Lit Century

In this episode, writers Alex Higley and Willie Fitzgerald join host Catherine Nichols to discuss three short stories by Wright Morris: "The Sound Tape," "The Character of the Lover," and "The Cat in the Picture." Higley, who brought the stories to Lit Century, talks about how he discovered Morris's writing through his photographs and photo-texts. The group also talks about Morris's detached, bemu...

In this episode, hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. Why is modernity (and the swimming pool) always deadly in twentieth century fiction? Where and how did Fitzgerald lose control of his material? Would it be a different book if Fitzgerald had chosen a different narrator? And most of all: why is this book so commonly seen as the g...

In this episode writers Alex Higley and Willie Fitzgerald join host Catherine Nichols to discuss two stories from Alice Munro's 1991 short story collection Friend of My Youth. The first is the title story, in which the narrator retells (and reinterprets) a story she was told by her dying mother about two Presbyterian sisters; the second is "Meneseteung," about a writer doing research on a 19th cen...

In this episode, writers V. V. Ganeshananthan and J. Robert Lennon join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Jamaica Kincaid's 1990 novel Lucy. The novel is about a girl who travels from Antigua to the United States to be an au pair for a wealthy white family, and forms a close relationship to the mother of the family, reacting against her relationship with her own mother. The conversation addresses...

Hosts Elisa Gabbert and Catherine Nichols discuss Christopher Pike's hit 1989 novel Remember Me and his less-known Fall Into Darkness (1990). Remember Me's ghostly protagonist explores an idiosyncratic afterlife and enters the dreams of her family and friends to solve her own murder at her friend's slumber party. In Fall Into Darkness, a teenage girl discovers that her best friend has framed her f...

Hosts Elisa Gabbert, Isaac Butler, and Catherine Nichols discuss W. G. Sebald's 1992 novel, The Emigrants, a hybrid fiction/nonfiction work made up of four long narratives about four people who emigrated from Germany around the time of WWII. A Sebald-like narrator travels in the footsteps of these characters, mentally and geographically, in an elegiac, oblique book that is ultimately about the lon...

In this episode, critic K. Austin Collins joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Isaac Butler to discuss Albanian author Ismail Kadare's 1971 novel The General of the Dead Army. In this novel, an Italian general comes to Albania 20 years after World War II to find the bodies of Italian soldiers who died there and return them to their families, and ends up in a small village looking for the remains of a...

`In this episode, writer, actor, and performance artist M. Leona Godin joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Helen Keller's 1908 book The World I Live In. Helen Keller (1880-1968) was an American author, lecturer, vaudeville performer, and political activist. At nineteen months, she suffered an illness that left her deaf and blind; The World I Live In offers Keller's remarkable insight of the wo...

Hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols discuss Yukio Mishima's 1963 novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, a disturbing, sui generis book about a young boy watching the developing relationship between his urbane, well-heeled mother and a quiet sailor with dark, secret dreams of glory. The boy also has secrets: he is spying on the sailor and his mother when they have sex, and he belo...

In this episode, geneticist Maria Naylor joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss James Watson and Francis Crick's 1953 paper "A Structure for DNA," for which they won the Nobel Prize (with many references also to Watson's book about the discovery, The Double Helix). The discovery of DNA's structure had a rich social context, which ultimately determined not only who got credit for the work, but who...

In this week's episode, art historian Robert Wiesenberger joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Isaac Butler to discuss artist Jenny Holzer's "Truisms" from 1978, "Truisms" is a group of declarative sentences Holzer first put up anonymously on posters all over New York City: "Labor is a life-destroying activity.," "Lack of charisma can be fatal," "Private property created crime." The work originated i...

In this episode, novelist and poet Kathleen Rooney joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Elisa Gabbert to discuss Robert Aickman's 1988 collection of stories The Wine-Dark Sea, with particular focus on the title story and the uncanny dollhouse story "The Inner Room." Aickman's work is often characterized as horror fiction, but he preferred the term "strange stories." His stories take the reader imperc...

