Sandra Newman And Catherine Nichols

Shows

Lit Century Train DreamsAuthor Amitava Kumar and host Catherine Nichols discuss Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. They talk about the wilderness and the names of plants, the associations of trains and the 19th and 20th centuries in India, Europe and the United States, and the book's rolling, associative prose style. Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and three novels. His novel Immigrant, Montana was a New York Times and New Yorker best book of the year and was selected by President Barack Obama as a favorite book of the year. Kumar's work has...

2024-05-141h 01

Book Fight Catherine Nichols on The Tenant of Wildfell HallOur "marriage plot" season continues, with freelance writer and podcaster Catherine Nichols joining us to talk about the "least fun" Bronte sister, and her novel about what happens when you marry a drunken frat boy (or whatever the 19th-century equivalent of a frat was). Check out Catherine's podcast, Lit Century, in which she and author Sandra Newman read through the 20th century, one year at a time: https://lithub.com/author/litcentury/ If you're enjoying our show, and would like more of it, subscribe to our Patreon for just $5 a month, which gets you two m...

2024-05-131h 17

Lit Century Pedro PáramoAuthors Daniel Saldaña París and Wah-Ming Chang join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Juan Rulfo's 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, in its new translation by Douglas J. Weatherford. They talk about the book's unique mixture of modernity and timelessness, the violence and coziness of the book's picture of domestic life, and Rulfo's life as a traveler, reader, and editor. Daniel Saldaña París is the author of three novels—Among Strange Victims, Ramifications, and The Dance and the Wildfire—and a collection of personal essays, Planes Flying Over a Monster. His work has been...

2024-04-021h 12

Lit Century The BellNa Zhong and Catherine Nichols discuss Iris Murdoch's 1958 novel The Bell. They discuss Murdoch's characters and the unique ethical quandaries of the book, as well as Murdoch's love of swimming and the size of the bell itself. A native of Chengdu, China, Na Zhong is a fiction writer who now calls New York her home. Her work has been recognized by organizations such as MacDowell and the Center for Fiction. Additionally, she serves as a columnist at China Books Review and is the co-founder of...

2024-02-131h 05

Lit Century The Swimmer and The WaltzHost Catherine Nichols and author Christine Coulson (One Woman Show, 2023) discuss The Swimmer by John Cheever and The Waltz by Dorothy Parker. Their conversation covers the humor and surrealism of both stories, the precise artistry of both authors' prose, as well as the social context of Cheever's suburbia, Parker's freedom and the constraints that both stories show in mid-20th century America. Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and left the Museum as Senior Writer in 2019. Her debut novel, Metropolitan Stories, was a national bestseller and is followed...

2023-11-211h 26

Lit Century My Soul in ExileIn this episode, host Catherine Nichols and writer Sally Foreman discuss Zabel Yesayan's enigmatic 1922 novel My Soul in Exile. Yesayan wrote the book after reporting on the genocide of her own Armenian people, shortly before before becoming a Communist. The book is counterintuitively joyful, as Yesayan describes a life in the arts both as a form of exile and a form of homecoming. Sally Foreman is an English writer and researcher living in Jerusalem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2023-10-171h 03

Lit Century The Notebooks of Malte Laurids BriggeElisa Gabbert and Michael Joseph Walsh join Catherine Nichols to discuss Rainer Maria Rilke's 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. They talk about the ways the book echoes the life and mind of its author--and how it doesn't, as well as the details of the text: the eeriness of hands and masks, the differences between childhood and adult consciousness, and the appeal of encountering horrors on purpose. Since the book has been translated from the German many times, they compare several translations.Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism. She...

2023-09-271h 11

Lit Century Songs for DrellaWriter and musician Leeore Schnairsohn and host Catherine Nichols discuss Songs for Drella, the album Lou Reed and John Cale released in 1990 about their friend, mentor and manager Andy Warhol. They talk about the intimacy of artists' imitation of their friends voices, the paradox of Warhol's art, and where the album fits in both Reed's and Cale's career.Leeore Schnairsohn’s fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Painted Bride Quarterly, the Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Review, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Pr...

