The Infinite Library

After a heaping helping of guests for the last couple of episodes, we're back this week with an Infinite Library Classique episode. This week, John and Ben are discussing "Tun-Huang", Yasushi Inoue's sparse yet epic tale of war and religion set against the beautiful, barren plains and deserts of western China. Topics this week include the NYRB Classics imprint, historical fiction...

I feel like White Kafka! Greetings, Bookheads: this week we've got a special off-week treat for you. We sat down with our friend Dan to discuss Franz Kafka's unfinished novel: The Castle. We hope you enjoy!

This week on the Infinite Library, we're talking about modern love (as in "modernism", get it?). John's girlfriend Ana joins the Book Boys to talk about Djuna Barnes' classic of lesbian literature. We talk about why this book isn't as well known as its peers, Freud and fascism, and whether or not books are supposed to teach us things. We hope you'll enjoy this discuss...

This week, John and Ben welcome Geoffrey Morrison, a novelist based in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss "By Night in Chile" by Roberto Bolano. The three of us had a fantastic discussion on Bolano's life and legacy, as well as this brilliant, terrifying little novel. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

This week, Ben and John are tackling their first work by the Queen of Literary Twitter: Joyce Carol Oates. Given this show's fascination with the gothic, we decided to start with the first installment of JCO's Gothic Quartet, "Bellefleur". We talk about the gothic (again), it's role in American culture, realism & supernaturalism in fiction, amongst many other topics. This...

On this week's episode of The Infinite Library, John and Ben are hopping in the Library's time machine and heading back to the 1860s with Zadie Smith's "The Fraud". We discuss historical fiction, the role art takes in shaping us, and hysterical realism.

Picture this: you, lowly listener, have managed to secure an invitation to the swankiest New Year's soiree known to man--hosted by the Infinite Library. Pressing shoulders with the great and good of the literary world, you stumble upon your humble hosts, John and Ben, in the midst of a private conversation. Being the humble, work-a-day podcast hosts they are, they engage you in conversation an...

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, Book-Heads! This week John and Ben are joined deep in the stacks by Eden of Death//Sentence, Heavy Blog is Heavy, and AnarchySF to discuss the "Velvet Underground of 80s Fantasy Novels": "The Dragon Waiting" by John M. Ford. Topics of conversation include the wild and wooly figure of John M. Ford himself, the curious nature of the Alternate H...

This week, the Book Boys are diving into the swamp and getting way out of their depth with Qiu Miaojin’s “Notes of a Crocodile”. Despite very much not being Taiwanese lesbians, the Infinite Library is discussing one of the seminal works of Taiwanese lesbian fiction. Come for the riveting conversation on 90s Taiwan and the history of homosexuality in the Sinosphere, stay to hear John butcher the pr...

Put on your Pomas and get ready to consult the Cone of Fate, because this week John and Ben are reading "Masters of Atlantis" by Charlie Portis. The Book Boys talk about cults, the unceasing march of time, and John's theory of the "Boomer Novel".

In aerodynamics, a “slipstream” is the region behind a moving object in which a wake of fluid (typically air or water) is moving at velocities comparable to that of the moving object, such as the the wake behind a speeding boat or jet plane. Most do not know though, that the term has another use: a genre of literature originally described by science fiction author Bruce Sterling in his 1989 essay...

John and Ben knew that Halloween can be a dangerous time in the Infinite Library, what with all the ghosts and goblins around, so they knew they were going to need a bit of extra support for this very spooky episode. Luckily, Dylan and Robb from Hot for Creature were sucked into the Library when Robb's Blu-Ray collection officially got "out of hand" so the Frightening Foursome was ab...

TRIGGER WARNING: Racially charged language (Mediterranean) As a little pre-Halloween treat, John decided to sit down and do a narration of one of their favorite Lovecraft stories: Pickman's Model. This is our team's first time putting something like this together, so please forgive the minor audio issues. Enjoy!

Ghoul evening, ladies & gentle-creeps. John & Ben welcome you to another foray into the endless stacks of the Infinite Library, but this time...it's spooky. For our first Halloween themed episode of October 2023, we're descending into the ghost-haunted crypts of the Library to discuss the first ever Gothic novel: "The Castle of Otranto". We start off the episode with a di...

John & Ben welcome you to the Infinite Library, a world where books are infinite, but we are not. We start off with a little table talk about the podcast and what we're doing here is. With the boring stuff out of the way, we dig into our first topic: "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco: a novel featuring a library that feels like it might go on for ever. We talk widely, with a...