Books of Some Substance

You may be thinking: If I had a dollar for every time I felt like I was just sitting in the waiting room of life—except that the room was an open field with a single tree in it and my best bud just wouldn't keep his boots on—I'd be rich!   Or in a hit Samuel Beckett play.   Whether it is about morality or acceptance or the morality of acceptance, Beckett's Waiting for Godot resonates indefinitely....

[Update (8/12/19): After recording and releasing this podcast, it has come to our attention that Sarvis has been barred from teaching in Florida public schools following allegations he engaged in inappropriate communications with students on social media.  We in no way condone this alleged behavior.  This episode will remain available and those that choose to listen may do so at their discretion.]...

Have you heard the bad news? God is dead. But in Flannery O'Connor's  Wise Blood,  you can't keep a good god down—even when you murder a consumptive flim-flam man, seduce a fifteen-year-old, and blind yourself with quicklime. So put glass shards in your shoes, turn up your headphones, and drink every time we say "nihilism."  (This episode's summary was written by our guest, Kathleen Founds .   Bef...

In this latest installment of the Books of Some Substance podcast San Francisco State University English Professor Sarita Cannon returns to talk about the violent grace (or graceful violence?) of Flannery O'Connor's short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find .   Listen in as Nick and Sarita talk about the curious relationship between Catholicism and the grotesque, how O'Connor can keep a live audience...

On this, our first episode of The Substance of Influence episodes, David speaks with fiction writer and poet Chaya Bhuvaneswar, winner of the 2017 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize for her first book  White Dancing Elephants . They discuss authorial voice, being a reader and a writer, influence in general, direct influence in particular with Chaya's selection of the novel Americanah by Chimamanda...

In this latest installment of the Books of Some Substance podcast David, Nick, and Eric go for a disorienting ride through the comedic darkness of László Krasznahorkai's Satantango. This paragraph-shunning tome from the "Hungarian Master of the Apocalypse" is perfect for the reader seeking that good ole bleak, rain-soaked, mud-packed, worm-eatin', dust-filled vibe.   Listen in for a rousing discus...

In this episode of the Books of Some Substance podcast, Stanford English Professor Roanne Kantor stops by to chat with Nick about Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes .   While providing a fertile ground to discuss what exactly Global Anglophone literature is , the 2008 novel also packs many a nod to Latin America greats  García Márquez  and Vargas Llosa and pairs well with that other stel...

If by chance—and what else really controls it all other than chance?—you are into examining the futility of it all, or, of course, the scorn of it all, then the latest B.O.S.S. podcast on László Krasznahorkai's The Last Wolf in which David, Stephanie, and Nick examine the tale of how a washed up German author tells the tale of traveling to the barren plains of Spain to encounter a warden telling a...

Did you  just  stop at digging up her body? How crippling is  your  love? In this episode, San Francisco State University Literature Professor Summer Star joins Nick and David for a rousingly dark conversation on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Is this story within a story within a story meant to be identifiable to anyone? Are those really ghosts? Is Heathcliff a critique of mid-19th century Bri...

That day they discoursed in a cool and oft solitudinous basement. Eric and Nick and Dean Rader of the University of San Francisco examined Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West and inquired what Cormac McCarthy had in mind. Sulphurous and detached and surgically endeavored as that mind may be. They passed through the beauty and bleakness of the prose and the ruinous afterimage of the b...

A man sits down at a cafe. Pauses. Thinks. Writes a sentence. Pauses. Thinks. Writes another sentence. Pauses. Thinks. Will that next sentence be about solving an age-old puzzle of a pirate's submerged treasure? Or perhaps it will be about cloning Carlos Fuentes? Or maybe it will just be about an attack of giant, shimmering silk worms. Only César Aira knows, but he ain't looking back and neither s...

  Is there anything beneath the iceberg of Ernest Hemingway's status than the Hemingway Lifestyle Brand™, with its hyper-masculinity, pared-down prose, and a shirtless, boozy, gun-toting Papa?  On this episode of the podcast, join Nick, Eric, and Stephanie as they find the answer to that question by analyzing the second best piece of war-time art after Top Gun: Ernest Hemingway's  A Farewell to Ar...