2023-04-041h 11

Lit Century The Death of the HeartAuthor Lucy Ferriss and host Catherine Nichols discuss Elizabeth Bowen's 1938 novel The Death of the Heart. They discuss the unique narrator—16-year-old Portia, almost unimaginably innocent and stubborn about refusing to learn the hard lessons of life—and whether her demands are reasonable within the world of the book, or the actual world.Lucy Ferriss is the author of eleven books, including her latest collection, Foreign Climes: Stories, which received the Brighthorse Books Prize; and the 2022 re-release of her novel, The Misconceiver. Other recent work includes the 2015 novel A Sister to Honor, as well as e...

2023-02-281h 04

Lit Century The Unwomanly Face of WarHost Catherine Nichols discusses Svetlana Alexeivich's 1985 oral history The Unwomanly Face of War with author Megan Buskey. The conversation covers the ways World War II is remembered in Russia versus in the United States, and the feminism of the 1970s that created an audience for a book of this kind--and the topics it can't cover--as well as ways that the experiences of Soviet soldiers in World War II can shed light on the current war in Ukraine.Megan Buskey is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family History of Exile and...

2023-01-3153 min

Lit Century A Chess StoryIn this episode, guest Leeore Schnairsohn joins Isaac Butler and Catherine Nichols to talk about Stefan Zweig's 1943 novella A Chess Story. They talk about the features of the story that seem to belong to the 19th century and to the 20th, and how it resonates with the work of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the web comic "Garfield Minus Garfield." They also discuss the biographical details that may or may not give the story its special haunting quality, and whether it's important to know about Zweig's life—and his friendship with Freud—to interpret the text.Leeore Schnairsohn’s fictio...

2022-12-061h 05

Lit Century The Golden CompassBook scout Kelly Farber joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Philip Pullman's 1995 novel The Golden Compass, the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy. They discuss the appeal of Pullman's imagined world and his place in both his intellectual and artistic traditions, his connections to C.S. Lewis and Milton, as well as the challenges of adapting this book for movies and television, and finally—what is Dust anyway?Kelly Farber is an international literary scout, owner/proprietor of KF Literary Scouting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2022-10-1858 min

Lit Century Parade's EndWriter Brian Hall joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Ford Madox Ford's 1928 quartet of novels, Parade's End, focusing particularly on the first book, Some Do Not.... Their conversation covers the book's place in Modernist literature, comparisons to the work of E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and particularly its descriptions of World War One: as granular as a soldier's perspective on the field all the way outward to the war's effects on every part of British society.Brian Hall is the author of eight books, five of them novels, including The Saskiad (Houghton-Mifflin, 1997); I Should Be Extremely Hap...

2022-08-301h 04

Lit Century Mrs DallowayIn this episode, writers Andrea Pitzer (Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World) and Matthew Hunte join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway. They discuss the paired stories of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith and what these two characters bring to one another, the book's private nihilism, its place in both Modernist and Edwardian literature, and the meaning of a party where the host dislikes the guests.Andrea Pitzer is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Outside, The Daily Beast, Vox, and Sl...

2022-08-091h 16

Lit Century Sex and the Single GirlHost Catherine Nichols discusses Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 Sex and the Single Girl with guests Briallen Hopper and Samantha Allen, both contributors to the 2022 collection Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic.The conversation covers Brown's class consciousness as well as the perplexing combination of hope and drudgery involved in her advice for living a glamorous, feminine life. While Brown acknowledged before her death that her advice was only for a narrow slice of the population--she acknowledged that lesbians might exist, but she had no useful advice for them—Nichols, Hopper, and Allen di...

2022-07-1250 min

Lit Century The Man Who Loved ChildrenIn this episode, film critic K. Austin Collins and John Lingan (Homeplace, A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival) join host Catherine Nichols to talk about Christina Stead’s 1940 novel The Man Who Loved Children. They discuss the book's place in American and Australian literature, and its political analysis of the traditional family, as well as its unique use of language to show the characters' psychological warfare on one another. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2022-05-311h 11

Lit Century Good Morning, MidnightIn this episode, writers Sandra Lim and Brian Hall join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Jean Rhys's 1939 novel, Good Morning, Midnight. The novel is about a grieving, impoverished woman wandering through Paris, intermittently hopeful and despairing, The conversation addresses the novel’s artistic and political context and biographical links to Rhys's life, as well as literary depictions of poverty in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the Great Depression.Sandra Lim is the author of three poetry collections: The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021), The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). The Wilderness was the winne...

