Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

Continuing our Melville spectacular, we bring you the first of two episodes on Moby-Dick (1851). Yes, this is Melville’s famous, uh, novel? romance? manifesto? -- let’s say “book” and leave it at that -- about a megalomaniacal sea captain’s obsession with a really big whale. But did you know that whales are in fact fish? Honest, it’s in the book, people. Moby-Dick is about everything -- ontology,...

This week, we begin our three-part Melville spectacular with our friend, comrade, and very first guest host, Peter Coviello, Professor of American literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pete is a scholar of Melville, empire, intimacy, and queer theory, and he’s a fellow traveler on the good ship San Dominick where everything is regular and normal! On this episode we shoot the salty s...

We can’t believe that we occasionally get to read books by real-deal leftists on this podcast, given the time we spend dunking on politically terrible novels, but Richard Wright is truly a fellow traveller. We discuss his 1940 novel Native Son , which is the story of a young Black man in Chicago and also the story of every diabolical and white supremacist institution of capital. So a lot of fun. W...

Here at Better Read than Dead we are here to tell you that work sucks and we should seize the means of production! But in the meantime, one job we definitely wouldn’t recommend is haunted house governess. Sure, the pay is good but the benefits package is just a bunch of ghosts and two very unnerving children. Henry James knew that too, which is why he wrote his 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw...

If you were to write an historical novel about the Scottish hero-outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor, you’d probably make it about Roy Roy, right? Well, you are an amateur, because that, comrades, is just not how Walter Scott rolls -- which actually shows us why his theory of history is pretty sophisticated. His sprawling Rob Roy (1817) is in fact about a failson named Francis Osbaldistone, with world-histor...

Megan is back to lead our discussion of Shirley Jackson’s most famous work, “The Lottery” (1948), and hoo boy, do we talk about how mad the readers were when this was published. The New Yorker famously lost like a billion subscriptions and got a grazillion angry letters from their readership of middlebrow prudes, who wondered, “is it based on reality? Do these practices still continue in back-coun...

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) allows us to take up a crucial question -- is it a ship or a boat? Well, it’s actually a raft, on a river, but even Tristan doesn’t hold that against this blistering satire of Antebellum American society. We talk about the novel’s fraught racial politics, its scathing critiques of the plantation class, and its interesting (and troubling) comme...

Eliza Haywood doesn’t get read much today outside of eighteenth-century lit classes, which is a shame because she’s 1) as important to the English novel as Defoe or Fielding and 2) great and weird in all all the right ways. We’re discussing Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725), a novella all about feminine desire and agency, subjecthood, and Enlightenment discourses of “identity.” (That is, how do...

Calling all gumshoes! Get ready to hear how Sherlock Holmes cracks the case of a magical glow-in-the-dark dog who eats aristocrat failsons in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901/1902)! He ate Sir Charles Baskerville, and if Sherlock and Watson don’t help him, his boring nephew who can’t keep track of his shoes might be next!!! We talk righteous supernatural canines, unsettling butterfly-net-wieldi...

As previously noted on the classic Better Read than Dead Christmas Carol show, Katie and Tristan are both fans of Charles Dickens. So needless to say, we had, uh, great expectations about this episode! Before you delete us for that horrible dad pun (thanks, Tristan), may we just point out that the phrase “great expectations” appears about 400 million times in Great Expectations (1861). Which actua...

In 1985, Doc Brown and Marty McFly traveled into the distant future of 2015, where we all had flying cars and hoverboards, wore our pockets inside out, and Pepsi cost $50. But Doc Brown and Marty were chumps, because real time travelers don’t mess with a few decades. Real time travelers say, “hey, I wonder what the year 802,701 is like” -- and hoooo boy is it f*cked. This week, we’re bringing you...

We here at Better Read than Dead do not care for fascists. So when we had the chance to kick off our 2020 season with an historical novel that dunks on fascists and their fascist f*ckery, well, let’s just say you didn’t need to ask us twice. Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934) is about a lot of things. The early Roman Empire, gender, political intrigue (including powerful grandmas who poison people...

Katie says, “bah humbug,” but Tristan says, “oi guv, Bob’s your uncle an’ bless us all, every one” to this most beloved of Victorian Christmas kitsch. We’re diving into Charles Dickens this week with A Christmas Carol (1843) and all kinds of lighthearted topics for the holidays -- like child labor, poverty under industrial capital, killer smog, and reactionary political economy (we want to go on t...

