’s nose to the feral children in the woods. Does the book fall apart, or is it mirroring the collapse of the world it dep...