Bedtime Stories for Tired Parents

Episode 11 is here, and this week we've been sitting with Vladimir Nabokov's "Symbols and Signs," a story so brief it almost sneaks up on you, yet so precise in its grief that it lingers long after the last page. This one genuinely touched a nerve for both of us. Nabokov manages to capture loss with devastating clarity. For both of us, Lolita was the only Nabokov we'd read before this. What struck...

"Children Are Bored on Sunday" didn't exactly sweep us off our feet. But the more we talked, the more we found ourselves grudgingly nodding along.  Stafford's protagonist is a woman adrift in New York, paralyzed by the particular shame of feeling intellectually and socially outclassed—and somewhere in the middle of our conversation, we both had to admit: we've been her. That specific cocktail of s...

Luise is back for part two of Separate Beds. The Living is Easy is Dorothy West at her most vivid and alive, and a mother-daughter read was exactly the right way to come at it. We spent a good chunk of time reveling in how powerfully West conjures her world, Boston's Black middle class in the early twentieth century feels so fully realized you can practically smell the parlor. And then there's Cle...

Sam tapped out this week—so Alan called in reinforcements: Sam's mom, Luise, who turned out to be exactly the reading companion this story deserved. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is Salinger at his most hypnotic and unsettling, and having a fresh voice in the mix made for one of our most incisive episodes yet. We went down a bit of a rabbit hole on Salinger himself—the recluse, the mythos, the de...

This one got complicated fast. We were supposed to dive into J.D. Salinger this week, but we couldn't even get to the actual reading without talking about the man—specifically, the deeply unsettling pattern of him grooming teenage girls. So we went there: can you separate the art from the artist? Should you? And here's the thing—we didn't have all the answers, but we wanted to actually talk it thr...

We're back with Mary McCarthy—our second woman writer, and honestly, where has she been all our lives? "The Weeds" is hands down our favorite story so far, and we couldn't stop quoting it to each other. McCarthy has this incredible gift for turns of phrase that are both elegant and devastating, the kind of sentences you want to read out loud just to feel them in your mouth. We got a bit sidetracke...

We're back from the holidays with Dawn Powell—finally, our first woman writer in the book! And honestly, it's criminal how overlooked she's been. While F. Scott Fitzgerald was busy romanticizing Jazz Age dreamers, Powell was serving up razor-sharp satire about New York society, equal parts humor and barely concealed fury. We dive into some of her most caustic quotes and wrestle with the big questi...

We finally broke free from short stories and dove into film, actually, two versions of the same film. The central question: how do you transform a 5-page story into a two-hour movie? We dug into what has to fundamentally change when you adapt a short story for screen, what a visual medium can do that prose simply can't, and whether these adaptations justified their existence beyond just "we liked...

We're officially in a rut—three middle-aged white men in a row, all deeply unsatisfied with their lives. James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939) gave us a protagonist who escapes into elaborate fantasies (complete with Sam's failed attempts at "pocketa pocketa pocketa" sound effects), but we couldn't help asking: why should we actually care about Walter Mitty? Here's a guy with ev...

We doubled our runtime for this one, and honestly? Worth it. John O’Hara’s “Over the River and Through the Wood” (1934) immediately had us both leaning forward on the bed, which is saying something at 11 PM. We started by digging in to the actual Thanksgiving poem that clearly inspired O’Hara’s  story, then spiraled into everything from Jane Austen to *The History of Love* to—yes—Shiv and Tom Wamb...

We're kicking things off with E.B. White's 1926 "Life Cycle of a Literary Genius"—and honestly, we almost didn't make it past the title. After forgetting to read the introduction (parenting brain strikes again), stumbling into some juicy gossip about White's complicated relationship with his New Yorker editor, and one of us starting out pretty skeptical about the whole thing, something unexpected...