Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

Have you ever wondered how to take some pointless old rich men for a ride? Have you ever wanted to learn to do close-up magic with a diamond tiara? Join us for a discussion of Anita Loos’s 1924 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and hear all about diamonds, silly hats, funny brunette best friends, and remarkably dumb aristocrats. We talk about money, sexuality, and gender, and living the dream of having a r...

Under no circumstances should you stop and smell the flowers. We learned this lesson and had many more plant-based epiphanies chatting about Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1844 short story, “Rappaccini's Daughter.”  This tale is set in a sinister garden in Padua, Italy, and we find out some similarly sinister facts about Megan's loving embrace of shrubs. We chat about science and medicine in the olden...

The book commies get into one of our favorite topics this week -- liberal imperialism (well, *dunking on* liberal imperialism is one of our favorite topics, because it is very, very bad). We’re conflicted about E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), a novel with some great writing (you know, Forster) that tries to think seriously about empire’s many incoherences and oppressive structures… but...

Wrench those eyeballs wide open for our discussion of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), a novel about a teenage droog and his rehabilitation by a dystopian police state. We have a very hard time with the politics of this one, given that they’re wildly incoherent, but we discuss the language games, ultraviolence, the police state, and the conditions of Kids These Days. We get into the “a...

Friend of the pod David Diamond visits us to talk about Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and join in Tristan and Katie’s nefarious plot to turn Megan into an eighteenth-centuryist. David is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, a scholar of religion and literature, and a Fielding expert. We discuss the relationship between Calvinist thought and noveli...

We conclude our 2020 Halloween spectacular with the scariest one yet, Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” That’s right, we read an EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SERMON voluntarily. If that’s not chilling enough, to wrap things up we take a very special journey to H-E-double hockey sticks ourselves. We get into Calvinist theology, Enlightenment thought, demon babies, the Fir...

We continue Halloween 2020 with Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House ! We talk about Women Who Are A Problem, sexuality, what the f*ck a pompous spiritualist is doing just showing up for no reason, space and home, and the haunted house genre. Basically, everybody who wrote a horror novel in the second half of the 20th century loves the shit out of this novel, so thanks Shirley J...

Welcome to our second annual Halloween spooktacular! We begin our frightfest with W. W. Jacobs’s 1902 short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” We talk about the historical and political implications of this story, from the racist legacy of imperialism and the insurance industry to hazardous labor conditions and mortgages. On a lighter note, we get into the overvaluation of Herberts and learn a very importa...

We are talking about Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), a book about a dog named Buck, his manly adventures on the frontier, and his tragic love affair with a guy named John Thornton whose hand he likes to chew on. Because he is a dog. Fortunately, that didn’t stop Jack London from narrating this tale entirely from Buck's point of view! We talk about how violent, erotic, and racist this no...

Comrades! It’s our 50th episode!! And what better way to celebrate than wrapping up our discussion of one of the raddest books of all time, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67)? Fear not, we are *far* from exhausting the staggering number of dick jokes you find in these spry nine volumes. But we also talk about the politics and philosophy behind the senti...

MADAM, today we have the first of two episodes on Tristan’s *favorite novel ever,* Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman . This behemoth, published in nine honking volumes between 1759 and 1767, is filthy, and silly, and brilliant, and absolutely delightful. Yes, dick jokes abound (good ones! for the most part). But Tristram Shandy is also about challenging, importa...

It’s taken us a while to get to James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which is too bad because it is delightful. We wander the many paths of this novel’s points of view, and talk about Pentecostalism, midcentury black literary debates (who’s mad at who among Wright, Baldwin, Himes, Ellison, Redding, et al.), and why Baldwin is enjoying a bit of a Moment. Following some of our many Pod...

Get ready to give those bootstraps a nice firm tug, because we are opening Season 3 with Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick ! We discuss what critics have called the Dunkaroo of American literature. We chat about how much fun it is being a Very Good Boy living in a box on the streets of nineteenth-century New York City, the dangers of large Irish children, labor, finance capital, and why you s...

