Overdue

Margaret Edson's rewarding play Wit (sometimes spelled W;t) is not light, boulevard comedy fare. Inspired by Edson's time in a Washington, D.C. research hospital, the play tackles death from a number of angles including cancer treatments and 17th-century poetry. But what makes it such an enduring entry into the modern canon is how Edson handles these subjects with sur...

Most people familiar with C.S. Lewis' work will have come to him via the Chronicles of Narnia, a series of fantasy books that's defined for better or worse by its heavy-handed Biblical allegory. Till We Have Faces, Lewis' last novel, certainly deals with some of the same themes. But it's also a retelling of the classic Cupid and Psyche myth that originally appeared in Apuleius' The Golden Ass in t...

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a modernist classic. Rich in lyrical prose and unrelenting streams of conciousness, Lighthouse set a standard for peering into characters' heads and hearts and relaying the contents back to the reader. It also closely mirrors portions of Woolf's life - particularly her summers in St. Ives and the devastating loss of her mother at a young age. Discussion p...

YOU: An intrepid spaceboy, graduating at the top of your class at Space Academy. YOUR MISSION: Find and destroy the evil space vampire at any cost! Our fourth Choose Your Own Adventure outing takes us into deep space and beyond—join us as we hijack advanced spacecraft, evade arrest, and drift through the vast inky void of space. Will we catch that nefarious SPACE VAMPIRE? There's only one way to f...

Harlan Ellison is a man whose reputation precedes him. His long and storied career as a sci-fi and speculative fiction writer is peppered with curmudgeonly diatribes and public incidents, many as interesting as the best of the thousand or so stories he churned out across books, television and film. His classic story A Boy and His Dog takes quite a dim view of a post-WW3 apocalypse, so buckle...

What would you do for a better life? Where would you go? Who would you leave behind? And what does "better" mean, anyway? Reyna Grande poses these questions with great poise and power in her debut novel, Across a Hundred Mountains. This week, we talk border crossings, panda bears, Chicana feminism, and the ingenuity of Days of Our Lives. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy an...

Cormac McCarthy is a writer in the vein of Hemingway or Faulkner, a person whose prose you can spot from a mile away. That can be a good or a bad thing, as we discuss in our show on his 1985 book Blood Meridian. Join us for a discussion of scalping, war, and the special Internet that only Cormac McCarthy knows about. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notic...

What better way to discuss Diana Gabaldon's genre-straddling, time-traveling historical fiction novel Outlander than by confining ourselves to the same room? Live (not really) from Craig's kitchen, we're happy to bring you an episode chockablock with bad Scottish accents, interdimensional romance, and plenty of Highland sex tips. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California...

Hey, jabronis! This week we finally read our first Brontë book, thanks to one of our Patreon supporters!  Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is considered to be "one of the first sustained feminist books," and though many of the sensibilities of early-to-mid-19th-century England are present here, we see the typical marriage and courtship rituals through a darker lens. Contemp...

Craig tackles Jorge Luis Borges this week, and what results is a pile of conversations about fake novels and encyclopedias, WIkipedia hoaxes, the way that reviews work, and thoughts on which fast food franchises make the best (and worst) road trips. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

This is our first monthly bonus episode, brought to you by our supporters on Patreon! If you want these shows one week earlier than everyone else, visit patreon.com/overduepod  for details. It's Children's Book Week again, and just like last year we're using it as an excuse to read things that Lil' Craig and Lil' Andrew never got around to reading. Craig reads Mr. Popper's Penguins by Ri...

Why do we let the messy implications of our beliefs keep us from shouting them the rooftops? Why is it difficult for a movement like feminism to be both strong and inclusive? Why don't chickens feature more prominently in the Nativity? Friend of the show Katherine Fritz joins us this week to answer these questions and discuss Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist. This 2014 bestseller features selected e...

At this point we've read a lot of novels, but we haven't tried to write our own just yet. Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman's 2008 anti-guidebook How Not To Write A Novel has shown us a lot of the stuff we should try to avoid if we ever decide to put pen to paper. We also devote a substantial chunk of this week's episode to listener mail from our Looking for Alaska episode, s...

Garth Nix may sound like the name of a country music superstar, but he's actually just the humble, award-winning author behind several fantasy series. This week's book, Sabriel, debuted in 1995 as the first entry in Nix's Old Kingdom series, and the novel remains notable for its lead character, its unique take on magic, and the small (for a fantasy novel) cast of char...

John Green's Looking for Alaska is another young adult coming-of-age novel in a long tradition of young adult coming-of-age novels. A young man goes away to school and becomes close with a small group of friends. They smoke, they drink, they have sexual experiences, they lose, they mourn. It's nothing that hasn't been done, but Green's light tone and deeper thematic questions make A...

Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is not for the faint of heart. The story is based on the grisly murder of Sylvia Likens by her de facto guardian in the 1960s. What preceded her death is too reprehensible to print here, but Ketchum dives headlong into the awful, determined to suss out the causes (and bounds) of human evil. Suffice to say, this makes for a difficult discus...

One of the reasons we read is because books can give us perspective—good ones can fully transport us to times and places where we've never been and, in some cases, could never go. That's the case with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, stories she wrote about her childhood on the American frontier. These books aren't without their problems (there are fairly significant questions...

Ernest Hemingway is celebrated for the economy of his prose. This week we read A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Rejected a world record 121 times before finally finding a publisher and going on to sell millions of copies, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the most widely read philosophy texts of the 20th-century. Robert Pirsig's semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional account of a motorcycle road trip with his son covers a lot of ground. America's psyche in the fifties and six...

We're back to sci-fi this week, but we take a break from the politics-heavy universe of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow instead uses science fiction to discuss anthropology, colonialism, and theology. There's some genuinely funny and warm stuff in this book, but there's a shadow hanging over the proceedings from the outset: eight people set out to explo...

John Ford's 1620s revenge drama 'Tis Pity She's A Whore has everything: friars, murder, bawdy jokes, bawdy suitors, incest -- incest?! What's that doing there?, you might say. And such has been the reaction from nigh on four centuries of critics and audiences confused by how romantically (and tragically) Ford depicted a brother and sister's love. Never ones to stay wholly on topic,...

Celebrated science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a lot in the 20th century: short stories, screenplays, books on pop science, books on hard science, essays on Shakespeare, essays on history and physics -- name a medium, he dabbled in it. But among all of Asimov's bibliography, the Foundation stands apart. This trilogy (later a quintet and then a septet) examined hard sci-fi...

Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most widely-read books in American literature. It's so entrenched in the modern canon that it's hard to believe Hurston fell into obscurity later in her career. But thanks to writer Alice Walker, Hurston's work was revived in the 1970s, and with good reason. Their Eyes is a fascinating portrait of a black woman's life at th...

Our odometer has rolled over, but the show's the same: this week we take you through the alternate history presented by Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. The basic question: what would happen if the Axis powers had won World War II? The sub-questions: what is real? Is it our reality, or the reality in this book, or the reality in the book in this book? We tackle those questions, our caf...

100 episodes! That means we've read and talked about 100 books, which isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things but it sure feels like a lot for our little podcast. For our last milestone episode, we read EL James' Fifty Shades of Grey. Now that we've done another 50 shows (and since the major motion picture is in theaters now), we've gone back to the sexy, sexy well to read Fifty Shades...