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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

01:11:36

Episode 69: Of One Blood

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

2021/05/23

Got a sister? Are you SURE you don’t have a sister? Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902-1903) explores this important question along with mesmerism, race, the legacy of American slavery, colonialism and imperialism in Africa, and--somehow--much more. In this episode we simply marvel at the adventures of our protagonist, doctor, anti-colonialist Indiana Jones, enemy of big cats, and king of the ancient Ethopian secret city of Telassar. This novel blew our minds, knocked our socks off, while keeping

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01:22:59

Episode 68: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

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

2021/05/16

Are you on the bus or off it, man? The book commies, dear listener, are decidedly off it. Or rather, we’re punching, clawing, screaming, and fighting our way out of this goddamn thing, past balls-trippin’ Ken Kesey, speed-addled Neal Cassady, the rest of the Merry Pranksters, and the 400+ freaking pages Tom Wolfe decided to write about them. It’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) this week, and we’re wrapping up our convo on the New Journalism and talking the counterculture’s reactionary side,

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01:33:38

Episode 67: The Journalist and the Murderer

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

2021/05/09

Friend of the pod Sebastian Stockman joins us for the second episode in our three-part series on The New Journalism. Sub is a teaching professor in English at Northeastern University, and a journalist and essayist. We discuss Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), a book about another book -- Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision, for which the subject (convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald) sued McGinniss for fraud. We take up the whole idea of the “nonfiction novel,” Malcolm’s interest in

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01:24:17

Episode 66: The White Album

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

2021/05/02

DID YOU MISS US? Reading with Reds returns for Season Four, and we’re talking about Joan Didion’s The White Album as the first of a three-part series on The New Journalism. We discuss Didion’s recording and perception of the 1960s, non-fiction writing and style, reactionary politics, and why you have to take a bottle of bourbon on all your travels. Remember to email us with suggestions for institutions that we should for real abolish, like for real for real. We read the Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux

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00:51:57

Episode 65: Season 3 Wrap-Up

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

2021/01/17

Join us as we revisit some of our favorite fail-lords of the season and conduct a highly scientific and professional grading meeting! We discuss the dastardly deeds of professors and shrubbery as we take a look back at Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) to determine final grades for “Evil STEM 207.” Then we get into Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) to find out whether "blood dad" or "tall nephew" is at the top of the fail-class in “Spooky Real Estate 305.” We

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01:27:21

Episode 64: Absalom, Absalom!

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

2021/01/10

If you’ve been listening to Better Read for a bit, you’re probably aware that Megan’s favorite genre of novel is "brother hearts sister but in a distressing sex way." In that vein, we present one of the absolute classics of the genre, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, which is 300 pages but feels longer. A lot longer. The novel features an upwardly-downwardly mobile Scots-Irish bigamist and his children, both “legitimate” and “illegitimate,” and the problem of racial panic in the 19th-century

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01:19:07

Episode 63: The Wild Irish Girl

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

2021/01/03

In keeping with Better Read than Dead’s mission of bringing you literature’s greatest failsons -- and Tristan’s favorite genre of novel, “feckless boob goes on a trip” -- may we present Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and its hero, Horatio M. (We assume he just forgot the rest of his last name.) Horatio is an English aristocrat whose dad exiles him to Ireland in penance for his failsonery, but he soon becomes quite horny for both a harp-playing Irish princess and for Ireland itself,

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01:16:40

Episode 62: A Christmas Memory

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

2020/12/27

If you need some salty tears in your fruitcake, have we got the one for you. We’re talking about Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” originally published in Mademoiselle in 1956. It’s his semi-autobiographical short story about a young boy’s friendship with his way-older cousin in 1930s Alabama and their alienation from the rest of the adults in the family, something that most of us can relate to. We talk about writing childhood, outsiderness, and the troubles with reading autobiography. We read

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01:14:46

Episode 61: A Child's Christmas in Wales

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

2020/12/20

Ho ho ho! Or in Welsh, cywnwn cywnwn cywnwn! (Probably. Or definitely not, we don’t speak Welsh). For the first of two Christmas episodes this year, we’re getting all poetic-like -- or rather, prose fiction that follows TONS of poetic conventions -- with Dylan Thomas’s 1952 A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Whether you love Christmas or hate it, this is a beautiful and hilarious piece, and a lot more complex than its surface nostalgia would indicate. We talk mythic vs. historical time, the nation,

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01:19:31

Episode 60: The Screwtape Letters

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

2020/12/13

This week we descend into the bowels of hell to bring you C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (1942), a Christian epistolary novel about what happens when your demon uncle is also your boss and you’re both very concerned with meeting the Dark Lord’s soul quota for professional reasons. We talk about religion, Anglicanism, Lewis’s politics (confusing!), and Eton’s satellite campus in the underworld. We also discuss the two surest paths to damnation: saying “after you, my dear” too much and complaining

