Spine Crackers

This week, the Spine Crackers read Sicilian crime novelist Leonardo Sciascia's early novel The Day of the Owl. Place, community, and the realities of organized crime take center stage here. Godfather eat your heart out. 

For our first ever non-fiction episode, the Spine Crackers tackle Henry Miller's pseudo-travelogue of exile, national identity, art, and the American consciousness, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. 

This week, the Spine Crackers read the highly praised "millennial fiction" novel of race, sex, and self Luster by Raven Leilani. 

This week the Spine Crackers read Yugoslavian-born author Dubravka Ugresic's strange, beautiful novel of identity, war, memory, and place The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. 

This week the Spinecrackers read Chinese author Ah Cheng's three novellas set in and around post-Maoist China, The King of Trees, The King of Chess, and The King of Children. Join us for a tipsy daoist power hour! 

This week, for their 20th episode, the Spine Crackers read French author Michel Houellebecq's controversial 2015 novel of religion, meaning-making, politics, and literature, Submission. 

This week the Spine Crackers read Hervé Guibert's brutally intimate and by turns hilarious and tragic semi-autobiographical account of AIDS and the early days of the crisis in the gay community in France. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Cameos by Michel Foucault and Isabelle Adjani. 

This week the Spine Crackers are joined by enigmatic friend of the pod Morgan to discuss the almost-as-mysterious author Evan Dara and their 2013 novel of community, capitalism, and economic destitution Flee. 

This week the Spine Crackers are joined and dramatically upstaged by the inimitable Scott Thomas of The Infinity Podcast and And the Best Picture Is... to read Hiroko Oyamada's lonely, evocative corporate dreamscape The Factory (2013). 

This week the Spine Crackers read Bass Cathedral, the fourth volume of Nathaniel Mackey's epic ongoing, beginning and end-less epistolary work of jazz, history, and identity (among many other things) From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. 

This week the Spine Crackers, along with OMEGA SPECIAL GUEST Daniel from the Viva La Dude podcast, tackle Helen DeWitt's genre and form-bending chonky boi novel about family and the nature of genius The Last Samurai (no not that one you rubes). 

This week the Spine Crackers read Guido Morselli's 1977 post-apocalyptic meditation on memory and selfhood Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing. If you have ever wanted to hear us sing, well boy howdy this is the episode for you!

This week the Spine Crackers read Anna Kavan's surrealist pseudo-autobiographical novel Sleep Has His House. This episode lives up the podcast's name, as disagreements were had, bones were broken, and feelings were hurt. Drama! Intrigue! Books!

This week the Spine Crackers head to British colonial Africa at some point in the flat circle of time with John Crowley's 1989 time-travel novella Great Work of Time!

This week the Spine Crackers read Dirty Snow, an existential pseudo-dystopian novel of life during World War II, by prolific Belgian noir specialist Georges Simenon. Listen to this episode in your happy place because this is not a fun read (though it is excellent and enjoyable in other sorts of ways). 

This week the Spine Crackers dig into a very unrealistic and not-at-all timely-or-an-exact-mirror-of-our-crumbling-reality novel The Lathe of Heaven by legendary science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. Alien turtles, dream realities, and psychological malpractice abound!

This week the Spine Crackers break into the strange and slightly (though understandably) misanthropic world of Jakov Lind, reading his 1962 novella Soul of Wood and a selection of his other short stories, most of which are centered around WWII and its aftermath. 

This week the Spine Crackers celebrate the most wonderful time of the year (in the case of one co-host, perhaps a bit too much) by talking through two of Charles Dickens' lesser known Christmas novellas: "The Chimes" and "The Haunted Man"

This week the Spine Crackers read noted Japanese author Natsume Sōseki's proto-modernist novel The Miner  (1908). 

This week the Spine Crackers read Czech author Bohumil Hrabal's comedic, erotic, historical adventure I Served the King of England, first published surreptitiously in 1971, and formally released in 1983. 

This week the Spine Crackers read Roberto Bolaño's 1996 fictional pseudo-encyclopedia Nazi Literature in the Americas. 

This Thanksgiving week the Spine Crackers read Paul Auster's 1989 coming of age-ish novel Moon Palace. 

This week the Spine Crackers read weird-fiction author Michael Cisco's first novel, The Divinity Student (1999). 

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was a Welsh author whose horror stories are often seen as a precursor to the "weird fiction" of today. This week the Spine Crackers read his two novellas "The Great God Pan" and "The White People."

In which we read Shella by Andrew Vachss.