Episodes

Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) was a naturalist, a conservationist, and a highly successful children's book author and illustrator, whose stories of Peter Rabbit and other anthropomorphized animals have sold more than 150 million...

In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the life and works of French author Stendhal (1783-1842), whose innovative novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma made him one of the greatest and most influential no...

The History of Literature presents some content from another Podglomerate podcast, Storybound. In this episode from Storybound's first season, author Mitchell S. Jackson reads from his memoir, Survival Math: Notes on an All-A...

Novelist and screenwriter Tom Perrotta joins Jacke for a discussion of his blue collar New Jersey background, the cultural shock of attending Yale University, and the profound impact that Raymond Carver's first collection of ...

As the Black Death swept through the city of Florence, Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) began writing his classic tale of survival and revelry. The Decameron (1349-1353) tells the story of ten individua...

Friend of the podcast Evie Lee joins Jacke to take a look at Joyce Carol Oates's classic short story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" (1966). NOTE TO LISTENERS: This episode contains disturbing descriptions of an a...

Jacke takes a look at the astonishing story of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo , whose own father (who was born into slavery before becoming a four-star general in Napoleon's army...

Author Lara Prescott joins Jacke to talk about her novel The Secrets We Kept , which is based on the incredible but true story of the CIA's efforts to use a novel (Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago ) as part of …

The fourth part of a three-part episode run! Jacke takes the advice of a listener and adds William Faulkner's "Dry September" (1931) to the Baldwin-Faulkner consideration. NOTE FOR LISTENERS: This story (and our discussion of...

Sputnik! Cuba! Glasnost and perestroika! In this follow-up to the very popular England vs. France literary battle royal, Jacke and Mike choose up sides and imagine the Cold War being fought by each nation's greatest authors. ...

"We can never get enough of nature," wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1854. "I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature." A century and a half later, author Nina Shengold left her desk …

In July of 1846, Henry David Thoreau took a break from his two-year experiment of living in the woods to return to town, where he bumped into a tax collector who promptly had him arrested. For six years, Thoreau had …

As with Santa's reindeer or Snow White's seven dwarves, we all know the phrase "Seven Deadly Sins" even if we struggle to remember the exact list. But who came up with this concept? And who decided that Pride, Envy, Wrath, …

In the autumn of 1902, a young man attending a German military school wrote to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to ask him for some advice. Rilke responded, and the two struck up a correspondence that has become one of …

What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to love and be loved? What sacrifices do we make in order to bring about happiness? And how can we do any of this if we're uncertain about the …

Think about your life: Have you always gotten what you wanted? Have you LET yourself be happy? Have you kept secrets - from others, or even yourself? In this episode, Jacke returns to the great Canadian writer Alice Munro for...

"She is our Chekhov," said Cynthia Ozick, "and she is going to outlast most of her contemporaries." Ozick was talking about the great Alice Munro, the Canadian writer whose short stories about ordinary women and men have garn...

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was an Irish-born writer who spent most of his adult life in Oxford and Cambridge, studying, teaching, enjoying the company of friends (including J.R.R. Tolkien) - and also writing some of the ...

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was a successful administrator and general man-about-town in Restoration London. As a devoted theatergoer, a capable bureaucrat, and a privileged witness of the King and his court, he saw firsthand ma...

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a fearless artist, an uncompromising critic, a brilliant essayist, and an American who lived within his time and yet was decades ahead of it. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at "Going To Meet...

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is one of the most celebrated and divisive figures in American literature. Widely recognized as one of the greatest novelists America has produced, his fiction and his life have become the stuff o...

In the 1950s, William Faulkner (1897-1962) was one of most celebrated novelists in America, highly praised for this formal innovation, his prodigious storytelling gifts, and his sweeping, multigenerational portrait of Souther...

"Our dear enemies," a French writer once said of the English. Englishman John Cleese called them "our natural enemies" and joked "if we have to fight anyone, I say let's fight the French." With the exception of a few big …

John Cheever (1912-1982) scratched the surface of the American suburbs and found that they were built over a deep pit of despair. His short stories and novels, which chronicled the lives of those damaged psyches trying to put...