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Episodes

Feb. 3, 2025

675 Zora Neale Hurston (with Cheryl Hopson) | Jack Kerouac's Newly Di…

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was the most published African American woman writer of the first half of the twentieth century; her signature novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is still read by students, scholars, and literat...

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Jan. 30, 2025

674 Nabokov vs Freud (with Joshua Ferris) [Ad-Free Re-Release]

“I admire Freud greatly,” the novelist Vladimir Nabokov once said, “as a comic writer.” For Nabokov, Sigmund Freud was “the Viennese witch-doctor,” objectionable for “the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world” of his i...

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Jan. 27, 2025

673 Edna Ferber (with Julie Gilbert) | My Last Book with Jessica Kirz…

Novelist and playwright Edna Ferber (1885-1968) lived a wondrous life: residing in Manhattan as a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ( So Big ), and producing works that Hollywoo...

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Jan. 23, 2025

672 The Little Review (with Holly A. Baggett) | My Last Book with Phi…

Founded in Chicago in 1914, the avant-garde journal the Little Review became a giant in the cause of modernism, publishing literature and art by luminaries such as T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, ...

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Jan. 20, 2025

671 Shakespeare's Tragic Art (with Rhodri Lewis) | My Last Book with …

It is a truth universally acknowledged that tragedy is one of the world's highest art forms, and that Shakespeare was one of the form's greatest practitioners. But how did he do it? What models did he have to draw upon, and w...

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Jan. 16, 2025

670 The Parable

Inspired by an email (from a listener?) with mysterious origins, Jacke takes a look at the brief narrative form the parable. How did parables get their name? What are their key features? Why did Jesus rely on them so heavily ...

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Jan. 13, 2025

669 Obsessed with Melville (with Jennifer Habel and Chris Bachelder) …

What happens when a woman becomes obsessed with Herman Melville during the pandemic? What if the process of sorting fact from fiction in Melville's work inspires a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition? And wha...

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Jan. 9, 2025

668 Book and Dagger - The Scholars and Librarians Who Became Spies an…

When the U.S. joined the war in the 1940s, it had a problem: its military had virtually no intelligence service. Enter the librarians! In this episode, Jacke talks to Elyse Graham about her work Book and Dagger: How Scholars ...

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Jan. 6, 2025

667 Sui Sin Far (with Victoria Namkung) | My Last Book with Samantha …

Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914) grew up in unusual circumstances: her father was an English merchant who traveled to China on business, and her mother was a formerly enslaved tightrope walker and human knife-throwing target who...

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Jan. 2, 2025

666 "Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (with Mike Palindrome) | M…

First published in December of 1922, "Winter Dreams" was one of the short stories known as the "Gatsby cluster," as F. Scott Fitzgerald worked out the characters, themes, and prose style that would later make his famous novel...

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Dec. 30, 2024

665 Keats's Great Odes (with Anahid Nersessian) [Ad-Free Encore Editi…

In 1819, John Keats quit his job as an assistant surgeon, abandoned an epic poem he was writing, and focused his poetic energies on shorter works. What followed was one of the most fertile periods in the history of poetry, as...

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Dec. 24, 2024

664 James Joyce's "The Dead" Part 2 [Ad-Free Encore Version]

Happy holidays! In this episode, presented without commercial interruption, Jacke revisits the second half of the classic James Joyce short story "The Dead." [ This episode was originally released on December 22, 2017 .] Addi...

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Dec. 23, 2024

663 James Joyce's "The Dead" Part 1 [Ad-Free Encore Edition]

Happy holidays! In this episode, presented without commercial interruption, Jacke revisits the first part of the the classic James Joyce holiday story, "The Dead." [ The full version of this episode was originally released on...

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Dec. 19, 2024

662 Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction - Black Women Writing Und…

Generally speaking, a common conception of U.S. race relations in the mid-twentieth century runs like this: segregation was racist and bad, the doctrine of "separate but equal" masked genuine inequality, and the racial integr...

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Dec. 16, 2024

661 James Baldwin (with Colm Tóibín)

Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. Inspired by the illumination and insight in Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain , Tóibín would soon become a lifelong fan. In this ep...

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Dec. 12, 2024

660 "Wakefield" by Nathaniel Hawthorne | My Last Book with Amelia Pos…

Before his marriage, before meeting Herman Melville, and before the publication of The Scarlet Letter , Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in near seclusion, writing the stories that formed his first collection Twice-Told Tales ....

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Dec. 9, 2024

659 The Legend of King Arthur (with Lev Grossman)

A legendary king, knights of the round table, magic and myths and valiant quests - the stories of King Arthur (also known as the "Matter of Britain") have captivated readers since the Middle Ages. It's potentially rich materi...

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Dec. 5, 2024

658 "The Snow Fairy" by Claude McKay | Literary Journeys (with John M…

After taking a look at a wintry poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, Jacke talks to editor John McMurtrie about his new book Literary Journeys Mapping Fictional Travels Across the World of Literature , which celebrat...

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Dec. 2, 2024

657 Auden's England (with Nicholas Jenkins) | My Last Book with Gabri…

From the beginning of his career as a poet, W.H. Auden wrestled with the meaning of Englishness. He came out with a collection of poems entitled On This Island , but what exactly was this island? A world in ruins? A beautiful...

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Nov. 29, 2024

656 Novelist Chigozie Obioma on Literature, Life, and His Love for Ka…

By listener request, Jacke presents a conversation with Nigerian-born novelist Chigozie Obioma ( The Road to the Country , The Fishermen , An Orchestra of Minorities ). Obioma, hailed by the New York Times as "the heir to Chi...

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Nov. 27, 2024

655 Guilty Pleasures (with Mike Palindrome and Laurie Frankel) | My L…

Guilty pleasures! We use the phrase all the time, but what does it really mean? Can reading a book ever be a guilty pleasure? A listener suggests that it can - and Jacke invites two frequent History of Literature guests to te...

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Nov. 25, 2024

654 Loving (and Reclaiming) Sylvia Plath (with Emily Van Duyne)

Troubled patron saint of confessional poetry? Quintessential literary sad girl? Genius poet rightfully viewed as the heir to Emily Dickinson? In her tragically brief life, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) somehow managed to inspire a...

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Nov. 21, 2024

653 J.D. Salinger

He's best known as the author of The Catcher in the Rye , one of the great publishing and cultural successes of the twentieth century. But there was more to the Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010) story than a single book. In t...

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Nov. 18, 2024

652 Writing a Comic Novel (with Charles Baxter) | My Last Book with B…

Jacke talks to award-winning novelist and short story writer Charles Baxter about his new book, Blood Test: A Comedy , which the New York Times says "provides a snapshot of a troubled America, disguised as a speculative comed...

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