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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

01:23:34

Episode 29: The Lottery

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

2020/03/01

Megan is back to lead our discussion of Shirley Jackson’s most famous work, “The Lottery” (1948), and hoo boy, do we talk about how mad the readers were when this was published. The New Yorker famously lost like a billion subscriptions and got a grazillion angry letters from their readership of middlebrow prudes, who wondered, “is it based on reality? Do these practices still continue in back-country England, the human sacrifice for the rich harvest? It’s a frightening thought.” Even though Shirley

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01:21:23

Episode 28: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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

2020/02/23

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) allows us to take up a crucial question -- is it a ship or a boat? Well, it’s actually a raft, on a river, but even Tristan doesn’t hold that against this blistering satire of Antebellum American society. We talk about the novel’s fraught racial politics, its scathing critiques of the plantation class, and its interesting (and troubling) commentary on nineteenth-century constructions of childhood. We also talk about the Mississippi River and how

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01:15:25

Episode 27: Fantomina

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

2020/02/16

Eliza Haywood doesn’t get read much today outside of eighteenth-century lit classes, which is a shame because she’s 1) as important to the English novel as Defoe or Fielding and 2) great and weird in all all the right ways. We’re discussing Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725), a novella all about feminine desire and agency, subjecthood, and Enlightenment discourses of “identity.” (That is, how do you know that you’re a distinct, legible person in the world? Maybe you don’t! Maybe you change your

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01:24:55

Episode 26: The Hound of the Baskervilles

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

2020/02/09

Calling all gumshoes! Get ready to hear how Sherlock Holmes cracks the case of a magical glow-in-the-dark dog who eats aristocrat failsons in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901/1902)! He ate Sir Charles Baskerville, and if Sherlock and Watson don’t help him, his boring nephew who can’t keep track of his shoes might be next!!! We talk righteous supernatural canines, unsettling butterfly-net-wielding neighbors, sexy butlers, racist boneheads, and the greatest mystery of all: can Tristan pass the CIA

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01:18:57

Episode 25: Great Expectations

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

2020/02/02

As previously noted on the classic Better Read than Dead Christmas Carol show, Katie and Tristan are both fans of Charles Dickens. So needless to say, we had, uh, great expectations about this episode! Before you delete us for that horrible dad pun (thanks, Tristan), may we just point out that the phrase “great expectations” appears about 400 million times in Great Expectations (1861). Which actually makes a lot of sense. This novel is all about contingencies, and the unseen and often unknowable

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01:24:17

Episode 24: The Time Machine

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

2020/01/26

In 1985, Doc Brown and Marty McFly traveled into the distant future of 2015, where we all had flying cars and hoverboards, wore our pockets inside out, and Pepsi cost $50. But Doc Brown and Marty were chumps, because real time travelers don’t mess with a few decades. Real time travelers say, “hey, I wonder what the year 802,701 is like” -- and hoooo boy is it f*cked. This week, we’re bringing you H. G. Wells’s 1895 novella, The Time Machine. We talk about the radical potentials of sci-fi and other

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01:28:28

Episode 23: I, Claudius

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

2020/01/19

We here at Better Read than Dead do not care for fascists. So when we had the chance to kick off our 2020 season with an historical novel that dunks on fascists and their fascist f*ckery, well, let’s just say you didn’t need to ask us twice. Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934) is about a lot of things. The early Roman Empire, gender, political intrigue (including powerful grandmas who poison people -- we didn’t know that was one of our favorite character types, but we do now, and not just because we

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01:25:23

Episode 22: A Christmas Carol

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

2019/12/01

Katie says, “bah humbug,” but Tristan says, “oi guv, Bob’s your uncle an’ bless us all, every one” to this most beloved of Victorian Christmas kitsch. We’re diving into Charles Dickens this week with A Christmas Carol (1843) and all kinds of lighthearted topics for the holidays -- like child labor, poverty under industrial capital, killer smog, and reactionary political economy (we want to go on the record as being very much against all those things). We do some admirable BOTHSIDES analysis of

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01:25:02

Episode 21: Hamlet

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

2019/11/24

Our apologies to Stephen Dedalus. Previously, we referred to him as King F*ckboy, but that’s grossly unfair to both Stephen and perhaps literature’s Kingest F*ckboy of them all -- Hamlet. This week, we discuss William Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1599? 1602? no one is sure, but it’s something like that) in all its beautiful, bonkers glory. We have many pressing questions. Like, why is this so long? (Four hours, at least -- Billy S needed an editor.) How should we read its

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01:26:04

Episode 20: Ulysses, Part 2

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

2019/11/17

Welp, friends, we made it through all eleventy billion pages of Ulysses and are the better for it. (Better Read than Dead 1, Mayor Pete 0.) And we all agree that the second half of the book is delightful. From Chapter 15 (“Circe”), a 150-page play about… kink? the nation? gender? all of that? to Chapter 17’s catechism, wherein Bloom and Dedalus pee together in true Hegelian mutual recognition, to Chapter 18 (“Penelope”), where we finally get to spend some time in Molly Bloom’s head (best character

