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108: By Night in Chile

September 10, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

Gothic intensity, psychological acuity and historical horror bleed into one another in a story of literary ambition entangled with fascism. The Sometime Seminar discusses By Night in Chile (2000/English translation 2003), a novella by Roberto Bolaño. Download this episode

104: Little, Big

May 10, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

What happens if you sprinkle late-19th-century-British fairy dust all over 20th-century upstate New York? What do you call it when a multi-generational family saga and a sweeping fate-of-the-world fantasy novel collide with 70s-style quote-unquote postmodernism? How many layers of meta-narrative…

103: Angel

April 9, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

It’s a fine-tuned realist novel…about an author of extravagant romantic novels. It’s middlebrow fiction…but extremely good. It’s Elizabeth Taylor…but not that Elizabeth Taylor. The Sometime Seminar discusses Angel (1957) by Elizabeth Taylor. Download this episode

102: Tristram Shandy

February 1, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

Plans go awry, digressions abound and hobbyhorses gallop in all directions as The Sometime Seminar discusses Laurence Sterne’s seriously unserious comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). Supplemental links: Sigurd Burckhardt, “Tristram Shandy’s Law of Gravity” (ELH, Mar….

101: The Dog of the South

January 8, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

How many digressions can you dangle from a road-novel quest plot? How many varieties of crank and con-artist can you fit in a Buick Special? How much hilarity can you wring from the masterfully rendered voice of an insufferable American…

98: The Female Man

98: The Female Man

September 11, 2017 · by Roger · in Podcast

A withering satire, a feminist utopia, a work of rigorous science fiction and a high-spirited postmodern genre-buster…all for the price of one book! The Sometime Seminar discusses The Female Man (1975) by Joanna Russ. Note on e-texts: All available electronic editions of…

97: The Time Machine

July 24, 2017 · by Roger · in Podcast

How much cosmic imagination and speculative social history can fit in a pulp-adventure framework? Why do science fiction and modernism emerge at the same literary-historical moment? Does the future belong to giant crabs? The Sometime Seminar discusses the work of…

95: The Way We Live Now

June 12, 2017 · by Roger · in Podcast

In a large bag, combine shady financiers, dissolute aristocrats and marriageable heiresses; spice with lower-class stereotypes and brash Americans to taste; add one improbable paragon of old-fashioned virtue; shake vigorously for 800 pages; serve with comic relish, sentimental syrup and…

94: Alien Hearts

May 22, 2017 · by Roger · in Podcast

What happens when the “modern woman” of the late 19th century takes a lead role in one of the oldest plots on the planet? How does social history finds its way into romantic psychology, and vice versa? The Sometime Seminar…

93: The Moonstone

May 3, 2017 · by Roger · in Podcast

Valuables vanish, comic/gothic stereotypes abound, the plot twists and the repressed returns as The Sometime Seminar discusses The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, which is by some accounts the first detective novel. Download this episode

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