2022-04-2657 min

Lit Century The Denial of DeathIn this episode, poet and critic Elisa Gabbert (The Unreality of Memory) joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. The book draws from psychology and philosophy to develop a theory of human behaviors motivated by fear of death and the desire to influence the world past an individual's natural life span. Gabbert and Nichols talk about how Becker's ideas look in a modern context of climate change, pandemic and sexual liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2022-03-2253 min

Lit Century Love in a Fallen CityIn this episode, writer and photographer Adalena Kavanagh and editor Jaime Chu join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Eileen Chang's 1943 novel Love In a Fallen City. Set in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the early days of World War II, it centers on Bai Liusu, a beautiful young woman who has divorced her husband and returned to her traditional Chinese family. They consider her spoiled goods and are trying to marry her off to a widower with five children. At the same time, they are trying to match her sister with the highly eligible and rich bachelor Fan Liuyuan...

2021-12-141h 12

Lit Century Sunday in the Park with GeorgeIn this episode, musician and editor Rob Weinert-Kendt joins hosts Isaac Butler and Catherine Nichols to discuss the musical "Sunday in the Park with George" with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. The play focuses on the painter Georges Seurat and his common-law wife Dot, in the time when he was painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, but in its second act goes to Seurat's great grandson, also an artist, and his personal crisis. The conversation address issues of muses, second acts, artistic isolation and connection, and how the...

2021-12-071h 14

Lit Century Pitchin' Man: Satchel Paige's Own StoryIn this episode, writer Luke Epplin joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Leroy "Satchel" Paige's 1948 memoir Pitchin' Man: Satchel Paige's Own Story, written with sportswriter Hal Lebovitz. Paige was a baseball legend and an important figure in the early integration of baseball. He was one of the greatest athletes of his time, but his stardom was also the product of a genius for self-promotion. In the 1940s, this involved cultivating a comical, unthreatening persona that made white audiences comfortable. His memoir tells the story of his life through that persona, turning his career in Black baseball into a series...

2021-11-3054 min

Lit Century The Hound of the BaskervillesIn this episode writers Alex Higley and Willie Fitzgerald join host Catherine Nichols to talk about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1901 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. The conversation includes discussion of how the figure of Watson is used as a magnifying frame for Holmes's genius and the lasting influence of that narrative device; the overwhelming influence Conan Doyle and Holmes had on the development of the mystery genre, and how this was first Holmes story Doyle wrote after eight years away from the character, of whom he had grown tired.Alex Higley is the author of the...

2021-11-231h 03

Lit Century Civilization and Its DiscontentsWriter Jessica Gross joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Freud's 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents, in which Freud writes about the difficulty of living as an individual in society, and the ways in which society demands we repress our nature and our desires. How has psychoanalysis, and Freud's theories in particular, changed the way we see ourselves and tell our stories? Is the price we pay for living in a society too high, especially when that price includes world wars?Jessica Gross is the author of the novel Hysteria, about a young woman's relationship with Freud. Her n...

2021-11-1652 min

Lit Century TetrisIn this episode, video game designer Tracy Rae Bowling (The Fight) joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss the history and impact of the 1984 game Tetris—its place in the history of video games, the cultural impact on the late 20th century, and why it's not as popular as it used to be.Tracy Rae Bowling is a writer and video game designer. Their games include The Fight, available to play on itch.io, and The Color of the Moon, in development. Tracy also hosts Gift Horse, a comedy podcast about gift-giving with their husband, Mike Meginnis.

2021-11-0946 min

Lit Century Mock Orange and Louise GluckIn this episode, guest K. Austin Collins joins hosts Elisa Gabbert and Catherine Nichols to talk about Louise Gluck's 1985 poem "Mock Orange" and through it, her work in general. Some topics are the unfashionable somberness and simplicity of Gluck's work, Gluck's extraordinary personal letter to her friend Brenda Hillman, and Gluck's near-fatal anorexia. Also discussed is Gabbert's recent review of Gluck's most recent collection in the New York Times.K. Austin Collins is a film critic for Rolling Stone, and formerly film critic for Vanity Fair and The Ringer. He was also the host of the film p...

2021-11-0258 min

Lit Century Strangers on a TrainIn this episode, writers Mike Meginnis and David Burr Gerrard join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Patricia Highsmith's 1950 novel Strangers on a Train. In the novel, two characters, Guy and Bruno, meet on a train; each have someone they would like to see murdered. Bruno offers to kill Guy's estranged wife, Miriam, in exchange for Guy killing Bruno's father. Guy doesn't agree, but Bruno kills Miriam anyway, and then expects to be paid back in murder. The conversation touches on the homoeroticism in the novel, how it deals with blurred identity, and how it expresses Highsmith's identification with monsters.

