Overdue

Luigi Pirandello's most notable contribution to the Western canon is a play about six characters come to life, intruding on a theater rehearsal in search of - get this - an author. Please join us as we grapple with the metaphysical implications of Six Characters in Search of An Author, recycle Seinfeld jokes, compose a musical extempore, and take a lesson from Craig's acting cl...

We dip back into the Choose Your Own Adventure well this week to read Jay Leibold's Secret of the Ninja, a harrowing tale about dojo and time travel and enchanted swords. Or something. So jump on in the passenger seat! Come for the adventures, stay for the ridiculous voices. $5.99 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell...

Set in the early years of Bruce Wayne's Batmanhood, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Batman: The Long Halloween chronicles a murderous year in Gotham City. The mysterious Holiday killer is instigating and exacerbating an all-out mob war, and the criminals controlling Batman's town unleash a rogue's gallery of costumed "freaks" in response. This week we talk about the best ways to dive...

It's not October anymore, but we've gone back to the spooky story well this week to read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Unlike The Martian Chronicles, the Bradbury book we read back in Episode 28, Wicked is a single coherent story, and it's about what happens when a mysterious and vaguely menacing carnival rolls into town. Join us for a discussion of aging, father-s...

At last, we've caught our White Whale! Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, a Leviathan of the American literary canon, chronicles the journey of the Pequod, a whaling ship helmed by the fanatical Captain Ahab. Narrated by Ishmael (of the infamous "Call me" opening line), Moby-Dick straddles the lines between fact and fiction, adventure and essay -- all the while never abandoning...

Donna Tartt, a recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Goldfinch, broke onto the literary scene over twenty years ago with her debut novel The Secret History. Set at a small Vermont college not unlike Tartt's alma mater, The Secret History explores how a singular tragedy forever defines the lives of six Classics students. Tune in as we discuss Bacchanalian...

Usually books try to make you root for the protagonist. Even if he or she is flawed in some crucial way, most stories try to make you feel something for the person whose mind you're inhabiting. That is not the case in Vladmir Nabokov's Lolita. This week we share with you an uncomfortable discussion about how it feels to read a book told from the perspective of an unrepentant pedophile—how do...

What're the holidays without children's stories? Every year, families gather around their yule rocks and Festivus poles to hear their favorite tales of holidays past -- which means it's rare that anyone discovers a new seasonal story. Enter L. Frank Baum's A Kidnapped Santa Claus and Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel and Trina Schart Hyman. One's a fairy...

Truman Capote's Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood chronicles the mass murder of a family in rural Kansas by two runaway parolees. Inspired by a 300-word newspaper article, it basically created the "true crime" genre, making it the grandpappy to the zeitgeist-conquering podcast Serial. Often times chilling, moving, and morbidly fascinating, In Cold Blood&...

We hope you like awesome horses and sobbing cowboys, because this week special guest host Casey Johnston is walking us through Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. It's a kind-of-subversive western that blends cowboy archetypes with some Grapes of Wrath-ish wandering. We also talk about the freelancing life, and what happens when you read books because you saw them in your dad's car. See Privacy P...

For the second week in a row, we've decided to read a book about a dystopian society—Animal Farm was about the oppressed overthrowing and then becoming the oppressors, but The Handmaid's Tale is about an already oppressed group getting even more oppressed. Margaret Atwood has a lot to say about women and feminism in this book, and we've got a lot of things to say about pie and thing...

Old Man Stalin Had A Farm...E-I-E-I-O....What happens when you mix the Russian Revolution with a bunch of farm animals and (more than a dash) of dystopian bummers? George Orwell's Animal Farm! Come listen to us learn the joys of rewriting history, selling your friends for whisky money, and holding whips in your trotters. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California...

Have you read Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, or seen the major motion picture currently in theaters? Because if not, you probably should turn back: we're in full-on spoiler mode this week, and this story hinges on its twists.  Also on the show this week: Christmas Creep, the writing process, and our brand-new Tickle Me Mario doll. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Pri...