You know the feeling. Or, perhaps, the lack thereof. It can happen to even the strongest human, the greatest writer, the toughest leopard capable of climbing the highest heights. But is it stagnation? Boredom? Regret? Or just your average case of gangrene? Only time (or one's continued sense of consciousness before the ultimate blackout) will tell. Bust out your hiking boots and climb to  Ngaje Ng...

On this episode, the third in our Hemingway Short Story Month, David and Nick are joined by Stephanie to discuss the oft-anthologized "Hills Like White Elephants," an anis-soaked, dialogue-heavy, purgatorial little number in which two characters talk around the possibility of an abortion and a doomed relationship.  Find the story, and give us a listen.  Follows us on Instagram & Twitter: @booksosu...

Hola Nada! On this episode, our second in the Hemingway Short Story Month, join David and Nick as they discuss the story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."  Ernest Hemingway was born in  nothing  in Oak Park,  nothing .  As a young man he worked as a  nothing  for  The  Nothing  City Star  until  nothing,  when he volunteered as a  nothing  on the  nothing  front.  He was severely wounded and decorate...

Howdy bright boys and girls!  Roll over in bed, face the wall, and forget the wrong people you double-crossed in Chicago with a new episode of the Books of Some Substance podcast.  This month we are reading four of Papa Hemingway's short stories. First up: The Killers, an elevated piece of noir with all the Hemingway trimmings.  Follows us on Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance Check out our hom...

Ah yes, Sabbath's Theater . Perhaps you remember that one uncle of yours reading it at family Thanksgiving '96. Or maybe you noticed a dash of judgment in the eye of your local librarian upon recently checking out a quality hardcover edition.   (Don't worry, everyone's just pumped that you still go to the library.) Maybe you, a literary-minded baseball fan, picked it up after reading The Great Ame...

For Books of Some Substance's 25th episode, Nick is joined by San Francisco State American Literature Professor Sarita Cannon to discuss Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Listen in for insight into 1970s politics, writing books like songs, the importance of myths and ancestry, and Morrison's knack for asking all of the right questions while not giving any of the answers.   And, oh yeah, that whole...

In preparation for next month's reading of  Song of Solomon,  Nick is joined by bookclub mainstays Frida and Eric to discuss Toni Morisson's key work of literary criticism  Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination .  Listen along as they discuss otherness, reading race, the inherently political, and their own confrontation with ways in which we read. 

With Nathan still motorcycling through the Americas, David and Nick are joined by Johanna, a wonderful and informative member of the Books of Some Substance bookclub, to discuss Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead . We talk Böll's style, violence in all its forms (institutional, linguistic, literal), fake news, 70s West Germany and the...

  We don't want other worlds, but do we want mirrors? Do we need them? From the retro-futuristic, wildly open, existentially uncertainty Andrei Tarkovsky version from 1972 to the beige and blue sleekness of Steven Soderbergh's redemptive and romantic 2002 version, David and Eric discuss the two strong adaptations of Stanisław Lem's  Solaris.  Watch the films; give us a listen.  Follows us on Insta...

Borgesian tropes, 60's pop-psych, the comfort of an infinitesimal self within the endless cosmos, the eternal return of a drunk-dialed jukebox, and livable confusion: ah yes, another episode of the BOSS podcast.   Moving on from the fiasco of reading  Fiasco , David and Nick discuss Stanisław Lem's  Solaris , his most popular science fiction work of failed communication. Read the book; give us a l...

Communication breakdown—it's always the same...unless of course you are light years away on a spacecraft with a crew of international and seemingly indistinguishable humans, a deceptive AI system that controls every aspect of the ship, and an unknown reanimated man whose reanimation plays no part in your once in an existence mission to communicate for the first time (ever) with a different intelli...

On this episode David and Eric are joined by Frida Pulido, an active and engaging member of the Books of Some Substance bookclub, to discuss Carlos Fuentes'  The Death of Artemio Cruz .  David questions the value of reading about such a despicable protagonist for such an extended page count, Eric finds humanity in where we all begin and eventually end, Frida schools us in the variety and elasticit...

Got yourself a case of originality-sickness? You know, the kind that wishes for the new, the always new, that fashionable illusion that speaks only of death when pretending to be nothing but birth?  Well, kiddo, you are not alone. But you are not loved. Fuentes sees you clinging to originality and he laughs. He sees the anxiety you have about your influences and shakes his head. Give it up, he say...