Did you think we already knew everything there was to know about Virginia Woolf? Think again! In this episode, Jacke talks to scholar and editor Urmila Seshagiri ab…

In the History of Literature's list of the 25 Greatest Books of All Time, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes comes in at #9. In Episode 746, Jacke makes the case fo…

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At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters’ professions of love, but he portions it out before he…

Always Have a Book With You I read somewhere that authors are voracious readers. I would imagine so. When I read, I also feel the urge to create something of my own. Likewise, I don’t think I’ve ev…

We asked, you answered! In response to a listener recommendation, we revisit a conversation from 2017 in which Mike and Jacke discuss Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkn…

At #10 on the History of Literature's Greatest Books of All Time is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Among the most memorable opening lines of any novel is the one tha…

5/5: This is my 2nd time reading Outline. Its structure diverges from the novels I typically champion, basically sketches of the mostly unlikeable near-strangers in the narrator's life. But it is a pa...

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was born into relative obscurity and died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 29. And yet, somehow this ambitious cobbler's so…

4/5: Maybe in a thousand years, Bleak House is one of the Bibles in society. So many characters, their twists of fate and bank ledger-like tallies at the end of life. Such captivating entrances too. T...

Born Tomáš Sträussler, in what was then Czechoslovakia, celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard (1937- ) became one of the most famous British playwrights in the world. …

A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88. One of a select band of writers from any discipline to earn his own adjective – “Stoppardian” – in the Oxford English Dictionary, he delighted in the most improbable juxtapositions: philosophy and gymnastics in Jumpers (1972); early 19th-century landscape gardening and chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); rock music, dissident Czech academics and the love poetry of Sappho in Rock ’n’ Roll (2006). Continue reading...

When Jacke started the podcast in 2015, he decided to privilege books that were at least fifty years old. (Longtime listeners will know he's made a few exceptions, …

In film, TV and even real-life tragedy, Casablanca’s immortal dialogue and gestures of defiance have taken on an extraordinary afterlife.

It's the OG of experimental literature! (In English, anyway...) In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the wild and woolly Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. And i…

Charlotte Brontë wasn't born the eldest child, but she was thrust into a leadership role at the age of ten, as the Brontë children dealt with the tragic deaths of t…

The winners of this year’s National Book Awards have just been announced at a ritzy gala in downtown Manhattan. Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) won the …