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01:21:00

Episode 59: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

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

2020/12/06

Have you ever wondered how to take some pointless old rich men for a ride? Have you ever wanted to learn to do close-up magic with a diamond tiara? Join us for a discussion of Anita Loos’s 1924 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and hear all about diamonds, silly hats, funny brunette best friends, and remarkably dumb aristocrats. We talk about money, sexuality, and gender, and living the dream of having a rich husband and a fun boyfriend at the same time. We also ponder the timeless question, “what do

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01:24:37

Episode 58: Rappaccini's Daughter

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

2020/11/29

Under no circumstances should you stop and smell the flowers. We learned this lesson and had many more plant-based epiphanies chatting about Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1844 short story, “Rappaccini's Daughter.” This tale is set in a sinister garden in Padua, Italy, and we find out some similarly sinister facts about Megan's loving embrace of shrubs. We chat about science and medicine in the olden days, the gothic, monks who probably should have just peed their pants, scary Catholics, and (most

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01:27:21

Episode 57: A Passage to India

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

2020/11/22

The book commies get into one of our favorite topics this week -- liberal imperialism (well, *dunking on* liberal imperialism is one of our favorite topics, because it is very, very bad). We’re conflicted about E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), a novel with some great writing (you know, Forster) that tries to think seriously about empire’s many incoherences and oppressive structures… but that also tends to reproduce those incoherences and structures. And that does plenty of its own

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01:25:40

Episode 56: A Clockwork Orange

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

2020/11/15

Wrench those eyeballs wide open for our discussion of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), a novel about a teenage droog and his rehabilitation by a dystopian police state. We have a very hard time with the politics of this one, given that they’re wildly incoherent, but we discuss the language games, ultraviolence, the police state, and the conditions of Kids These Days. We get into the “angry young man” genre and how this novel does a pretty shitty job with what is actually a cool moment in

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01:31:41

Episode 55: Joseph Andrews

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

2020/11/08

Friend of the pod David Diamond visits us to talk about Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and join in Tristan and Katie’s nefarious plot to turn Megan into an eighteenth-centuryist. David is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, a scholar of religion and literature, and a Fielding expert. We discuss the relationship between Calvinist thought and novelistic character, how Joseph Andrews has pretty good class AND gender politics (especially for the time),

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01:25:49

Episode 54: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

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

2020/11/01

We conclude our 2020 Halloween spectacular with the scariest one yet, Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” That’s right, we read an EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SERMON voluntarily. If that’s not chilling enough, to wrap things up we take a very special journey to H-E-double hockey sticks ourselves. We get into Calvinist theology, Enlightenment thought, demon babies, the First Great Awakening and Edwards’s status as a skinny legend—and the surprising location where you can

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01:21:30

Episode 53: The Haunting of Hill House

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

2020/10/25

We continue Halloween 2020 with Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House! We talk about Women Who Are A Problem, sexuality, what the f*ck a pompous spiritualist is doing just showing up for no reason, space and home, and the haunted house genre. Basically, everybody who wrote a horror novel in the second half of the 20th century loves the shit out of this novel, so thanks Shirley Jackson, now we have Ira Levin who also rules. For more on the haunted house, we recommend William

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01:18:20

Episode 52: The Monkey's Paw

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

2020/10/18

Welcome to our second annual Halloween spooktacular! We begin our frightfest with W. W. Jacobs’s 1902 short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” We talk about the historical and political implications of this story, from the racist legacy of imperialism and the insurance industry to hazardous labor conditions and mortgages. On a lighter note, we get into the overvaluation of Herberts and learn a very important lesson: the only thing scarier than wishing on a cursed monkey's paw is what bonobos do with

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01:23:37

Episode 51: The Call of the Wild

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

2020/10/11

We are talking about Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), a book about a dog named Buck, his manly adventures on the frontier, and his tragic love affair with a guy named John Thornton whose hand he likes to chew on. Because he is a dog. Fortunately, that didn’t stop Jack London from narrating this tale entirely from Buck's point of view! We talk about how violent, erotic, and racist this novel is and then engage in some sport of our own to determine who will be crowned the Big Dog of the

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01:32:46

Episode 50: Tristram Shandy, Part 2

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

2020/10/04

Comrades! It’s our 50th episode!! And what better way to celebrate than wrapping up our discussion of one of the raddest books of all time, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67)? Fear not, we are *far* from exhausting the staggering number of dick jokes you find in these spry nine volumes. But we also talk about the politics and philosophy behind the sentimental novel, how Sterne simultaneously loved that genre and thought it was a prime target for satire,

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