Upcoming topics
Suggestions and possible future topics
We invite your ideas! Leave a comment below.
- In Parenthesis
- “prestige television”
- The X-Files and auteurism
- modernist and contemporary poets
- Eliot, Pound, Moore, Oppen
- Jack Spicer
- 19c literature/philosophy/aesthetics
- one or more Schlegels
- one or more Shelleys
- Melville: travel writing and/or poetry
- The Confidence-Man
- Schelling, Ages of the World (w/ Žižek introduction)
- William Morris
- Walter Pater
- John Ruskin
- Strachey, Eminent Victorians
- fantasy literature
- Moorcock
- Howard (Conan stories)
- Delany
- Le Guin
- Parker (Engineer trilogy)
- Jemisin (Inheritance trilogy)
- science fiction
- Philip K. Dick – VALIS
- horror fiction
- contemporary/20th Century theory, philosophy, aesthetics
- Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster? Future of the Image/writings on film?
- Nancy
- Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic
- Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope
- Gramsci
- Althusser
- Derrida
- Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life
- comics/graphic novels
- Building Stories
- Asterios Polyp
- film
- Godard
- Hitchcock
- Espriu, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth
- Shklovsky, Bowstring
- Xu Bing, Book from the Sky/Book from the Ground
- Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud
- Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?
- Thomas Browne (Urn Burial?)
- W.G. Sebald
- Bolaño
- Charles Portis
- John Barth
- Rafael Alberti, Concerning the Angels
(NB: this page should be viewed as impermanent; both the page and the comments may change as we update and change our plans, but nonetheless, all suggestions are very welcome!)
Suggestions for a future topic:
A Thomas Bernhard novel such as Old Masters, The Loser, Correction, Woodcutters or Extinction.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
What serendipitous timing: I was just reading an excerpt from Bernhard’s “Montaigne” in Harper’s and thinking the same thing! Thanks for the ideas.
Would you consider devoting a show to Edmond Jabes’ Book of Questions or his Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion?
Definitely. I don’t know Jabès’s work well but I’ve been wanting to read more of it.
I’d love a William Gass and/or John Barth episode
So would we, I suspect! Thanks for the suggestion, and let us know if you have specific books in mind — I guess my defaults would probably be Omensetter’s Luck for Gass and The Sot-Weed Factor, which I’ve been wanting to read for a long time, for Barth.
I would say Omensetter’s Luck for Gass, and Giles Goat-Boy for Barth. I love Sot-Weed Factor, but in my mind GG-B is his masterpiece, & the high point of that kind of bawdy, 60s metafiction.
How about the criminally neglected poetry of alfred starr hamilton? The song cave have printed a collection called “a dark dreambox of another kind”.
Great suggestion, thanks — I’m unfamiliar with him but a quick search makes him seem right up our alley. We’ll take a look for sure.
Just discovered this podcast, really like it. Do Matthew Stover or Celine.
Thanks for listening! I fear both of those might violate our inclination not to do too much hate-reading, but we’ve been thinking about Celine for a while, maybe we’ll work him in sometime.
looking to delve into this podcast very soon! very excited about the gass and lispector episodes.
a few humble suggestions:
• wm. gaddis’s J R
• joanna russ’s ON STRIKE AGAINST GOD or THE FEMALE MAN or HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN’S WRITING
• musil’s THE CONFUSIONS OF YOUNG TORLESS (pretend there’s an umlaut)
• sergio de la pava’s A NAKED SINGULARITY
• machado de assis’s EPITAPH OF A SMALL WINNER
All great suggestions! (Although I sort of doubt we’ll double up on Machado…)
-AI: Artificial Intelligence (the movie)
-Hou Hsiao-Hsien
-Jean Eustache
-John Ford
-Ernst Robert Curtius (or early 20th century philology in general)
-Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce or Oscar Wilde
-The Auroras of Autumn
-Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone
Some terrific ideas in there! Thanks for the suggestions.
-Doris Lessing
-Lydia Davis
-Darconville’s Cat, Alexander Theroux
-Chris Marker, especially one of the political ones like Grin Without a Cat
This list could nearly be all cat-themed. Oh, and David Markson.
We’re never going to run out of ideas at this point! Lessing is a passion of mine whom I’ve been expecting to get around to at some point; Marker too has been in the back of my head for a while already. Thanks.
A Confederacy of Dunces, of course.
Thank you for the episodes so far- they’ve really lifted me out of a reading rut (of my own making)
My wishlist of discussion would be-
• anything written by José Saramago
• Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘The Wake’
• Russell Hoban’s ‘Riddley Walker’
• anything you think that covers the irony, authorial voice, language, etc. that my wishlist suggests
Thanks! I appreciate the reminder about the Kingsnorth book, especially — it’d somehow fallen off my mental to-read list.
would love a Gertrude Stein show,
especially Ida, imo,
or the late Barthelme, also
Great ideas. Do let me know if there’s a Barthelme you’d recommend in particular, I don’t know all his work that well.
Two suggestions:
1) Wide Sargasso Sea
2) Maldoror
Great ideas too. I’m a bit cool on the Rhys book but I haven’t read it in a long time.
Lol, me too. I was somewhat hoping you guys could convince me to like WSS more. That and I feel like I don’t really understand what it’s up to. But it’s so famous I figured this was my fault.
i’d say, for Barthelme, “City Life” or “Sadness” i like a lot; first novel “Snow White” is maybe unsubtle but fun, i think
Have now enjoyed 3.9% of your productions out of the 3.9% I have sampled. Subjective facts don’t care about your feelings, but apparently they like you just fine anyway.
I have a bunch of suggestions that honestly are more “talk about some of my favorite books” than necessarily good ideas. But do let me try to sell you on just this one book as a good episode topic:
The Book of Fantasy, the (famous?) anthology selected by Borges, Casares & Ocampo. Not only for the high quality of the mix of obscure and famous tales and authors, but because I think you two could do a lot with talking about some of the implicit ideas about Fantasy (or ‘the fantastic’) the selections suggest.
That’s a good idea! We’re probably taking a break from fantasy-ish topics for a little while after our next few, but I’ll try to keep it in mind for later.
I’ve only recently discovered the podcast, so firstly thank you for the excellent discussions. I still have many to enjoy!
I see the next episode will be on Dunsany, so perhaps these suggestions are untimely but I’d love for you to cover some M. R. James, or Robert Aickman. Both fit into your troublesome, reactionary, weird fiction author lineage (Aickman a lot more interestingly than James in my opinion). Aickman, I think, is something different, however, in that he’s actually a good prose stylist!
Aside from that I’d be delighted to hear you discuss Sebald (particularly The Rings of Saturn) and Thomas Browne from the list above!
Thanks for listening — and for the good suggestions!
I’d like you to select your favourite Iain M. Banks novel and discuss it.
You may regret asking us to do this, but we’ll think about it!
Love the podcast. One suggestion: Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. I feel like it fits in the other minor modernist texts and gothic-tinged prose works that you’ve discussed on the show.