Episodes

Ford Madox Ford lived a fascinating life, surrounded by some of the most famous writers of the era: Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Henry James, Stephen Crane, D.H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys, Ernest Hemingway, and many others. Today, he...

Persuaded by the well-meaning Lady Russell, Anne Elliot turns down prospective suitor Frederick Wentworth. Will life give her a second chance at love? And if so, can she persuade herself to take it? In this episode, Jacke tal...

What happens when we let opportunities slip past us? And what if we let others talk us out of what looks like our best chance at love? In this episode, Jacke talks to historical romance novelist Gina Buonaguro ( The Virgins o...

Harold Bloom called Persuasion "the perfect novel." Virginia Woolf said "In Persuasion , Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she supposed." In this episode, t...

Irina Mashinski is a bilingual Russophone American writer, poet, essayist, teacher, and translator, whose works include Giornata and eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian. She is also the co-editor of The Penguin Book ...

It's Episode 500! Jacke shares some thoughts on Meg White's drumming, Boswell and Johnson, and living in Taiwan. Then author Margot Livesey ( The Boy in the Field , The Flight of Gemma Hardy ) joins Jacke for a discussion of ...

Jacke talks to author Laura Lee about her new book Wilde Nights and Robber Barons: The Story of Maruice Schwabe, the Man Behind Oscar Wilde's Downfall, Who with a Band of False Aristocrats Swindled the World . LAURA LEE is th...

Jacke talks to legendary independent filmmaker John Sayles ( Lone Star , Passion Fish ) about his new novel Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade's Journey , which tells a sweeping story of romance and revolution in eighteenth cen...

By any measure, the ancient Chinese military treatise The Art of War has had an astonishing literary history, proving itself over two and a half millennia to be one of the world's most essential and enduring books. In this ep...

The Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognizably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have ...

How do today's master's create their art? In this episode, Jacke talks to Joe Skinner, producer and host of the podcast American Masters: Creative Spark , about the narrative interviews he's conducted with iconic artists abou...

In a final powerful book , acclaimed literary biographer Robert Richardson told the story of how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James dealt with personal tragedies early in their careers. In this episod...

He loved and he hated. Other than that, not much is known about the life of Catullus, who scandalized the late Roman Republic with his bawdy poems, his aching love for the upper-class married woman he called "Lesbia," and his...

After the October Revolution in 1917, a teenaged Vladimir Nabokov and his family, part of the Russian nobility, sought exile in Western Europe, eventually settling in Berlin, where Vladimir lived for fifteen years. His life t...

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was one of the twentieth century's most accomplished and celebrated poets. In this episode, Jacke talks to Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Megan Marshall about her personal connection to Bishop,...

Introducing YE GODS WITH SCOTT CARTER

Jacke talks to Edgar Award-winning novelist, Tony Award-winning playwright, and legendary story songwriter Rupert Holmes about writing pop song landmarks ("Escape (The Piña Colada Song))," Broadway whodunit musicals ( The Mys...

"It is difficult to find happiness within oneself," said the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), "but it is impossible to find it anywhere else." In spite of his pessimism - or perhaps because of it - Schopenh...

Jacke talks to "serial biographer" Carl Rollyson about his new two-volume biography of William Faulkner, The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934 (Volume 1) and The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarmi...

On October 5, 1962, two items were released, hardly newsworthy at the time. One was Dr. No , the first James Bond film, and the other was Love Me Do , the first Beatles recording. Over the next sixty years, both Bond and the ...

What was Willa Cather's life really like? Was she - as is often thought - a solitary artist, painstakingly crafting her novels about the Great Plains? Or did she actually have a robust creative partnership with another woman,...

"In the early United States, a Black person committed an act of resistance simply by reading and writing. Yet we overlook that these activities also brought pleasure." In this episode, Jacke talks to Dr. Tara A. Bynum about h...

John Milton is often regarded as second only to Shakespeare in the history of English verse - and his epic poem, Paradise Lost , is viewed by many as second to none. His literary achievements are all the more remarkable when ...

In her lifetime, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was widely acknowledged as the best read person - male or female - in New England. Her landmark work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century , is considered the first full-length treatmen...