2021-10-2653 min

Lit Century The Sound TapeIn this episode, writers Alex Higley and Willie Fitzgerald join host Catherine Nichols to discuss three short stories by Wright Morris: "The Sound Tape," "The Character of the Lover," and "The Cat in the Picture." Higley, who brought the stories to Lit Century, talks about how he discovered Morris's writing through his photographs and photo-texts. The group also talks about Morris's detached, bemused voice, that sometimes tips over into confusion or joy, and the way his stories cheat the reader of conclusive meaning and leave them in a place of mystery.Alex Higley is the author of...

2021-10-191h 25

Lit Century The Great GatsbyIn this episode, hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. Why is modernity (and the swimming pool) always deadly in twentieth century fiction? Where and how did Fitzgerald lose control of his material? Would it be a different book if Fitzgerald had chosen a different narrator? And most of all: why is this book so commonly seen as the great American novel? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-10-1258 min

Lit Century Friend of My YouthIn this episode writers Alex Higley and Willie Fitzgerald join host Catherine Nichols to discuss two stories from Alice Munro's 1991 short story collection Friend of My Youth. The first is the title story, in which the narrator retells (and reinterprets) a story she was told by her dying mother about two Presbyterian sisters; the second is "Meneseteung," about a writer doing research on a 19th century poet.Willie Fitzgerald's short stories have been published in Joyland, Prairie Schooner, and many other publications. He is a graduate of the Michener Center, cofounder of the APRIL...

2021-10-051h 20

Lit Century LucyIn this episode, writers V. V. Ganeshananthan and J. Robert Lennon join host Catherine Nichols to discuss Jamaica Kincaid's 1990 novel Lucy. The novel is about a girl who travels from Antigua to the United States to be an au pair for a wealthy white family, and forms a close relationship to the mother of the family, reacting against her relationship with her own mother. The conversation addresses the novel's complex treatment of race and the concept of white innocence, its prescient interest in environmental issues, and its morally ambiguous, triumphantly selfish narrator. V.V. "Sugi" Ganeshananthan, who was a s...

2021-09-2856 min

Lit Century Remember MeHosts Elisa Gabbert and Catherine Nichols discuss Christopher Pike's hit 1989 novel Remember Me and his less-known Fall Into Darkness (1990). Remember Me's ghostly protagonist explores an idiosyncratic afterlife and enters the dreams of her family and friends to solve her own murder at her friend's slumber party. In Fall Into Darkness, a teenage girl discovers that her best friend has framed her for murder.Link to an interview with Christopher Pike discussed in the episode: https://electricliterature.com/everything-youve-always-wanted-to-ask-christopher-pike/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-09-211h 02

Lit Century The EmigrantsHosts Elisa Gabbert, Isaac Butler, and Catherine Nichols discuss W. G. Sebald's 1992 novel, The Emigrants, a hybrid fiction/nonfiction work made up of four long narratives about four people who emigrated from Germany around the time of WWII. A Sebald-like narrator travels in the footsteps of these characters, mentally and geographically, in an elegiac, oblique book that is ultimately about the long shadow of the Holocaust and more generally about loss and memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-07-071h 10

Lit Century The General of the Dead ArmyIn this episode, critic K. Austin Collins joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Isaac Butler to discuss Albanian author Ismail Kadare's 1971 novel The General of the Dead Army. In this novel, an Italian general comes to Albania 20 years after World War II to find the bodies of Italian soldiers who died there and return them to their families, and ends up in a small village looking for the remains of a particular army captain with a particularly brutal reputation.Working as a writer in the Stalinist Albania of Enver Hoxha, Ismail Kadare became an international literary figure and a...

2021-06-291h 02

Lit Century The World I Live In`In this episode, writer, actor, and performance artist M. Leona Godin joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Helen Keller's 1908 book The World I Live In. Helen Keller (1880-1968) was an American author, lecturer, vaudeville performer, and political activist. At nineteen months, she suffered an illness that left her deaf and blind; The World I Live In offers Keller's remarkable insight of the world as perceived through three senses.M. Leona Godin, is a performance artist, actor and writer with a PhD in literature. She has written a play, "The Star of Happiness," about Helen Keller's vaudeville years...