Our apologies to Stephen Dedalus. Previously, we referred to him as King F*ckboy, but that’s grossly unfair to both Stephen and perhaps literature’s Kingest F*ckboy of them all -- Hamlet. This week, we discuss William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1599? 1602? no one is sure, but it’s something like that) in all its beautiful, bonkers glory. We have many pressing questions. Li...

Welp, friends, we made it through all eleventy billion pages of Ulysses and are the better for it. (Better Read than Dead 1, Mayor Pete 0.) And we all agree that the second half of the book is delightful. From Chapter 15 (“Circe”), a 150-page play about… kink? the nation? gender? all of that? to Chapter 17’s catechism, wherein Bloom and Dedalus pee together in true Hegelian mutual recognition, to...

After these next two episodes, will Megan manage to convince Katie and Tristan that our novel in question is hysterically funny and good indeed, or will we remain a Pod Divided? We know you jerks have just been up nights waiting for this one--we’ll be spending two episodes tackling James Joyce’s big-ass 1918 or 1922 novel Ulysses . We talk about form and structure, poo jokes, Irish history, day dr...

Was Horace Walpole a second-grader when he wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764)? “And then a big helmet squished the guy, and then grandpa walked out of the painting, and then the statue had a nosebleed, and there were boogers and and and.” Nope! He was the 40-something failson of Britain’s first prime minister! (God, who knew failsons would be such a theme of the pod -- not us.) It’s the “first Got...

We’re back to one of our usual themes this week--creepy babies! We take on Ira Levin’s 1967 genre novel Rosemary’s Baby , which asks if pregnancy, neighbors, or husbands are the most creepy (they’re all creepy AF.) The DEVIL HIMSELF shows up in the form of a tin whistle in this episode, and there is much discussion of (maybe poison) smoothies, the terror domestic, and HIPAA regulations (turns out...

There are few things Better Read than Dead enjoys more than owning dipsh*ts/watching dipsh*ts get owned, which is why we were so psyched to read Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). Irving’s spooky (no, hilarious) short story is about a tall dipsh*t who gets owned by a Headless Horseman. Or a pumpkin? Or, really, just the Dutch version of Gaston. Also, did you know Irving was...

Put your crying pants on, because it’s time for Little Women (1868)! We talk about why Jo is so cool, whether it’s bad to steal a lady’s glove so you can sniff it in private (it is), and whether Beth—the shy sister who suffers from noted 19th-century ailment “paleness”—is actually the biggest psycho of them all. We get deep into how Megan lost her soul and ability to feel, as she found herself unm...

We’re such goths (apparently), we didn’t even realize we were doing a Halloween month when we recorded this episode on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Stevenson’s novella is about an insufferable prick who invents a potion that turns him into a tiny psychopath -- and then he gets stuck like that. What did your (deranged, race-sciencey) grandmother tell you ab...

We follow one of literature’s least-impressive boats up the Belgian Congo in our discussion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). It’s yet another magazine novella, this time about how our “hero” Charles Marlow journeys up the Congo seeing some truly horrifying effects of European colonialism, and how he encounters the ivory trader and Big Thoughts Guy Kurtz. We talk about empire, space, do...

If you're trying to decide whether to reconnect with your creepy old childhood friend who lives in a fungus covered mansion deep in the woods with a secret twin sister, this episode is for you!* We're talking about “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is goth icon Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story about twincest. We dig into the uncanny, phrenology, family trees, and olde timey doctoring...and...

Gulliver’s Travels (1726) may indeed be the “goofiest book that was ever written,” which is why it’s so fun to talk about! We get into all the nitty-gritty of Jonathan Swift’s scathing, sprawling, scatalogical satire -- its historical contexts, its politics that range from pretty good (empire is bad!) to terrible (it thinks women’s bodies are gross), and how its horses seem like they’re probably m...

This week we read Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening (1899). Chopin’s short work is about a tall lady who doesn’t want to listen to her husband (hetereosexuality! the best!), but she also doesn’t really want to do anything else either. We talk about bourgeois malaise, women’s suicide, atmospherics, and being a lady f*ckboy. We read the Norton edition, edited by Margo Culley. While she doesn’t dir...