Episodes

Sigmund Freud once said of the philosopher and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) that "he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.” Well known for his iconoc...

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 …

Pulitzer-Prize-winning literary biographer Megan Marshall joins Jacke to discuss the book that was twenty years in the making: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited the American Renaissance . This "stunning work of bio...

Jacke talks to author Anna Beer about her new book Eve Bites Back! An Alternative History of English Literature , which tells the stories of eight women (Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Bradstreet, Aphr...

In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the life and works of the legendary Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Central to what became known as the Bengali Renaissance, Tagore's poetry, short stories, songs, essays...

For many Russian writers and readers, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) holds a special place: his position in Russian literature is often compared to Shakespeare's in English, Dante's in Italian, and Goethe's in German. In this ...

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) has become famous as the man who in 1862 encouraged young contributors to submit to his magazine - and who received in reply four poems from an unknown woman in Amherst, who asked whethe...

Best known for her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was a woman of many talents and accomplishments. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the life and works of this incredible s...

Perhaps contemporary critic James Wood put it best: "Novelists," he wrote, "should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring." In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the life and major works of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), t...

Happy Halloween! In this episode, producer Emma selects a classic Victorian ghost story for Jacke to read: "Eveline's Visitant" by the publishing powerhouse Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Additional listening suggestions: 270 "The B...

Jacke talks to Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant about her journey to becoming a wildlife ecologist and two classic works from the 1960s that helped inspire her: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley) and Rachel Carson's Sil...

In this episode, Jacke takes a look at two topics. First, the story of Charles and Mary Lamb, whose children's book Tales from Shakespeare (1807) was published more than two hundred years ago and has never been out of print. …

For more than two centuries, the author Mary Shelley (1797-1851) has been eclipsed by others: her famous parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, her even more famous husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even her own crea...

It's October! Time for dead leaves, spooky twilight, and little goblins running around in search of candy. And of course, the OG Mr. October, Edgar Allan Poe. In this episode, Jacke (finally!) accommodates the voluminous requ...

We all talk about actors who use the Method, but do we really understand what that means? And how exactly has the Method changed the way we take in drama? In this episode, Jacke talks to theater expert Isaac Butler …

Although best known for his classic children's books involving Alice and her Wonderland adventures, Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) was a man of many talents and interests. In this episode, Jacke talks to Carrollinian scholar and b...

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) started a firestorm with his 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover , which was quickly banned around the world. But the novel eventually found its way into print, after winning numerous obscenity trials...

Jacke takes a look at the early years of Percy Bysshe Shelley, from his idyllic childhood, to his rebellious student years, to his experiments in free love, radical politics, and Wordsworthian poetry. Works discussed include ...

As the author of what is generally considered the first and perhaps greatest novel of the modern era, Miguel de Cervantes and his masterpiece Don Quixote belongs on every shelf. But as two scholars point out in their new book...

The British spy novel was well established long before Ian Fleming's creation of James Bond in the 1950s. And while it came to be identified with the Cold War, thanks to Fleming and subsequent writers like John le Carré, thri...

In 1994, Harold Bloom's magnum opus The Western Canon took up the critical cudgels on behalf of 26 writers declared by Bloom to be essential. In this episode, Bethanne Patrick (aka the Book Maven), literary critic and host of...

The warrior and leader known as Bābur (1483-1530) had the kind of life one might expect from the descendant of Timur (Tamburlaine) on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's. Elevated to the throne at age 12, and …

It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when reading novels was not a common activity - and then, suddenly, it was. In this episode, Jacke talks to Jason Feifer, an expert on transformative changes in society, to …

Today, Kate Chopin (1851-1904) might be best known for her groundbreaking feminist novel The Awakening (1899). But she was also an accomplished short story writer, publishing in national magazines like Atlantic Monthly and Vo...