2021-06-2252 min

Lit Century The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the SeaHosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols discuss Yukio Mishima's 1963 novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, a disturbing, sui generis book about a young boy watching the developing relationship between his urbane, well-heeled mother and a quiet sailor with dark, secret dreams of glory. The boy also has secrets: he is spying on the sailor and his mother when they have sex, and he belongs to a secret society of boys that will ultimately condemn the sailor to death. The book reads like an intimate and damning portrayal of the mentality of fascism, but Mishima himself...

2021-06-1552 min

Lit Century A Structure for DNAIn this episode, geneticist Maria Naylor joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss James Watson and Francis Crick's 1953 paper "A Structure for DNA," for which they won the Nobel Prize (with many references also to Watson's book about the discovery, The Double Helix). The discovery of DNA's structure had a rich social context, which ultimately determined not only who got credit for the work, but who was effectively able to do it. Most notoriously, there was the malicious exclusion of Rosalind Franklin from the story, but this episodes also looks at how collaborations between scientists were facilitated or obstructed by...

2021-06-0855 min

Lit Century TruismsIn this week's episode, art historian Robert Wiesenberger joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Isaac Butler to discuss artist Jenny Holzer's "Truisms" from 1978, "Truisms" is a group of declarative sentences Holzer first put up anonymously on posters all over New York City: "Labor is a life-destroying activity.," "Lack of charisma can be fatal," "Private property created crime." The work originated in a period when Holzer was frustrated with painting and turned to language as a more direct means of expression. "Language is a good way to convey meaning," as Holzer put it.Robert Wiesenberger is the associate curator...

2021-06-0157 min

Lit Century The Wine-Dark Sea (1988)In this episode, novelist and poet Kathleen Rooney joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Elisa Gabbert to discuss Robert Aickman's 1988 collection of stories The Wine-Dark Sea, with particular focus on the title story and the uncanny dollhouse story "The Inner Room." Aickman's work is often characterized as horror fiction, but he preferred the term "strange stories." His stories take the reader imperceptibly across the gauzy line between mundane reality and surreal terror. As one of his characters says: "Dreams are misleading because they make life seem real."Kathleen Rooney is the author of nine books of poetry, fiction...

2021-05-251h 02

Lit Century Valley of the DollsIn this episode co-hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss Jacqueline Susann's 1966 mega-bestseller Valley of the Dolls, looking at how it treats women's bodies, sexuality, success, and glamour purely as sources of misery. In this book (nominally a cautionary tale about drug addiction) the only real joy comes from pills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-05-1857 min

Lit Century Superman Comes to the SupermarketIn this episode, novelist Miranda Popkey joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Isaac Butler to discuss Norman Mailer's 1960 essay, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," a landmark work in the history of New Journalism. The essay is about the presidential campaign of JFK and the cultural changes it embodies, particularly the emergence from the fifties culture of conformity and the way television impacts politics. Today's conversation deals not only with the essay but with Norman Mailer's legacy, and how it's been reassessed in the light of his habit of violence, most notably exemplified by the fact that he stabbed his wife...

2021-05-1155 min

Lit Century The Love Song of J. Alfred PrufrockIn this episode, writer and critic Elisa Gabbert joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss T.S. Eliot's 1915 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem about aging, limitations and disillusionment written by a young poet on the threshold of a brilliant career. How do the poet's youth and the narrator's age affect the tone of the poem? What makes it such a potently memorable (but also elusive) work? Included in the episode is discussion of Eliot's essay about Marvell. Lit Century also wants to thank the T. S. Eliot Society for use of the audio recording of...

2021-05-0439 min

Lit Century The Surrealist ManifestoIn this episode, co-hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss André Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto from 1924. Why were the demands of the surrealists such a lasting influence on twentieth century art? Are they revolutionary or insidiously counter-revolutionary in their meaning? Mentioned in the episode is Catherine Nichols' essay about privilege and the avant garde, "A God-awful Small Affair." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-04-2746 min

Lit Century The Chaneysville IncidentIn this episode, writer Matthew Hunte joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss David Bradley's 1981 novel The Chaneysville Incident, a historical novel based on a legend of thirteen runaway slaves who killed themselves to avoid being caught and returned to slavery. Matthew Hunte is a writer from St. Lucia, whose essays include "In Praise of Minor Literature," and "Albert Murray and the Americas." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-04-201h 05

Lit Century Excellent WomenIn this episode V V Ganeshananthan joins host Catherine Nichols to discuss Barbara Pym's novel Excellent Women, a comedy of manners about an unmarried woman living in the very small world of 1950s Britain, and about the pleasures of independence—and of pettiness.V V Ganeshananthan is a fiction writer and journalist. Her novel, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World's best books of the year, and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. Her work has also appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the At...

