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PODCAST

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

Three jerky socialists talk about books you"ve probably heard of. With Megan Tusler, Tristan Schweiger, and Katie K.

arts books

All Episodes

01:30:13

Episode 89: Mrs. Dalloway

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2022/01/16

Modernist grouch, Bloomsbury group member, Freud-to-tea-haver, and Great Novelist Virginia Woolf takes center stage in our discussion of Mrs. Dalloway (1925). We recommend this book if you like books or good writing, and we discuss interwar anxiety, shell shock, gender trouble, and class. This episode also features some discussion of real nerd shit, including Viennese playwright/libertine Arthur Schnitzler and many, many Star Trek opinions. Many. Even for us. We read the new Liveright (Norton)

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01:29:45

Episode 88: The Talented Mr. Ripley

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/12/19

Friend, comrade, fellow podcaster, and University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate Devin Daniels joins us to discuss Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)! Devin is the co-host of You’re Tall but I’m Standing in Front of You, and he’s with us for a fun romp about an ordinary guy who likes maps and trips to Italy and is in no way weird or sinister. He is not a confidence man in any way and definitely doesn’t kill people with ashtrays. We discuss gender construction, surveillance

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01:17:59

Episode 87: Pierre, Part 2

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/12/12

Wrapping up our two-parter on Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852), we talk about religion, the mind bending plot, what Melville was doing with these characters, writing and publishing, and a splash of Transcendentalism. We also consider the eternal question: what are ladies for? Tristan delivers a discourse on sea clocks and why sailors used to just have to go on vibes to know where they were. And stay tuned for the game, when you’ll find out how many elephants your hair can hold up. Farewell, Pierre

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01:28:32

Episode 86: Pierre, Part 1

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/12/05

This week we are bringing you what the people want, and have always wanted, Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852)! Wait, you don’t want to read a book about a guy who breaks up with his mom for his sister? But you haven’t even heard about his dad yet! Technically it’s more of a painting of his dad, but the painting has a mischievous stare that lets you know it’s very into French ladies. And that’s how Pierre got a secret sister. He likes her more than a friend. She likes hiding in her hair and playing

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01:30:13

Episode 85: Caleb Williams

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/11/21

This week, we bring you the OG ACAB novel, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). We very much stan Godwin, awesome radical, proto-anarchist, Mary Wollstonecraft wifeguy AND Mary Shelley daughterguy. Caleb Williams is about a rich dude who really does mean well, but does that matter? Of course not! It’s structure, structure, structure, so he does murder and then hounds his poor servant (Caleb Williams) all over Britain when his servant finds out about it. We talk Jacobinism, 1790s politics, and

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01:24:35

Episode 84: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/11/14

Closing out this year’s Halloween episodes, we have the much-requested Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) by Oscar Wilde. You probably know the story. Magic picture gets old while dude the picture is of stays young, dumb, and, uh, dtf? And smoking lots of opium, for it is late Victorian London, and what else does one do? We talk queerness and sexuality, how aesthetics might actually be liberatory, as well as Wilde’s (very good!) politics and tragic bio. We also dive into Wilde’s literary innovation of

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01:31:22

Episode 83: The Case of George Dedlow

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/11/07

The next installment in our Halloween fright fest comes from the guy who brought us classics like “the rest cure” and a book called Fat and Blood: It’s Silas Weir Mitchell’s 1866 short story “The Case of George Dedlow.” The noted Philadelphia physician gave us this fine tale of a Civil War doctor(ish) who loses all of his limbs in a series of events so unfortunate you won’t believe people thought it was a true story. And you extra won’t believe that once you hear about the ending. We chat about

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01:22:31

Episode 82: Carrie

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/10/31

Friends, it’s our third annual Halloween series! We’re talking about Stephen King’s horror classic Carrie (1974), which is about a teenage girl with telekinesis, which the “scientists” cited in the novel conveniently refer to as “TK.” We discuss King’s uneven canon and its political resonances (lots of liberal stuff, but we obviously deliberately misread.) In typical BRtD manner, we talk about the evils of people who ask, “do you know who my dad is?” For those interested in Brian DePalma’s 1976

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01:28:05

Episode 81: McTeague

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/10/24

Hey comrades! We’re back with more swears, random Frankfurt School references, and messy book takes. In our Season 5 opener, UChicago PhD candidate, friend of the pod, and union organizer Josh Stadtner talks with us about Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), which is about an amateur dentist and his obsession with a concertina. We establish that Frank Norris was a frat douche and social Darwinist (yeesh), and that his having written in the late 19th/early 20th century is still not the slightest excuse

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00:43:51

Episode 80: Season 4 Wrap-Up

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/08/15

We are capping off Season 4 with a tribute to next season’s two-parter, Herman Melville’s sister-boinking polycule classic Pierre. We inhabit the mind of Melville and create a Frankenstein Pierre using some old favorites. All we have to do is find a mom with no chill, a theme for our polycule, a “man-child invincible,” a sister to pine after, a forgettable plot device character, and someone to write this bananas-ass book. Plus Jello. You don’t need to know anything about Pierre to have a good time

