Episodes

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...

Medieval manuscripts are so wondrously beautiful they deserve comparison with the world's finest works of art. But what was behind the production of these manuscripts? We might think of rows of monks, patiently toiling away i...

Yes, he's the father of English poetry, and yes, he's perhaps best known today for bawdy tales like the Wife of Bath. But who was Geoffrey Chaucer? How did he navigate life during one of the most turbulent periods of English ...

Bibliophiles everywhere know the sweet feeling of getting lost in a book. And like all good literary snobs, we tend to think that full immersion requires a distraction-free relationship between reader and text. But was it alw...

For fifty years, Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann (1875-1955) lived his life as Germany's preeminent novelist and one of Europe's most respected intellectuals. In this episode, Jacke examines the truth behind the public image, ...

We asked, you answered! In response to a listener recommendation, we revisit a conversation from 2017 in which Mike and Jacke discuss Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now , and Eleanor Cop...

Who was Emily Dickinson? We think we know her, or at least one side of her, from her poems. But what was she like when she wasn't writing poetry? What was she like with her friends and family? In this episode, we talk to edit...

Dealing with reality can be difficult enough, but when the nature of that reality is completely overturned - as it is in a case like the climate crisis - people are left with a feeling of intense uncertainty. What does this m...

For more than two thousand years, the Bible has been an essential part of the world's conception of humanity and its relationship to God. But although it is in some sense timeless and eternal - literally the word of God - the...

Discussions of Ernest Hemingway tend to focus on the peaks of his career, which are typically centered around his most famous novels. But Hemingway was busy in between those novels too, writing articles, short stories, and le...

For almost sixty years, Norman Mailer was a fixture on the American literary scene, seemingly as well known for his feuds and personal exploits as he was for his prize-winning novels and groundbreaking journalism. But what wa...

Recently, we talked to novelist Jodi Picoult about her contention that many of the works commonly attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by a woman named Emilia Bassano (a.k.a. Aemilia Lanyer). But even as that compe...

Was Shakespeare gay? Will Tosh, head of research at Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London, says that question has an easy answer - but more importantly, when it comes to understanding Shakespeare's sexuality, it isn't really ...

For thousands of years, desperate writers have struggled with the condition known as writer's block. In this episode, Jacke talks to novelist Kate Feiffer about her book Morning Pages , in which a playwright on a tight deadli...

Is it really true? Did the Elizabethan poet Emilia Bassano (sometimes known as Aemelia Lanyer) actually write Shakespeare's works? A bestselling novelist thinks so - and she's turned her research-based theories into an entert...

It's one of the most famous and admired short stories that Ernest Hemingway ever wrote - and also one of the most controversial. In this episode, Hemingway expert Mark Cirino (host of the One True Podcast ) joins Jacke for a ...

As fans of literature, we all know how powerful and effective storytelling can be. But can we harness that power to help us communicate in our daily lives? In this episode, Jacke talks to Matt Abrahams ( Think Faster, Talk Sm...

Since the publication of Little Women in 1868, millions of readers have gotten to know (and love) Louisa May Alcott through her fiction. But in her own day, Alcott was well known as an essayist who wrote on a wide range of su...

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...

The Hakkenden, or Eight Dogs is one of the classics of Japanese literature. In this episode, Jacke talks to translator Glynne Walley about this massive - and massively popular and influential - nineteenth-century novel about ...

Lesbians have been around for thousands of years (at least!), but their voices have often fallen victim to censorship, oppression, and ostracization. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Amelia Possanza, whose new book Lesb...

For Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy was "the greatest of all novelists," and her argument was simple: "[W]hat else can we call the author of War and Peace ?" In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Tolstoy's original plans for the...

What was the deal with the Victorians and their obsession with reanimating corpses? How did writers like Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others breathe life into the undead - and w...

Novelist Fred Waitzkin ( Searching for Bobby Fischer ) stops by to discuss Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, and his new novel Anything Is Good , which tells the story of a childhood friend who was a genius - and who ended up l...