Overdue

It's time to choose our adventure and celebrate the arrival of Spring with a trip to the Big Apple in Ellen Kushner's Statue of Liberty Adventure. This week's choices include quantum pants, Coffee Boy, and Dick Van Dyke's Worst Charlie Bit My Finger Impression (TM). The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are uniformly terrible. Any identification with actual p...

Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds is about the power of words, the power of nature, the power of women, and the power of silence. It's not always fun to read, but it's always got something to say. That's not always the case for Andrew and Craig at parties, though. This week's episode is sponsored by SquareSpace. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Not...

You've seen the movie(s). You've seen the play/musical. But have you read the novel of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan? It's chockablock with mommy wives, nanny dogs, and more adventures than you can shake a pretend stick at. Join us as we poke fun at and point out problematic elements of a classic children's story, revel in the power of the imagination, and catalog the myriad inspirations for Peter Pan....

For February's bonus show, friend of the show and co-Two Bossy Dame Sophie Brookover (@sophiebiblio) joins us to talk about Speedboat, Renata Adler's first novel. This is one of those episodes where the author threatens to overshadow the book itself - Adler is an outsize figure with a long career, and she's never been shy about telling people exactly what she thinks. And that's true even though he...

Disgruntled, Asali Solomon’s debut novel, is simultaneously ambitious and accessible. It’s a coming-of-age novel that grapples with questions of race, identity, and family, all heavy topics. But it’s always clear and direct and it’s often funny, and Solomon has a gift for making complicated feelings easy to understand. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice a...

We are doomed to remember a podcast about a book about a boy with a wrecked voice. John Irving's seminal bildungsroman A Prayer for Owen Meany weaves together themes of American disillusionment and religious destiny into a fable about little Owen, who changed the world of everyone that knew him. Join us as we find excuses to talk about Seinfeld, prayers for war robots, and strange dads. This week'...

Stephen King's It deserves most of the praise it gets - it's an incredibly long, incredibly detailed book that tells two long intertwined stories and a bunch of short ones besides, and in one section it made Andrew physically uncomfortable. Mission accomplished, Stephen! But it's not all good; the book is longer than it probably needs to be and it lingers on certain aspects of pre-teen sexuality j...

Special guest Jake Hurwitz (of Jake and Amir, If I Were You, and Headgum fame) joins us this week to talk about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, one of the very earliest examples of the modern novel. Along the way, we discuss the ins and outs of being stuck on a desert island, the many ways in which this years-old story is pretty racist, and just how long the REAL title of the book is. This week's...

For January's bonus episode, we put together a sci-fi double feature: The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin and The Forbidden Words of Margaret A. by L. Timmel Duchamp. Both are short stories of speculative fiction, and both are incredibly clever bummers. When not despairing at the states of humanity and journalism, we lighten the mood with some horrifying mouth noises, David Bro...

Widely regarded as one of the best, and most important books, of the last half-century, Toni Morrison's Beloved is an unflinching examination of how the past can enslave just as painfully as a yoke or a whip can - and how our inability to wrestle with the past begets wrongdoing for generations to come. Listen in as we discuss full-contact sports, the myth of the well-meaning slave-owner, hauntings...

This week's book manages to combine eerily accurate biology with a Margaret Atwood-esque dystopia, a potent mixture that you need to read to believe. We also dive deep into our mailbag, discuss the recent blizzard, and put some basketball jokes in the place you would LEAST expect. This week's episode is brought to you in part by Squarespace. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and Cali...

In A Canticle for Leibowitz, the 1959 post-apocalyptic classic by Walter M. Miller, Jr., a secluded order of monks have dedicated themselves to preserving knowledge that predates an apocalyptic event several centuries prior. But what to do when people come asking for it? Is mankind doomed to repeat its mistakes forever? This week we're doomed to chat about cyclical history, the first rule of impro...