2021-04-1350 min

Lit Century The Women of Brewster Place IIIn this episode, author Tyrese L. Coleman joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman again to continue their discussion of Gloria Naylor’s book of linked short stories, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), a classic of Black women’s literature.Tyrese L. Coleman is a writer, wife, mother, and attorney. Her debut collection of stories and essays, How to Sit, was published by Mason Jar Press in 2018 and nominated for a 2019 PEN Open Book Award. Her work has appeared as a notable in Best American Essays 2018 and 2016 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Learn...

2021-04-0628 min

Lit Century The Women of Brewster Place IIn this episode, author Tyrese L. Coleman joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman to discuss Gloria Naylor's book of linked short stories, The Women of Brewster Place (1982). This book is a classic of Black women's literature; does that canon differ from the white male canon, and why might any differences have arisen?Tyrese L. Coleman is the author of How to Sit, a 2019 Pen Open Book Award finalist published with Mason Jar Press in 2018. She's also the writer of the forthcoming book, Spectacle. Writer, wife, mother, attorney, and writing instructor, she is a contributing editor at...

2021-03-3026 min

Lit Century What Is It Like to Be a Bat?In this episode, hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols discuss Thomas Nagel's 1974 essay "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" How did materialism, for centuries the tool of radical thinkers, become the philosophy of the status quo? And why was this philosophical essay about the possibility of understanding other minds—or any minds—so crucial for contemporary thinkers? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-03-2341 min

Lit Century The End of VandalismIn this episode, Adalena Kavanagh joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss Tom Drury's 1994 novel The End of Vandalism, a quietly hilarious and profound novel about a love triangle in rural Iowa, with a huge cast of characters who have all known each other from birth. What does this book have to tell us about rural America, and why does this relatively recent novel already feel like a work that could not be written and published now?Adalena Kavanagh is a writer and librarian in New York. She has just completed a novel, and writes...

2021-03-1644 min

Lit Century The UnconsoledIn this episode, author J. Robert Lennon joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss Kazuo Ishiguro's novel-in-the-form-of-an-extended-dream, The Unconsoled (1995). Why is this novel called a masterpiece by some (including the participants in this conversation), while being dismissed as rambling and pointless by others?J. Robert Lennon is the author of nine novels, including Familiar, Broken River, and Subdivision, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand, See You in Paradise, and Let Me Think. He lives in Ithaca, New York. His most recent books are available for order and pre-order here. You can find...

2021-03-0952 min

Lit Century Chekhov's Short StoriesIn this episode, hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman talk about the short stories of Anton Chekhov, particularly "Lady With a Little Dog" and "Ward No. 6." What do these stories tell us about the revolutionary sentiment that was about to change not just Russia but the world? The stories embody a radical hopelessness, but also a harsh judgment of that hopelessness. Do we need to continue to hope in order to be good people? And is Chekhov telling us that (partly for that reason) it's not possible for some people to be good? Learn more...

2021-03-0238 min

Lit Century The Cherry Orchard #1In this episode, hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss "The Cherry Orchard" by Anton Chekhov, and particularly what it has to say about slavery, upper-class revolutionary types, and the twentieth-century tendency to turn all relationships into transactions. With added material from guest Isaac Butler, who tells us how Chekhov originally wrote the play for Stanislavsky, and the hijinks that ensued.Isaac Butler is a writer and theater director, co-author (with Dan Kose) of The World Only Spins Forward, and author of the upcoming The Method. Learn more about your ad...

