Overdue

Tina Fey is a prolific, talented, outspoken comedian with a track record to rival the best in the business. She’s also a keen observer of the human condition, and her 2011 memoir/essay collection Bossypants covers with wit and humor a wide range of topics including the ins and outs of television comedy writing, motherhood, and becoming a woman in the late 20th century. Just as her infamous 2008 po...

Agatha Christie is the owner of numerous superlatives: best-selling novelist, influential mystery writer, criminally successful playwright. Also, did we mention she's a dame? Her novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written in the 1930s, endures not only for its fanciful cast of characters (including the lovable detective Hercule Poirot) but also for its subversion of the murder...

More than a year after reading Middlesex for Episode 12, this week we return to Jeffrey Eugenides' oeuvre to check out 2011's The Marriage Plot. It's a more focused, less-sprawling book than Middlesex, but as in his previous book Eugenides spends a lot of time here talking about growing up with a difficult condition. Intentional or not, there's also some subtle sexism here that...

Dorothy Parker was a prolific Jazz Age writer who rose to prominence during her days as a member of the Algonquin Round Table - a group of writers, critics and actors who liked to spend lunch cracking wise and practically joking. A celebrated poet, Parker also churned out dozens of short stories, earning herself an O. Henry Short Story Prize for "Big Blonde" which we discuss on today's show....

William Shakespeare's reputation is basically secure at this point. He was hugely influential, his works are widely studied, and although he's over 400 years old he remains a part of the liberal arts canon to this day. That doesn't necessarily mean that his works are easy to parse. This week, we stumble a bit through the epic tragedy King Lear, a play that has all the hallmarks of a Shak...

Lois Lowry's The Giver imagines a world without color, without hills, without difference and most importantly without memory. Winner of the 1994 Newberry Award, The Giver shares thematic DNA with classic "Kid Who Is More Special Than Anyone Else Ever" literature like The Hunger Games, Ender's Game, and Harry Potter. So naturally we take a big old swing at Quiddit...

In honor of Children's Book Week, we each decided to read a Dr. Seuss book for this episode—that's right, Andrew had somehow managed to avoid the Lorax, and Craig knew nothing about the Places He'll Go. Seuss himself is a fascinating guy, a prolific and long-lived artist who put a lot of good into the world but was by no means perfect. In some ways he's a product of his time, even if his work...

What if superheroes were real? Would we still revere them so much? Or would they be too frightening for us to handle, too unstable for us to control? What if they didn't want to save us? These are the questions that kick off Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a classic revered by comic fans for its deconstruction of superhero imagery, its compelling Cold War conspiracies, and its engrossing...

Mark Twain is an incredibly prolific, incredibly distinctive author. This week's read is just a short story and it's one of Twain's first major successes, but it manages to convey why he remains vital over 100 years after his death. It's great for a few laughs, too. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Justin Cronin got his start publishing quiet but moving "literary" fiction. In 2010, he blew up North America (in a manner of speaking) with his post-apocalyptic don't-call-them-vampires "genre" novel The Passage. We can't hope to cover every plot point or character in Cronin's 766-page genre epic, but we try to at least touch on a few reasons for its mainstream appeal: rich characters, an un...

Tell the Wolves I'm Home, author Carol Rifka Brunt's first novel, is multi-faceted: it's about different kinds of love. It's about siblinghood, and growing up. It's about the early stages of the AIDS epidemic in the US. There's a lot going on here, to which we add the requisite discussion about pizza-making, podcasting, and how actors remember all those lines. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.c...

Molière's The Misanthrope is a three-and-a-half centuries old play about something as old as time: dishing on your people behind their back. It's also full of great zingers about man's duplicitous nature, all written by a guy who loved theater so much he ended up nearly dying onstage in his final performance. Join us as Richard Wilbur's delightful translation makes us laugh out loud, as...

A true classic, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those books we should have read years ago. For the two of you who aren't familiar, it's a story about a lot of things: the trial of an innocent black man; growing up in small-town Alabama during the Depression; and growing up. It's made all the more interesting by Lee herself, who to date has never written another novel. See Pr...

Why do we keep trying to solve murders in small towns? What is it like for an American author to set a story in a sleepy Irish suburb? Will our amnesiac protagonists ever regain this memory? What's the best way to interrogate a suspect? We try to solve these mysteries and more on this week's episode as we discuss Tana French's award-winning crime novel In the Woods. See Privacy Policy at http...

We double-dip a bit in this week's show, reading two short stories and proving that you don't have to have a ton of time to read something thought-provoking. The theme is "female authors writing about controversial-at-the-time ideas," and the stories are The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. One is about a misdiagnosed "hysterical"...

It's almost baseball season! And what better way to celebrate America's (former) pastime than to document the annual occurrence of Craig forcing Andrew to tolerate his love of baseball? Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers is an in-depth, statistics-focused look at today's game from the folks at Baseball Prospectus. It's full of trivia, charts and, thankfully, humorous anecdotes t...

What if you got to/had to live the same 25 years of your life over and over again? Would you try to recreate the life you had lost? Would you game the system and make a whole bunch of money? Would you try to change the course of human history, with sometimes-disastrous results? Those are the questions raised by Ken Grimwood's sci-fi classic Replay, which Andrew read for the show this week. Ta...

Strap yourselves in and pick a good safe word, because Andrew and Craig both read Fifty Shades of Grey for this, our landmark 50th episode! Boy are they sorry! A warning up front in case you're not familiar: this is a book that is mostly about a BDSM relationship. Our show this week has swearing and pretty graphic descriptions of sex, so keep that in mind while listening. See Privacy Pol...

What's a granfalloon, you ask? Or a karass? A stuppa? A wampeter? These are all terms from the Bokonon religion, created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle - a hilarious but depressing satire of scientific and cultural responsibility in the atomic age. Topics for this week's discussion include Donuts versus Bagels, grading your own work the Vonnegut way,...

Craig and Andrew take a trip to Transylvania this week, facilitated by Bram Stoker's Dracula. Join us for a talk about the evolution of the vampire, the Olympics, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff too. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

'Ello 'ello! What's all this then?! A discussion of George Bernard Shaw, turn-of-the-century dialects, My Fair Lady and gender politics, ya say? Conversations about whether or not stories should end romantically or with women declaring their independence, ya say? Well, 'Guv, I'm all ears. Cheerio!  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at http...

We return to the Dead White Male canon this week with Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the gripping tale of an old man who goes out fishing in the sea. The title is maybe a little more literal than some other books we've read. Join us for a discussion of man's place in the circle of life and of Craig's many misfortunes. Just don't come expecting us to talk about the story's religio...

What does it mean to be a woman? We don't know the answer to that question, and it's doubtful we ever will. But reading Kate Chopin's revolutionary novel The Awakening is as close as we'll ever come to understanding the obstacles facing a woman in late 19th-century New Orleans. Censored in its day for its matter-of-fact portrait of a woman stuck in a stifling marriage, The Awakening...

Have you ever revisited a classic from your childhood only to find a whole pile of weird subtext you've never noticed before? Andrew's never read Mary Poppins, but all he noticed in this children's tale of whimsy and wonder was the bizarre-and-possibly-damaging stuff. Also on tap: chatting about gambling, babysitters, and more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy...

Nothing screams New Year's like a guy sitting in his study, missing his beloved, wishing an obnoxious, repetitive bird would just leave him the heck alone. Therefore it's only natural that Craig read a classic tale of bird vs. man antagonism. The Raven is arguably Edgar Allan Poe's most famous work, so it's fitting we use it as a springboard to talk about all sorts of Poe-related topics such...