Episodes

Even the best biographical depictions of Oscar Wilde often skip over the years he spent in prison, perhaps because the episode is so sad and painful. But in doing so, they miss the profundity of his life and writings. In this...

The American poet Dana Gioia calls Charles Baudelaire "the first modern poet," adding "In both style and content, his provocative, alluring, and shockingly original work shaped and enlarged the imagination of later poets, not...

The writer, philosopher, and trailblazing feminist Mary Wollstonecraft is perhaps best known as the mother of the author of Frankenstein , but this amazing figure deserves more attention than a line in Mary Shelley's biograph...

Mysteries! Beloved by adults and children alike, it's hard to imagine a genre with a more universal appeal. But what makes mysteries so compelling? What is it about mysteries - and human beings, for that matter - that makes m...

A special guest stops by to help Jacke talk about life, literature, and one of the world's great masterpieces: The Metamorphosis , by Franz Kafka. Hope you enjoy! Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofli...

As a child growing up in Newark, New Jersey in the 1930s and 40s, Philip Milton Roth (1933-2018) never thought about being a writer. By the time he died, he had become one of the most famous and celebrated figures in the lite...

William Sidney Porter (1862-1910) packed a lot of life into his 47 years, traveling from a childhood in North Carolina to work as a rancher and bank teller in Texas to a desperate escape to Honduras, where he hoped to avoid f...

John Marcher has been waiting all his life for something rare and strange to happen to him - something that will leap out of the darkness and attack him like a Beast in a Jungle. His friend May Bartram has agreed to wait with...

How's literature doing these days? Does the twenty-first century look as good for literature as the nineteenth did? How about the seventeenth? And the twentieth was no slouch... In this episode, Mike Palindrome, the President...

A man has lived his life convinced that something rare and strange lies in wait for him - a monumental catastrophe that has never happened to anyone before. He shares his secret apprehension with one person, until his fear be...

Squirrel-voiced waiter-host Jacke Wilson invites his listeners to a literary feast! In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Henry James's long-short-story masterpiece, "The Beast in the Jungle." (Don't worry if you've never re...

In the aftermath of World War II, author Graham Greene was in personal and professional agony. His marriage was on the rocks, his soul was struggling to find its home, and his restless spirit had taken him into the bedrooms o...

In the immediate aftermath of her death at the age of 53, Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was considered one of the greatest writers of her day, but her reputation soon faded. A hundred years later, she was little more...

When she died tragically at the age of 53, Constance Fenimore Woolson was ranked with the greatest female writers of all time, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontes. What happened to her reputation after that? ...

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was one of the most famous American writers of the mid-twentieth century. As a key member of a group of writers known as the "Beat Generation," his works explored the role of the individual in post-wa...

Jacke talks to actress and novelist Meg Tilly about her unusual childhood, her life as a ballet dancer and Hollywood star, and her current life writing thrillers in the peaceful Pacific Northwest. THE RUNAWAY HEIRESS is the p...

Debut novelist A. Natasha Joukovsky ( The Portrait of a Mirror ) joins Jacke for a discussion of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray , Ovid's myth of Narcissus, the fascinating power of recursions, and a life lived in th...

German artist Charlie Stein joins Jacke for a discussion of art in literature, including her series 100 Paintings Imagined by Authors , in which she and her partner Andy Best use textual clues and historical context to reimag...

Finally! At long last, Jacke responds to years of requests from his Brazilian listeners to take a closer look at Machado de Assis, the novelist whom critic Harold Bloom called simply "a miracle." In this episode, author and B...

Born into a well-to-do family in New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield began writing fiction at the age of 10. But it was in England and continental Europe that her writing took flight, as she drew upon Chekhov and the new spirit ...

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 in spite of Dr. Johnson's famous claim that "nothing odd will ...

Novelist Laurie Frankel joins Jacke to talk about her writing, her theater background, and her new novel One Two Three . Then Jacke and Laurie geek out on Shakespeare and choose the Top 10 Things To Love About Hamlet . Laurie...

As the world struggles to emerge from a global pandemic, Jacke takes a look at our relationship with nature, turning to William Wordsworth's classic sonnet "The World Is Too Much With Us" to see if its concerns are applicable...

Yang Huang, author of the new novel My Good Son , joins Jacke for a discussion of her childhood in China, how censorship restricted her ability to imagine stories, and how George Eliot's Middlemarch helped her break free from...