In this episode co-hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss Jacqueline Susann's 1966 mega-bestseller Valley of the Dolls, looking at how it treats women's bodies, sexuality, success, and glamour purely as sources of misery. In this book (nominally a cautionary tale about drug addiction) the only real joy comes from pills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, novelist Miranda Popkey joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Isaac Butler to discuss Norman Mailer's 1960 essay, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," a landmark work in the history of New Journalism. The essay is about the presidential campaign of JFK and the cultural changes it embodies, particularly the emergence from the fifties culture of conformity and the way television impacts...

In this episode, writer and critic Elisa Gabbert joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss T.S. Eliot's 1915 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem about aging, limitations and disillusionment written by a young poet on the threshold of a brilliant career. How do the poet's youth and the narrator's age affect the tone of the poem? What makes it such a potently memorable (but also elusive...

In this episode, co-hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss André Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto from 1924. Why were the demands of the surrealists such a lasting influence on twentieth century art? Are they revolutionary or insidiously counter-revolutionary in their meaning? Mentioned in the episode is Catherine Nichols' essay about privilege and the avant garde, "A God-awful Small...

In this episode, writer Matthew Hunte joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss David Bradley's 1981 novel The Chaneysville Incident, a historical novel based on a legend of thirteen runaway slaves who killed themselves to avoid being caught and returned to slavery. Matthew Hunte is a writer from St. Lucia, whose essays include "In Praise of Minor Literature," and "Albert Murray and the Americas." L...

In this episode V V Ganeshananthan joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Barbara Pym's novel Excellent Women, a comedy of manners about an unmarried woman living in the very small world of 1950s Britain, and about the pleasures of independence—and of pettiness. V V Ganeshananthan is a fiction writer and journalist. Her novel, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Wa...

In this episode, author Tyrese L. Coleman joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman again to continue their discussion of Gloria Naylor’s book of linked short stories, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), a classic of Black women’s literature. Tyrese L. Coleman is a writer, wife, mother, and attorney. Her debut collection of stories and essays, How to Sit, was published by Mason Jar Press in...

In this episode, author Tyrese L. Coleman joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman to discuss Gloria Naylor's book of linked short stories, The Women of Brewster Place (1982). This book is a classic of Black women's literature; does that canon differ from the white male canon, and why might any differences have arisen? Tyrese L. Coleman is the author of How to Sit, a 2019 Pen Open Book Awar...

In this episode, hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols discuss Thomas Nagel's 1974 essay "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" How did materialism, for centuries the tool of radical thinkers, become the philosophy of the status quo? And why was this philosophical essay about the possibility of understanding other minds—or any minds—so crucial for contemporary thinkers? Learn more about your ad choice...

In this episode, Adalena Kavanagh joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss Tom Drury's 1994 novel The End of Vandalism, a quietly hilarious and profound novel about a love triangle in rural Iowa, with a huge cast of characters who have all known each other from birth. What does this book have to tell us about rural America, and why does this relatively recent novel already feel l...

In this episode, author J. Robert Lennon joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss Kazuo Ishiguro's novel-in-the-form-of-an-extended-dream, The Unconsoled (1995). Why is this novel called a masterpiece by some (including the participants in this conversation), while being dismissed as rambling and pointless by others? J. Robert Lennon is the author of nine novels, including Famili...

In this episode, hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman talk about the short stories of Anton Chekhov, particularly "Lady With a Little Dog" and "Ward No. 6." What do these stories tell us about the revolutionary sentiment that was about to change not just Russia but the world? The stories embody a radical hopelessness, but also a harsh judgment of that hopelessness. Do we need to continue to h...

In this episode, hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss "The Cherry Orchard" by Anton Chekhov, and particularly what it has to say about slavery, upper-class revolutionary types, and the twentieth-century tendency to turn all relationships into transactions. With added material from guest Isaac Butler, who tells us how Chekhov originally wrote the play for Stanislavsky, and the hijinks...