Good Omens was written by a sort of science fiction supergroup, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It's one of those books where it's as fun to chew on the turns of phrase as it is to find out what happens, which is pretty amazing since it's literally about the end of the world. Join us for a chat about humanity's innate goodness and evilness, a moratorium on Serial jokes, and some sleepy giggles. S...

Odd's fish! It's time to reveal the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the hero of Baroness Emma Orczy's 1908 novel. (No seriously, we're going to tell you who he or she is.) Other spoilers during our Reign of Terror include what finally tipped the public against Robespierre, some truly terrible accents, and secret identities stretching from Batman to Zorro. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com...

This month, first-ever patron guest host Asma walks us through Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, a story about upper-class people of marriageable age in 19th century New York City. It's not the harshest criticism that Wharton ever wrote about the upper crust (that would be The House of Mirth, published earlier), but the book still isn't overly kind to these people and their rigid hierarchies....

What exactly IS a Cormoran Strike? Did J.K. Rowling's publisher leak her pen name to make big big bucks? To answer these questions and more, we invited on friend of the show Margaret H. Willison to talk The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling.) Other mysteries solved include the origins of Godbucks, the power of Reddit detectives, and how much Andrew likes Bones. See Privacy Pol...

Welcome to the wild world of movie novelizations! This week, we read Todd Strasser's (mostly) faithful novelization of the hit 1990 family comedy Home Alone. Join us for an occasionally musical discussion of Krampus, taking ideas from the page to the screen and back again, the realities of being hit in the head with an iron, and the Wet Bandits' branding issues. This week's home defense tutorial i...

We're back to finish the fight - this week we take on the third and final book in EL James' Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. It's not that a book about a BDSM relationship (complete with graphic sex scenes) can't be good, it's just that THESE books are intensely frustrating. The repetitive prose and awkward sex end up back in our crosshairs, but this time around we pay especial attention to Ana and C...

This week we're going around the world -- in 80 days, no less! Well, actually, Andrew read Jules Verne's classic globetrotting adventure Around the World in Eighty Days, but we still TALK about a lot of places even if we don't go there. Other travel tips include cultural broad strokes. fast food pranks, and scientific romance. This week's transcontinental journey is brought to you by the good folk...

Our belated bonus episode for November tackles Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a seminal work of Nigerian literature and a look at the bad things that can happen when cultures clash. Join us for a treatise on present wrapping, discussions of colonialism and yams, and a tiny, disturbing sneak peek into our next 50 Shades of Grey talk. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and Californi...

War...war never changes. But it does get more and more absurd the deeper you dive into Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Join us for a discussion of potato tips, alternate podcast titles, double binds and logic traps, and the celebrity resemblance of one Major Major Major Major. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Flannery O'Connor was a master of the Southern Gothic short story. Her characters are vivid, her turns of phrase equal parts memorable and chilling. These stories make you laugh, make you cringe, and sometimes make you wish you could forget how they end. This week we chat about two or three collected O'Connor stories, including the renowned A Good Man is Hard to Find. Other topics include desktop...

Every once in awhile you read a character study about a character who is uniquely unpleasant to study—such is the case with John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, a thoroughly delightful book about the thoroughly repulsive Ignatius J. Reilly. Join us for a discussion of baby birthdays, Seinfeld, dialect, jelly donuts, and solo hobbies. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and Cal...

Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine depicts Ancient Greece as truthfully as possible. It is historical fiction filled with war, political intrigue, pederasty and explicit homosexual love - the likes of which were rather scandalous when she published it in the 1950s. Her book also spawned an episode complete with discussions of Mr(s). Doubtfire, Alexander the Fine, unread text messages, and mummy l...

To close out Spooktober, we thought it only appropriate that we gather around the digital campfire and swap some spooooooky stories. Tales told include the Legend of Bloody Mary, an email forward about spiders, The Hook, and a rather disturbing story about Soviet sleep science gone horribly wrong (no really this one's actually sort of graphic and gross). We forgot the s'mores, but we didn't forget...