December 15, 2025

A Meal of Thorns 39- THE SECRET HISTORY with Roseanna Pendlebury

1 hour 25 minutes

We’re tracking down the wellspring of “dark academia” in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and plucking on threads that stretch out to current fantasy and science fiction literature, with reviewer Roseanna Pendlebury as our guide. Casella manages to throw some shade at Arrival, somehow, and also references Dumb & Dumber.

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Guest: Roseanna Pendlebury

Title: The Secret History

Host: Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide

E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again

Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker

Rebecca Campbell's Arboreality

Simon Roy's Griz Grobus & A Star Called The Sun

Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon

Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Euripides’ The Bacchae

Jane Alison's Meander Spiral Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

Roger Ebert's review of Roger Avary’s film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction (which, we didn’t get into this in the episode, is sort of in the Expanded Secret History Universe)

Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian

Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter

Sofia Samatar's The Practice The Horizon and the Chain

R.F. Kuang's Katabasis & Babel

Fellman's The Two Doctors Górski

Marina & Sergei Dyachenko's Vita Nostra, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey

Ceaușescu's bathroom

Peter Farrelly’s film Dumb and Dumber

Sir Arthur Conan Doyles’ Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet

Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" vs. Denis Villeneuve's film Arrival

Becky Chamber’s To Be Taught if Fortunate

Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent

Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch

"All art is perfectly useless"

C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces

Samatar's A Stranger In Olondria and The Winged Histories

Fellman's The Breath of the Sun

Katherin Addison's The Goblin Emperor & sequels

Dungeons & Dragons

Roseanna’s Small Press Dispatch series at ARB

Roseanna's blog

Tolkien's Beowulf & The Tolkien Reader

Lina Palera’s Seikilos Epitaph with the Lyre of Apollo, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0*

*Note that ARB & AMOT are generally distributed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, but will match the CC of any incorporated material for particular posts/episodes.

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