2021-02-2345 min

Lit Century Ten Book Retrospective #2The second part of a discussion between co-hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols about the first ten books discussed on Lit Century. How did suffering come to be seen as cool in the twentieth century? Is this related to the fact that most of the writers discussed had domestic help, and that the perspective of the people doing the cleaning is notably absent from their work? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-02-1624 min

Lit Century Ten Book RestrospectiveCo-hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols look back on the first ten books on Lit Century and what they tell us about the mindset of the 20th century. Why was the 20th century so obsessed with what is normal, and what is transgressive? How did normality become uncool? 20th century literature also tended to fetishize pain, particularly the pain of marginalized people. Why was this, and what does it mean? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-02-0928 min

Lit Century The Designated Mourner (1996)In this episode, writer, actor and director John Cotter joins hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman to discuss Wallace Shawn's 1996 play "The Designated Mourner," about the fate of intellectuals during an authoritarian coup in an unnamed country.John Cotter directed The Designated Mourner in Denver in 2013 & 2014. There's a chapter about one of the performances in his forthcoming memoir,Losing Music, which is due out from Milkweed Editions in 2022. Elisa Gabbert, who played the role of Judy in that production, wrote a book of poems inspired by the experience, L'Heure Bleue, or The Judy Poems, which was published by...

2021-02-0232 min

Lit Century Flowers in the Attic #2In this episode, Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman continue their discussion of V. C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic (1979) and the story behind the story—particularly the ableism Andrews encountered in how she was marketed to her readership, plus her strong opinions on gender that didn't stop her publisher from hiring a male ghostwriter to write under her name after her death in 1986. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-01-2633 min

Lit Century Flowers in the Attic #1In this episode, Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman talk about V. C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic (1979), focusing on how the book is an allegory for the treatment of people with disabilities; Andrews herself had a serious spinal injury and used a wheelchair for most of her life. The hosts also discuss the book's notoriously transgressive subject matter, and how it's been dismissed as trash, largely because its fans were mostly teenaged girls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2021-01-1926 min

Lit Century The Haunting of Hill House #2In this episode, author and editor Benjamin Dreyer joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss the all-time great haunted house novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.Benjamin Dreyer is the author of Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, a sharp, funny guide to style and grammar, which also happens to be a New York Times bestseller. He is also the copy chief at Random House, in which capacity he worked on Let Me Tell You, a collection of previously unpublished work by Shirley Jackson.And for...

2021-01-1235 min

Lit Century The Haunting of Hill House #1In this episode, author and editor Benjamin Dreyer joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss the all-time great haunted house novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.Benjamin Dreyer is the author of Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, a sharp, funny guide to style and grammar, which also happens to be a.New York Times bestseller. He is also the copy chief at Random House, in which capacity he worked on Let Me Tell You, a collection of previously unpublished work by Shirley Jackson. And some...

2021-01-0528 min

Lit Century Blues for Mister Charlie #2Isaac Butler joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss James Baldwin's play "Blues for Mister Charlie" (1964), written to address the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, In this episode we discuss the troubled performance history of the play. We also talk about how Baldwin approached the writing of a play (a genre he generally disliked), and his place in the history of African-American writers grappling with the problem of writing political literature that spoke to both white and Black audiences.Isaac Butler is the author (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent...

2020-12-2925 min

Lit Century Blues for Mister Charlie (1964) #1In this episode, Isaac Butler joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss James' Baldwin's play "Blues for Mister Charlie" (1964). It was written to address the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, but Baldwin alters characters and events in surprising and significant ways, notably—and, at first glance, perversely—focusing the narrative on the moral struggles of a white lawyer. This week we discuss Baldwin's aims in making these choices, and how they come across in 2020.Isaac Butler is the author (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels In America, and also...

2020-12-2229 min

Lit Century ArielIn this episode about Sylvia Plath's 1965 poetry collection Ariel, writer and critic Elisa Gabbert joins the hosts to talk about the evolution of Plath's poetry and how her work turned into a cultural signal for "angry women" (see: Kat Stratford, 10 Things I Hate About You).Content note: Suicide and self-harm are discussed in this episode. Elisa Gabbert is the author of the poetry collections, L'Heure Bleue, The Self Unstable, and The French Exit. Her debut collection of essays, The Word Pretty, was published in 2018. The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one...

