Episodes

After spending decades in Europe, the American Henry James felt haunted by the idea that he'd given up something essential. Inspired by a trip home to New York City, the place of his birth, he wrote an astonishing story about...

Although the writer Henry James (1843-1916) was born in New York City's Washington Square, he spent most of his adulthood in Europe, where he wrote such masterpieces as The Portrait of a Lady , The Wings of the Dove , …

Jacke's been trying to come to grips with Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa ever since Harold Bloom named him one of the 26 most influential writers in the entire Western canon. But it's not easy! As a young man, Pess...

Dylan Thomas: brilliant poet or self-indulgent blowhard? In this episode, Jacke talks to John Goodby, co-author of the biography Dylan Thomas: A Critical Life , about the misconceptions swirling around the famous Welsh poet, ...

Mike Palindrome, the President of the Literature Supporters Club, joins Jacke for a reading and discussion of "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" by Sui Sin Far. The story, which takes place against a backdrop of waves of immigration to ...

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...

“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...

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...

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, ...

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, …

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 …

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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, …

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ....

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...

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...

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? …