Michael Chabon is no stranger to genre fiction. He has a Lovecraftesque alter ego. He's written essays decrying navel-gazing trends in the short story world. His Pulitzer Prize-winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tackled its larger themes through the lens of two comic book writers. So it should come as no surprise that in the early 2000s, Chabon took a stab at young adult fantasy...

Haruki Murakami is a giant of contemporary literature, particularly in his native Japan. However, his books are often rife with references to Western culture - in fact, one of his breakout novels was named after the Beatles song Norwegian Wood. His first-person style marries the fantastic with the private, the epic with the intimate, and his latest novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... is no...

Spooktober comes to a close with yet another Choose Your Own Adventure story: Edward Packard's You Are A Monster. If you missed our previous CYA episode, do check it out. We cover the series' inception, as well as discuss its legacy a bit. This week it's all choices, all the time...or so we hoped. Caveat lictor: the audio quality's not up to our usual standard this week. Technical difficulties (bo...

Spooktober rolls on with this week's story, an Anne Rice novel that's about spooky mummies and the women who love them. For real, though, people in this book have sex with reanimated immortal sexy mummies. And that's not all! The downright Austenian cast of characters has many more adventures in between the mummy sex, and despite being a bit overlong the book at least spins a fairly compelling yar...

If you've ever heard of a Cthulu, read about the Necronomicon, or been creeped out by sleepy towns in New England, you likely have H.P. Lovecraft to thank. At the Mountains of Madness (1935), a tale of an Antarctic expedition gone wrong, fits squarely into two literary genres Lovecraft helped to define: cosmicism and weird fiction. Man is rendered insignificant by the ancient forces of t...

Our spooky October (Spooktober?) continues this week with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, a book about broken trust and creepy new neighbors and Satan babies and a bunch of other stuff. It's a laugh a minute! This book (and the successful film based on it) serves as a predecessor to just about every horror film where a happy young family moves into a new house only to discover that it's hau...

Washington Irving - aka Jonathan Oldstyle, Abner Knickerbocker or Geoffrey Crayon - is widely regarded as the First American writer. Born just after the Revolutionary War, he broke ground as a satirist in the early 1800s before moving to England (ironically enough) and gaining international recognition as a teller of tales. You may have heard of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The Headless Horse...

The stuff in these show notes is just as important as the stuff that isn't in these show notes. At least, that would be the case if they were written by Harold Pinter. Andrew wasn't quite on board with Pinter's classic The Homecoming, but he was coming around a little bit by the end. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-...

We're trying something a little different this week on Overdue. To hear more, turn to page 44. To go back, turn to page 56. OK, this episode listing doesn't actually have branching paths based on page numbers, but this week's episode does! We both decided to navigate through Edward Packard's The Mystery of Chimney Rock on-air this week, and in doing so we encountered some scary cats, old...

Safecracker, prankster, bongo drummer, painter, teacher. Richard Feynman was many things in addition to being a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and he seemed to enjoy the incongruities of his varied interests. His collection of anecdotes Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! chronicles some of these pursuits, while also shedding light on Feynman's years at Los Alamos working on the atomic bo...

This week's story, This Is How You Lose Her, is a loosely connected collection of short stories that blurs the line between protagonist and author. Junot Díaz's upbringing and personal history are clearly related to that of Yunior, the character the book spends the most time with. But how much of Díaz is in Yunior, and how does that affect the way we feel about them both? Also on the docket:...

"I'm a hairy ape, get me? And I'll bust youse in de jaw if you don't lay off kiddin' me." When Eugene O'Neill wants to get his point across, he leaves nothing to chance. In his 1922 work of expressionist theatre, The Hairy Ape, the four-time Pulitzer Prize winner spells out exactly how you're supposed to feel about the dehumanizing effects of Capitalism and industry. Men resemble gorillas, cr...