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 with this unholy creation, but we hope you want to by the end of the episode. While you’re listening, we suggest you find a recipe for Pretzel Salad, google some pictures of the Phillie Phanatic, and scroll through Joe Gorga’s instagram (@joeygorga) for some nuggets of New Jersey wisdom. You won’t regret any of it. As you may have guessed, this is our last episode of the season. We'll be back with you in the fall, comrades! Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

Episode 80: Season 4 Wrap-Up

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 read this book. We talked about the gothic, the terrifying continent of Europe, and religion and madness. And we have our own moment of quasi-religious epiphany: this book is early American It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We read the Norton Critical Edition edited by Bryan Waterman, which includes Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. For more on Wieland, ventriloquism, and so much more, we recommend Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. It’s amazing. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 79: Wieland

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 pressing question: why do rich white sh*theads love claiming to be “Indian” so much? We read the Ferrar, Straus and Giroux edition. There are two pieces of scholarship we talk about on the show which we highly recommend. For how Lucy explores outsider-ness as a way of disrupting white, bourgeois structures, check out Jennifer J. Nichols’s “‘Poor Visitor’: Mobility as/of Voice in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy” in MELUS. And for more on Lucy’s sexual adventures as strategies of resistance and becoming, see Gary E. Holcomb’s “Travels of a Transnational Slut: Sexual Migration in Kincaid’s Lucy” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 78: Lucy

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 racialization. We get into the absolutely wild publication history of this novel, which was (re)found, (re)published, and then published without the estate’s permission. We read the University of Washington Press edition with forward by Ruth Ozeki, introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada, and afterward by Frank Chin. We recommend King-Kok Cheung’s Articulate Silences as a foundational work in Asian-American literary studies, and Jeffrey Santa Ana’s Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion for a recent study of Asian-American literature/affect studies. *Note to our listeners -- Katie is off this episode. She’ll be back next week. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 77: No-No Boy

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 wrote, it’s also about, uh, everything -- industrialization, capital, parentage, class, religion and modernity, epistemology, and much much more. We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Juliette Atkinson. For an excellent discussion of how Silas Marner critiques materialist/financial forms of value, see Mary Poovey’s influential Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. And for a landmark study of how the English novel was shaped by -- and critiqued -- the emergence of the capitalist market, as always, we recommend Deidre Shauna Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. *Note to our listeners -- Megan is off this episode. She’ll be back next week. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 76: Silas Marner

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 edition with introduction by Jesmyn Ward. For a wild ride, read Gore Vidal’s “Scott’s Case,” published in the May 1 1980 issue of The New York Review of Books, as it contains some truly wacky bon mots, like “All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars,” which… probably not? Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 75: The Great Gatsby

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 killer. We read the Penguin edition with an afterword by Brian Herbert. Check out Jordan S. Carroll’s excellent piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books “Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s Dune,” which we read excerpts from in this episode. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 74: Dune

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 funniest sorry sorry we meant saddest death scene in all of eighteenth-century literature. We read the Oxford edition edited by Brian Vickers with notes and introduction by Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave. There’s a ton of scholarship on sentiment and the related "cult of sensibility," and we highly recommend both Janet Todd’s Sensibility: An Introduction and John Mullan’s Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 73: The Man of Feeling

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, Tristan is still feeling pretty bolshy, and we indulge in a fun round of “you might be a Russian novelist if.” We read the Alfred Appel, Jr. Annotated Lolita published by Vintage. As before, we’re kinda not into Nabokov criticism, so either go watch the Kubrick movie (really good! veeeeerrrry different) and have a Kubrick-fest, or read some of Nabokov’s other books—Ada if you’re a word pervert, The Defense if you’re a chess pervert, or Pnin if you’re an academic and therefore every kind of pervert. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 72: Lolita, Part 2

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 Lolita (more on the annotations next week, yowza) published by Vintage. The scholarly engagements with this book are pretty terrible, so we recommend browsing around contemporaneous reviews (The National Review said, “[Nabokov] excoriates the materialist monstrosities of our civilization—from progressive education to motel architecture”) but maybe also check out this listicle of Lolita covers: https://lithub.com/the-60-best-and-worst-international-covers-of-lolita/ ? Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 71: Lolita, Part 1

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 political actors would handle it. Spoiler: the KKK doesn’t handle it great. We discuss the terms/objects of satire and whether Schuyler was mostly just being a dick when he wrote this, the notion of the “grift” or confidence scheme, and how the novel puts pressure on “race” as a series of concepts. We read the Penguin edition with an introduction by Danzy Senna. For more context on Schuyler and his contentious relationship with other black writers of the 1920s and ‘30s, you can read Schuyler’s essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” and Langston Hughes’s response, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” And, of course, we highly recommend Lauren’s White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue… and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation, published by Beacon Press. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Lauren on Twitter @proseb4bros, Tristan @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 70: Black No More

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 our pants secured in an upright position. Because you never know who your sister might be. We read the edition from The Givens Collection with an introduction by Deborah E. McDowell. For more on Hopkins’s amazing work check out Dana Luciano’s “Passing Shadows: Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of one Blood” in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian’s Loss: the Politics of Mourning (2002). And if you’d like to learn more about the wild world of mesmerism, we recommend Emily Ogden’s Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (2018). Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 69: Of One Blood

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, how saying “f*ck it” actually isn’t a politic, man, and the psychology of going through one’s professional life wearing an all-white three-piece suit. We read the Picador USA edition. Wolfe thought he basically invented New Journalism, and he did coin the term in the 1973 anthology called The New Journalism. You can check that out for more from Wolfe and our old pals Didion, Capote, McGinniss, and other people we might get around to talking about on the show someday. If you don’t want to read Acid Test, or at least want a skimming aid, just watch Magic Trip, the 2011 (heavily edited) release of the film from the Pranksters’ 1964 escapades. Cassady is very high. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 68: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

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 psychoanalysis as a lens for thinking about the journalist-subject relationship, and the ethics of writing about real people. Tristan also gets to dunk on William F Buckley (his favorite thing), and Sub shares some tips on good work habits via Tom Wolfe -- we’ll get to him next week. We read the Vintage edition. For more Malcolm, you can read In the Freud Archives, which Sub talks about on the show. That book spawned its own famous lawsuit, an experience Malcolm discusses in The Journalist and the Murderer and which, in part, frames her discussion of the McGinniss case. You should also check out Sub’s newsletter! You can find it -- and subscribe! -- here: https://sebastianstockman.substack.com. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Sub on Twitter @substockman, Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Episode 67: The Journalist and the Murderer

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 edition. We recommend Sulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex because Didion hates it and it deserves to be revisited. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus. And next week, journalist Sebastian Stockman joins us to talk about The Journalist and the Murderer, so definitely don’t miss it!

Episode 66: The White Album

Three jerky socialists talk about books you've probably heard of. With Megan Tusler, Tristan Schweiger, and Katie K. *Note to listeners -- we're on break until Jan. 19. See you in 2020, comrades!

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Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

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