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01:26:51

Episode 79: Wieland

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/08/08

This week we are thrilled to bring you Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland. It’s about a guy who gets tricked by a ventriloquist into murdering his family and—we can’t stress this enough—not anybody else. Not another soul was present. There was absolutely no other character involved in this situation. Even to suggest it would be ridiculous. And that’s final. Also, the ventriloquist is a clown who shows up at a stranger’s house demanding milk. There is spontaneous human combustion. Please

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01:17:59

Episode 78: Lucy

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/08/01

After devoting much of this podcast to the pressing topic of Dads Who Are A**holes (and have failsons), here’s our second back-to-back episode on Moms Who Are A**holes (this time with a success daughter). We love Jamaica Kincaid, and we especially love her 1990 novella Lucy about a young West Indian woman who comes to work as an au pair for clueless bourgie white people in the United States. We’re talking race and colonialism, capital, gender and sexuality, and, yes, mothers. We also plunge into the

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01:16:58

Episode 77: No-No Boy

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/07/18

It’s a drizzly day in Seattle in John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), and we’re feeling the mood. No-No Boy is about Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese-American man who refused military service after being drafted from an internment camp and was imprisoned for it. He careens around Seattle and Portland, turning down jobs (always a good instinct) and connecting and disconnecting from his friends and family (including his rather… conspiratorially-minded mother.) We discuss war-era masculinity, citizenship, and

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01:24:27

Episode 76: Silas Marner

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/07/11

The Bible says something somewhere about children who are worth their weight in gold. Well, George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) explores what would happen if we took that proverb super literally! (Or figuratively? Mythically! That’s it. Or is this more of a fable? Wait, it’s a realist novel???) Silas Marner is about a linen weaver in the Midlands countryside whom the village folk assume is Gandalf (natch) and who adopts a daughter who mysteriously appears at his door. But, as with everything Eliot

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01:20:28

Episode 75: The Great Gatsby

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/07/04

If you’re one of those try-hards who read this for the AP Lit test (and we are), you’ll be pleased to see us finally take this one on. This week we have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, which is about extremely non-embarrassing things like throwing enormous parties so your ex-girlfriend will notice you. We talk about Fitzgerald’s accounts of sex and money, gender and sexuality, and Long Island guys who are really transplants so they go particularly hard. We read the Scribner

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01:21:47

Episode 74: Dune

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/06/27

It is time to ride the worm and ask the eternal question “what’s in the box?” This week we have Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic about a future where drugs have replaced computers, the nuns are magic and scary, money is worm [redacted], and the East India Company rules space. We chat about this book’s politics, and we get into religion, time, and environmentalism. You simply must try the spice. Everything will make sense. Even the terrifying toddlers in grim reaper robes. Fear is the mind

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01:22:45

Episode 73: The Man of Feeling

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/06/20

If you like feckless boobs who are also giant crysacks (Megan does not), do we have a book for you! Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is a classic sentimental novel with all the trimmings -- a useless protagonist who thinks crying is hot and who can’t stop getting conned by every sharp, coxcomb, and failson in London. It’s a delightfully ridiculous book, one we suspect is very much in on the joke, and we talk discourses of feeling, sentimental critiques of empire and capital, and the

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01:23:59

Episode 72: Lolita, Part 2

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/06/13

We close up our discussion of Lolita and try not to reflect too much on what has brought us to this point. We consider what sort of people would read this as a morality play, and what in the actual eff is wrong with them (everything). We talk about the road novel as a genre, the doppelgänger (doing a Freud while simultaneously hating the Good Doctor), what reading “with” a character is like, and why this book makes it so difficult not to talk about word objects as though they’re “people.” Also,

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01:16:09

Episode 71: Lolita, Part 1

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/06/06

Our Season Four two-parter is on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and there’s some truly gruesome material here. If you’ve ever wondered where a Vulgar Marxist and an As*hole with Fussy Modernist Aesthetics might diverge in opinion, it’s over this one. We talk about noveliness, comedy, being a reader (bad and good), and the book’s review genealogy. We roll our eyes over blunt commentary (Blanche Schwartzman, really) and nonstop Edgar Allen Poe references. We read the Alfred Appel, Jr. Annotated

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01:26:23

Episode 70: Black No More

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left... ·

2021/05/30

Friend of the pod, cultural critic, and Northwestern University professor of African American literature Lauren Michele Jackson joins us for our discussion of George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931). If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to read a wacky-ass novel written by a socialist-turned-right-wing nut, have we got the one for you. Schuyler’s novel takes up the story of what might happen if there were a machine that turned black people white (extra-white, in fact) and how various social and

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