The Big Book Project

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject Effingers by Gabriele Tergit is an 800-page German Jewish family saga published by New York Review of Books Classics, and this week NYRB publicist Nick During joins me to talk about what makes it so special. Nick and I follow three generations of the Effinger family from a watchmaker’s bench in small-town Bavaria to the grand houses and Sunday lunches of Ber...

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus is a puzzling novel, and in this episode of The Big Book Project host Lori Feathers and guest Chad W. Post take on the first two hundred pages featuring an unreliable narrator, an unorthodox musical prodigy, and the transformation of art making into conformity to a systematized order. The Big Book Project was created as a forum to share ideas about challenging novels,...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject (Lori recorded this interview on a different device, and we apologize for the poor quality of her audio.) For five decades Steven Moore has been one of the most thoughtful champions of the kinds of novels we read at The Big Book Project — the abundant, stylistically ambitious works that reward slow attention. He is the foremost scholar on William Gaddis, the...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject Watch the full episode on youtube:  As we continue reading The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Richard Bailey joins me to talk about Part Two of the novel. Richard is my fellow bookseller at Interabang Books and simply, one of my favorite people to talk to about books, ideas, and the creative process. As we continue to try to understand who Kristian...

The name Fernando Del Paso was new to me two and a half years ago when author, publisher, and Dalkey Archive Press alum Martin Riker introduced me to Palinuro of Mexico . What a revelation this late Mexican novelist! Here was an author who wrote wildly, exuberantly, and explored consciousness, memory, and the ineffable mysticism of the world in such a compelling way. It didn’t take me any time at...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject Chad W. Post, publisher at Open Letter Books and translation studies instructor at the University of Rochester joins Lori Feathers on The Big Book Project to discuss the first 145 pages of Karl Ove Knausgåard's The School of Night. They explore Knausgaard's ouvre, the companion novels in his The School of Night constellation, as well as some of the...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is too much—too many characters, too many plot points, too much chaos—and that’s exactly what makes it extraordinary. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers sits down with Professor Michael Sexton, a devoted reader now on his fourth reading of the novel, to dig into Part Two, Chapters VII through XII. They talk abo...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow rewards readers willing to move inward — into the psychological depths of a single family across three generations — rather than outward toward the conventional satisfactions of plot and incident. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers is joined by novelist Mark Haber for a rich, searching conversation about o...

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is one of those novels that resists easy summary — and that resistance is precisely what makes it so worth discussing. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers is joined by Faulkner scholar Larry Allums for a deep, unhurried conversation about one of Faulkner’s most structurally ambitious and morally searching works. Go Down, Moses occupies a de...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori Feathers is joined by translator Ursula Phillips to discuss her extraordinary translation of Ice, the monumental, genre-defying novel by Polish author Jacek Dukaj. Clocking in at nearly 1,200 pages, Ice is both an alternate-history epic and a philosophical meditation on truth, language, power, and perception. Phi...

In this episode of The Big Book Project , Lori sits down with novelist and philosopher Mark de Silva to explore his monumental 2022 novel The Logos — a thousand-page meditation on art, perception, capitalism, and the visual texture of contemporary life. A writer steeped in philosophy and the visual arts, Mark reveals how The Logos emerged from nearly a decade of research into advertising theory, i...

In this final discussion of Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, Lori is joined once again by Dr. Larry Allums to close out one of the most haunting and inexhaustible novels in American literature. Together, they trace Faulkner’s labyrinth of narration—Quentin and Shreve’s imaginative reconstruction of the Sutpen story—and explore what it reveals about truth, storytelling, and the South’s enduri...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject In this episode of The Big Book Project , Lori Feathers and Dr. Larry Allums delve into Chapter 7 of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! —one of the novel’s most intricate and revealing sections. They trace Thomas Sutpen’s backstory from his rugged Appalachian boyhood to the life-altering moment that shapes his “design.” What begins as a story of social hum...