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01:26:07

Episode 19: Ulysses, Part 1

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

2019/11/10

After these next two episodes, will Megan manage to convince Katie and Tristan that our novel in question is hysterically funny and good indeed, or will we remain a Pod Divided? We know you jerks have just been up nights waiting for this one--we’ll be spending two episodes tackling James Joyce’s big-ass 1918 or 1922 novel Ulysses. We talk about form and structure, poo jokes, Irish history, day drinking, the little magazine, and King F*ckboy Stephen Dedalus. We propose that James Joyce would almost

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01:19:00

Episode 18: The Castle of Otranto

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

2019/11/03

Was Horace Walpole a second-grader when he wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764)? “And then a big helmet squished the guy, and then grandpa walked out of the painting, and then the statue had a nosebleed, and there were boogers and and and.” Nope! He was the 40-something failson of Britain’s first prime minister! (God, who knew failsons would be such a theme of the pod -- not us.) It’s the “first Gothic novel” in English this week, and we’re talking epistemology, gender, the nation, and why this book

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01:24:32

Episode 17: Rosemary's Baby

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

2019/10/27

We’re back to one of our usual themes this week--creepy babies! We take on Ira Levin’s 1967 genre novel Rosemary’s Baby, which asks if pregnancy, neighbors, or husbands are the most creepy (they’re all creepy AF.) The DEVIL HIMSELF shows up in the form of a tin whistle in this episode, and there is much discussion of (maybe poison) smoothies, the terror domestic, and HIPAA regulations (turns out they’re useful). We read the Pegasus Books edition, with an introduction by Otto Penzler. We mention

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01:24:47

Episode 16: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

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

2019/10/20

There are few things Better Read than Dead enjoys more than owning dipsh*ts/watching dipsh*ts get owned, which is why we were so psyched to read Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). Irving’s spooky (no, hilarious) short story is about a tall dipsh*t who gets owned by a Headless Horseman. Or a pumpkin? Or, really, just the Dutch version of Gaston. Also, did you know Irving was the OG flat-earther?? He sure was! Chemtrails -- google it, folks. We’re talking genre, colonial

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01:26:44

Episode 15: Little Women

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

2019/10/13

Put your crying pants on, because it’s time for Little Women (1868)! We talk about why Jo is so cool, whether it’s bad to steal a lady’s glove so you can sniff it in private (it is), and whether Beth—the shy sister who suffers from noted 19th-century ailment “paleness”—is actually the biggest psycho of them all. We get deep into how Megan lost her soul and ability to feel, as she found herself unmoved by the many touching and ennobling scenes in this book. We also discuss class (boy are they

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01:27:00

Episode 14: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

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

2019/10/06

We’re such goths (apparently), we didn’t even realize we were doing a Halloween month when we recorded this episode on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Stevenson’s novella is about an insufferable prick who invents a potion that turns him into a tiny psychopath -- and then he gets stuck like that. What did your (deranged, race-sciencey) grandmother tell you about the dangers of making a face of THE CRIMINAL TYPE? Lots of great discussion on Victorian anxieties

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01:15:04

Episode 13: Heart of Darkness

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

2019/09/29

We follow one of literature’s least-impressive boats up the Belgian Congo in our discussion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). It’s yet another magazine novella, this time about how our “hero” Charles Marlow journeys up the Congo seeing some truly horrifying effects of European colonialism, and how he encounters the ivory trader and Big Thoughts Guy Kurtz. We talk about empire, space, doubling, gender, and Marlon Brando. We read the Norton Critical Edition edited by Paul B. Armstrong

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01:17:04

Episode 12: The Fall of the House of Usher

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

2019/09/22

If you're trying to decide whether to reconnect with your creepy old childhood friend who lives in a fungus covered mansion deep in the woods with a secret twin sister, this episode is for you!* We're talking about “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is goth icon Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story about twincest. We dig into the uncanny, phrenology, family trees, and olde timey doctoring...and while we were digging we just may have found someone buried alive under these many layers of

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01:20:58

Episode 11: Gulliver's Travels

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

2019/09/15

Gulliver’s Travels (1726) may indeed be the “goofiest book that was ever written,” which is why it’s so fun to talk about! We get into all the nitty-gritty of Jonathan Swift’s scathing, sprawling, scatalogical satire -- its historical contexts, its politics that range from pretty good (empire is bad!) to terrible (it thinks women’s bodies are gross), and how its horses seem like they’re probably murderous eugenicists. Also, just FYI for a certain kind of tankie -- satire need not be some

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01:16:14

Episode 10: The Awakening

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

2019/09/08

This week we read Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening (1899). Chopin’s short work is about a tall lady who doesn’t want to listen to her husband (hetereosexuality! the best!), but she also doesn’t really want to do anything else either. We talk about bourgeois malaise, women’s suicide, atmospherics, and being a lady f*ckboy. We read the Norton edition, edited by Margo Culley. While she doesn’t directly mention Chopin, we recommend Jacqueline Rose’s On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the

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