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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...

It's a good day for cooking! First up: Scott Carter, author of the play Discord: The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Count Leo Tolstoy , joins Jacke for a look at the gospel as updated by Leo Tolsto...

The question stopped Jacke in his tracks. "Dear Jacke," said the emailer. "What do you want your "last book" to be? This will be the last book you will ever read..." And so, he set about determining what his "last book" shoul...

Jacke celebrates autumn with a look at Shakespeare's Sonnet #73 ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold"), then welcomes novelist Laurie Frankel ( Family Family , One Two Three ) for a Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving discus...

Theater is by nature ephemeral: even the greatest of performances are fleeting, thrilling a single audience before disappearing into history. But what if you could travel through time and space to be present at any production...

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...

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, but for the most part, that's been the policy.) Last month, t...

"And one man in his time plays many parts," wrote Shakespeare in As You Like It , "[h]is acts being seven ages." We all know the feeling of passing from one phase to the next. But what happens when something dramatic mashes t...

It's a paradox that has bothered Shakespeare's fans for centuries: the man was as insightful into human beings as anyone whoever lived, and yet his own life is barely documented. This combination of literary genius plus biogr...

It's hard to imagine now, but the United States government wasn't always hostile or indifferent to the arts. In fact, from 1935 to 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal Government responded to the Great Depress...

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...

For the past few years, the History of Literature Podcast has been running the special "My Last Book Series." The idea for the series started with a question in an email from a listener: "Dear Jacke," said the emailer. "What do you want your "last b…