Future Topics

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!)

20 Responses

  1. Perry DeLay · April 20, 2016 at 06:01:02 · →

    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

    1. Roger · April 20, 2016 at 13:55:45 · →

      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.

  2. Perry · August 31, 2016 at 07:54:42 · →

    Would you consider devoting a show to Edmond Jabes’ Book of Questions or his Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion?

    1. Roger · August 31, 2016 at 21:45:49 · →

      Definitely. I don’t know Jabès’s work well but I’ve been wanting to read more of it.

  3. adam · September 8, 2016 at 05:53:36 · →

    I’d love a William Gass and/or John Barth episode

    1. Roger · September 8, 2016 at 13:55:45 · →

      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.

  4. Adam · September 24, 2016 at 09:03:05 · →

    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.

  5. delf · March 21, 2017 at 09:30:56 · →

    How about the criminally neglected poetry of alfred starr hamilton? The song cave have printed a collection called “a dark dreambox of another kind”.

    1. Roger · March 21, 2017 at 10:19:46 · →

      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.

  6. Adam · June 9, 2017 at 19:35:09 · →

    Just discovered this podcast, really like it. Do Matthew Stover or Celine.

    1. Roger · June 10, 2017 at 12:52:47 · →

      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.

  7. Z · June 20, 2017 at 10:10:50 · →

    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

    1. Roger · June 20, 2017 at 10:28:49 · →

      All great suggestions! (Although I sort of doubt we’ll double up on Machado…)

  8. JD · July 10, 2017 at 16:28:34 · →

    -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

    1. Roger · July 10, 2017 at 17:09:10 · →

      Some terrific ideas in there! Thanks for the suggestions.

  9. C. · July 12, 2017 at 22:11:41 · →

    -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.

    1. Roger · July 13, 2017 at 10:27:15 · →

      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.

  10. Casey · July 28, 2017 at 22:06:36 · →

    A Confederacy of Dunces, of course.

  11. D · August 4, 2017 at 15:48:54 · →

    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

    1. Roger · August 4, 2017 at 16:42:32 · →

      Thanks! I appreciate the reminder about the Kingsnorth book, especially — it’d somehow fallen off my mental to-read list.

Leave a Reply