2020-12-1538 min

Lit Century Kristin Lavransdatter #2In the second episode about Kristin Lavransdatter, the trilogy of historical novels that won Sigrid Undset the Nobel Prize, the hosts discuss the provincial politics of the early Nobel Prize with Timothy Paulson (whose great-grandfather was another winner), and talk about the novel's idiosyncratic treatment of Catholicism and paganism. You can find some supplementary reading about the book here and here.Timothy Paulson is the writer of several works of nonfiction for younger readers, including New York: the New Amsterdam Colony and Days of Sorrow, Years of Glory, a history of the Nat Turner slave revolt. He...

2020-12-0831 min

Lit Century The Kristin Lavransdatter TrilogyWelcome to Lit Century: 100 Years, 100 Books. Combining literary analysis with an in-depth look at historical context, hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols choose one book for each year of the 20th century, and—along with special guests—will take a deep dive into a hundred years of literature.On this episode, Sandra and Catherine discuss the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2020-12-0139 min

Lit Century Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970)In this episode, co-hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols invite guest Ellen Tarlow to discuss Arnold Lobel's classic Frog and Toad series, beginning with Frog and Toad Are Friends from 1970. Among other subjects, the episode discusses Lobel's preoccupation with solitude, his subtle handling of the minutiae of relationships, and how his work intersects with his personal biography (you can read more background here).Ellen Tarlow has worked in children's publishing for decades, and is the author of several books for young children, most recently Looking for Smile, a picture book exploring the issue of depression for kids 5...

2020-11-2428 min

Lit Century Cheaper by the Dozen #2 with April HolmIn this week's episode, historian April Holm talks with co-hosts Nichols and Newman about Cheaper by the Dozen, a 1948 bestseller whose air of wholesome family fun has gradually shifted it into the children's literature category. Written by Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, it's a comedy memoir of being raised by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, pioneering time-motion study experts who also had twelve children, whom they subjected to a regime of time-motion optimization.Historian April Holm (author of A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era) considers the experience of rereading the...

2020-11-1728 min

Lit Century Cheaper by the Dozen #1 with April HolmIn this week's episode, historian April Holm talks with co-hosts Nichols and Newman about Cheaper by the Dozen, a 1948 bestseller whose air of wholesome family fun has gradually shifted it into the children's literature category. Written by Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, it's a comedy memoir of being raised by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, pioneering time-motion study experts who also had twelve children, whom they subjected to a regime of time-motion optimization.Historian April Holm (author of A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era) considers the experience of rereading the...

2020-11-1023 min

Lit Century Passing #2 with Kaitlyn GreenidgeIn today's episode, Nichols and Newman discuss Nella Larsen's 1929 Harlem Renaissance classic Passing (1929) with novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge, focusing on the history and cultural significance of Black people passing as white, and how this and other issues are treated in the novel. Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman, which was chosen as one of the New York Times Critics top ten books of 2016 and of the forthcoming Libertie. She won the Whiting Award for fiction, and is the features director for Harper's Bazaar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone...

2020-11-0329 min

Lit Century Passing #1 with Megan AbbottIn today's episode, Nichols and Newman discuss Nella Larsen's 1929 Harlem Renaissance classic Passing (1929) with guest Megan Abbott, focusing on its groundbreaking treatment of gender and sexuality. Megan Abbott is the bestselling author of many novels, including Give Me Your Hand, which won the Anthony Award, and the forthcoming The Turnout, (which you can pre-order here). She has also written for TV series The Deuce and was co-creator and co-showrunner of the TV adaptation of her novel Dare Me.And because at Lit Century we love extra historical content, here's an article on novelist and critic Carl van...

2020-10-2729 min

Lit Century Nightwood (1936)Hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss the novel Nightwood, focusing in this episode on the extraordinary life and career of its author, Djuna Barnes, who lived among the most extreme personalities of 1920s Paris and was celebrated as one of Modernism's great writers, but then withdrew into total seclusion for the last 40 years of her life.For some background on this episode, here's Robert Giroux reminiscing about the experience of being Barnes's publisher: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/01/books/the-most-famous-unknown-in-the-world-remembering-djuna-barnes.html. And here's a very rare recording of Barnes herself, reading from her play "...

2020-10-2028 min

Lit Century Nightwood (1936)Hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols discuss the Modernist classic Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, focusing on its treatment of eugenics and LGBT issues.For those who want to know more: here's some extra reading on lesbian legend Joe Carstairs; https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n05/terry-castle/if-everybody-had-a-wadley And here's more on the pioneering work of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/lgbtq-institute-in-germany-was-burned-down-by-nazis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2020-10-1320 min