Episodes

For years, listeners have been requesting an episode devoted to the French novelist, journalist, playwright, and public intellectual Émile Zola (1840-1902). In this episode, Jacke talks to author Robert Lethbridge, whose new ...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Jane Austen's novels make us wish she was our friend. She wouldn't be just any old friend: she'd be the sharpest and wisest, the one we turn to in a crisis, the one who understands...

Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861) was one of the most prolific and accomplished poets of the Victorian age, an inspiration to Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and countless others. And yet, her life was full of cloi...

Poetry, butterflies, and original music oh my! With some help from poets Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth, and John Keats, along with original music by composer Gabriel Ruiz-Bernal, Jacke tackles the topic of...

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) is one of the most famous novelists of his era - and one of the most difficult to pin down. Was he a tasteless, avant-garde pornographer? Or the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation (as E....

Jacke talks to D.G. Rampton , Australia's Queen of the Regency Romance, about her love for the novels of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer - and what it's like for a twenty-first-century novelist to set her novels in the early-...

For several decades, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was perhaps the most prominent writer and intellectual in America. As an advocate of personal freedom living in Massachusetts, surrounded by passionate abolitionists, one m...

Returning to some devastating news after a trip to Paris, Jacke searches for lost time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby might be one hundred years old, but it's still incredibly relevant: one list-of-lists site ranks it as the number-one book of all time. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Rache...

It's springtime! A great time to be in love - and if you're a poetic genius like Dante Alighieri, a great time to catch a glimpse of a girl named Beatrice on the streets of Florence, fall madly in love with her, and spend the...

Anyone digging into fairy tales soon discovers that there's more to these stories of magic and wonder than meets the eye. Often thought of as stories for children, the narratives can be shockingly violent, and they sometimes ...

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a powerhouse of a man: writer, lecturer, critic, social reformer - and much else besides. From his five-volume work Modern Painters through his late writings about literature in Fiction, Fair and F...

For the past ten years, the Murty Classical Library of India (published by Harvard University Press) has sought to do for classic Indian works what the famous Loeb Classical Library has done for Ancient Greek and Roman texts....

For some reason, human beings don't seem to be content just thinking about their own death: they insist on imagining the end of the entire world. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Dorian Lynskey ( Everything Must Go: The...

In today's world of specialization, Alan Lightman is that rare individual who has accomplished remarkable things in two very different realms. As a physicist with a Ph.D. from Cal Tech, he's taught at Harvard and MIT and advi...

It's a two-for-one special! First, Jacke talks to novelist Radha Vatsal about her new book, No. 10 Doyers Street , which tells the gripping story of an Indian woman journalist investigating a bloody shooting in New York's Chi...

Since her death, poet and novelist Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) has been an endless source of fascination for fans of her and her work. But while much attention has been paid to her tumultuous relationship with fellow poet Ted Hu...

[This episode originally ran on July 18, 2016. It is presented here without commercial interruption.] In 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge took two grains of opium and fell into a stupor. When he awoke, he had in his hea...

For centuries, the playwright Thomas Kyd has been best known as the author of The Spanish Tragedy , a terrific story of revenge believed to have strongly influenced Shakespeare's Hamlet . And yet, a contemporary referred to K...

The Belgian-born French writer Georges Simenon (1903-1989) was astonishing for his literary ambition and output. The author of something like 400 novels, which he wrote in 7-10 day bursts (after checking with his physician be...

"I want to write something new," American author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to his editor, "something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." Months later, he presented the results: the n...

For decades, the Soviet Union was unfriendly territory for poets and writers. But what happened when the wall fell? Emerging from the underground, the poets reacted with a creative outpouring that responded to a brave new wor...

Complex and talented, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was one of the first American authors to write for both Black and white readers. Born in Cleveland to "mixed race" parents, Chesnutt rejected the opportunity to "pass" as ...

What happens when a respected church leader shows up one day wearing a mysterious veil that conceals his eyes, offering no explanation - and keeps wearing it for decades? How will the community respond? What conspiracy theori...