For our Season 2 finale, we do a round of roasts and toasts. Hear us dunk more on the readership of The New Yorker , marvel at the dipshit failsonery of Horace Walpole, wonder why the f*ck Hester Prynne was so hot for Arthur Dimmesdale, and much much more! We still disagree sharply about how much one might cry while reading Little Women and not be embarrassed about it (don’t listen to Megan -- the...

Our friend and comrade Hilary Strang joins us this week to discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and we’re talking about anarcho-communism and utopia. Hilary is the director of the MA Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the co-host of the podcast Marooned on Mars with Matt and Hilary , about the works of Kim Stanley Robinson and leftism: https://anchor.fm/maroo...

It’s a real weeper this week: we’re reading S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) and talking about tough, dangerous, sensitive teenagers and the readers who love them. You might be familiar with this book if you like teen melodrama (you should) or the 1983 movie with the entire Brat Pack. The book is about a 14-year-old greaser, Ponyboy Curtis, who is both School and Cool, his brothers Sodapop and D...

Have you ever tried to ride out a plague by welding yourself and 1,000 of your closest friends in a psychedelic castle for some depravity and debauchery? Only to have some ASSHOLE decide to show up to the party dressed as the plague? Except it turns out it’s not some asshole but the actual plague, and then all of you bleed out at once? It’s Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) on...

Not sure why we wanted to talk about Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) in the middle of a global pandemic -- let’s just say we needed some light reading. Sorry folks, we’re commies, and historicists, and literature helps us think about f*cked up structures of the past, and of the present, and that’s what we’re doing today. We get into the Puritan/Dissenting theology behind Defoe’s h...

It’s everyone’s favorite book from freshman English, John Steinbeck’s novella-play Of Mice and Men , which is about two migrant ranch workers in the 1930s and the incidents that befall them during one of their awful temp jobs. We do find the one moment of hilarity in this book, which concerns a very special asshole called Curley who keeps one of his hands in a big glove full of Vaseline to “keep i...

On this episode, we talk environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, and racism in the 2020s. If any of that sounds awfully familiar, stay tuned, because we are diving into Parable of the Sower , Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel about the long, slow end of the world. We get into class, the family, religion, the biblical parable (which we definitely all knew and did not have to google), race, and meta...

We recorded this episode before the police murder of George Floyd and before the nationwide protests against structural racism and police terror. We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and with all those fighting against white supremacism, capital, and the carceral state. This week, we take up a novel that deals with one specific scene in the long history of empire and anti-Black violence....

We have made--and stand by--the claim that the whale is the most dangerous game of all. Well, apparently Richard Connell felt differently, because he wrote “The Most Dangerous Game” (1924), all about a Russian aristocrat and his human-hunting playground, Ship Trap Island, which is actually called that, and has a swamp called Death Swamp, which is actually called that. The story’s hero is also a gi...

Once upon a time, Jack Kerouac got very drunk, taped a 120-foot roll of paper together, and started typing for three straight weeks. He ended up with On the Road (1957), in which Kerouac is “Sal Paradise,” his BFF Neal Cassady is “Dean Moriarty,” and which recounts their travels across the United States and Mexico -- full of cool musings on how wives are a drag, man, and how they call beer “cervez...

If you thought porn originated in 1972 or 2017 or with the invention of the pizza delivery man, goodness madam are you mistaken. We’re reading John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748/49), which reminds us that porn has existed ever since the media to make it have been around (see also: the very hornt paintings from Pompeii ca. 79 CE). Our young heroine Fanny boinks her way through this touching novel, rev...

Regrettably, we bring our discussion of this whale of a tale to a close today. That's right, we are wrapping up Moby-Dick (1851). We talk labor, the environment, liberalism, and that chapter where they all get together and...uh...you'll see. We also get into why Ahab and Elizabeth Holmes might be more alike than you think. Unless you already think they are very much the same. In which case, they a...