In this episode of The Big Book Project , host Lori Feathers and literary scholar Dr. Larry Allums continue their deep exploration of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! —turning to the enigmatic and multi-layered Chapter 6. This chapter introduces a new voice into Faulkner’s intricate web of narrators: Shreve McCannon, Quentin Compson’s Canadian roommate at Harvard. Lori and Larry discuss how Fa...

Welcome back to The Big Book Project , hosted by Lori Feathers . In Video 2 , Lori continues her discussion of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! with returning guest Dr. Larry Allums . Together, they unpack the intense drama of Chapters 4 and 5 , where Rosa Coldfield’s narration reveals her humiliation at the hands of Thomas Sutpen — and Faulkner deepens his exploration of race, obsession, and...

In this episode of The Big Book Project , Lori Feathers is joined by Dr. Larry Allums to launch our collective read of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! — one of the most complex and unforgettable novels in American literature. They unpack the biblical and mythological dimensions of the novel, explore its shifting narrators, and discuss how Faulkner used the story of Thomas Sutpen to expose the...

This week on The Big Book Project I’m joined by Nick During , publicist at New York Review Books , for a deep dive into Henrik Pontoppidan’s monumental novel A Fortunate Man translated by Paul Larkin . Pontoppidan, who won the 1917 Nobel Prize in Literature , gives us one of the great portraits of ambition, love, and disillusionment at the turn of the 20th century. His protagonist, Per, dreams of...

Join host Lori Feathers and guest Chad W. Post (Dalkey Archive Press & Open Letter Books) as they dive into the world of Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes, one of the most significant literary voices of the last 50 years. They discuss Antunes’s groundbreaking style—shifting voices, fragmented memory, and narrative consciousness—as well as the political and historical backdrops of his fict...

In this final conversation on The Kindly Ones , I’m joined again by Tom Flynn to explore the last chaotic stretch of Jonathan Littell’s massive and deeply unsettling novel. We talk about the feverish pacing, the bizarre turns, and the chilling final scenes—from Max biting Hitler’s nose to the feral children in the woods. Does the book fall apart, or is it mirroring the collapse of the world it dep...

Why do some readers gravitate toward sprawling, ambitious novels that take weeks—or even months—to read? What is it about long books that makes them so immersive, so risky, and so rewarding? In this episode of The Big Book Project , Lori Feathers is joined once again by writer and professor James Elkins for an in-depth conversation about the magic and challenges of big books. They explore their pe...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori sits down with Brad Costa, sales representative for W.W. Norton and an extraordinary reader, to discuss Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. Brad brings a unique perspective as someone who worked in library archives with Holocaust materials, offering profound insights into the novel’s detailed depiction of bureauc...

In this episode of The Big Book Project , Lori Feathers is joined by Professor Dorian Stuber for a deep dive into Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones . They explore the book’s place within Holocaust literature, its historical accuracy, and the challenges it poses to readers and educators alike. From the banality of evil to the controversial portrayal of sexual deviancy, Lori and Dorian unpack the t...

In this episode of The Big Book Project , Lori Feathers sits down with art historian, theorist, and novelist James Elkins to discuss his new book A Short Introduction to Anneliese published by Unnamed Press—the second novel in his five-volume literary experiment, Five Strange Languages . James shares the 20-year journey behind this sprawling, genre-defying project, its dizzying structure, overlapp...

Tom Flynn returns to The Big Book Project to continue our group read of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones —this time tackling pages 333–427, a harrowing descent into the frozen siege of Stalingrad. Lori and Tom unpack the disturbing realism and psychological depth of the novel, exploring themes of unreliable narration, classical tragedy, and the machinery of fascist ideology. They ask hard questi...

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers is joined by acclaimed translator David McKay to explore The Remembered Soldier, the haunting and deeply psychological novel by Anjet Daanje, newly released in English by New Vessel Press. This episode unpacks the long journey of bringing The Remembered Soldier from a small regional publisher in the...