Our wide-ranging conversation with poet and library fan Ollie Shane covers European history, contemporary poetry, Somerset Maugham, and more!

Intro and outro music: "Your Love Hip Hop" courtesy Music_Unlimited on Pixabay.

Episode artwork: Student at the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1981 (cropped). Image with no known copyright restrictions courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Want to learn more about the books—and movies!—we talked about on this episode? Check out the list below. You can also find us on LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Mastodon—and show your support at Liberapay!

Theodor Adorno et al. Aesthetics and Politics

Richard Aldrich Colonialism and Homosexuality

Joseph Barbera & William Hanna The Jetsons

Antony Beevor The Second World War

Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction"

Bertolt Brecht Love Poems

Bertolt Brecht Mother Courage and Her Children

Richard Burton "The Terminal Essay"

CAConrad While Standing in Line for Death

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Oscar Chan Nazi Titanic

Chris-Chan (Christine Weston Chandler)

Joseph Conrad

Guy Debord

Len Deighton Winter

Jacques Derrida Specters of Marx

Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle

Charles Dickens Caroline Elkins Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya Caroline Elkins Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire Tan Twan Eng The House of Doors

Bob Fosse Cabaret

Michel Foucault

Frankfurt School

Kurt Gödel

Veit Harlan Jud Süss

Stefano Harney & Fred Moten The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

Selina Hastings The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography

Fritz Hippler The Eternal Jew

Martin Jay Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure

François Jullien In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics

Philip Kerr Berlin Noir

Philip Kerr Hitler's Peace

Rudyard Kipling

Chris Kraus I Love Dick

Chris Kraus Where Art Belongs

Erik Larson In the Garden of Beasts

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller Bad Gays podcast

Janna Levin A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Gabriel García Márquez Until August

Airea D. Matthews Bread and Circus

W. Somerset Maugham The Narrow Corner

W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage

Ted Morgan Maugham: A Biography

Maggie Nelson

Russell Nieli Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language

Friedrich Nietzsche

Luis Puenzo The Official Story

Assotto Saint Sacred Spells: Collected Works

Sam Sax

Diane Seuss Four-Legged Girl

Diane Seuss Frank: Sonnets

Diane Seuss Modern Poetry

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Ollie Shane I Do It So It Feels Like Hell

Ollie Shane Notes from the Void

Danez Smith Bluff

Frank Spotnitz (creator) The Man in the High Castle (series)

Torquato Tasso Jerusalem Delivered (esp. Anthony M. Esolen translation)

Alan Turing

Morten Tyldum The Imitation Game

Michael Verhoeven The Nasty Girl

Eric Voegelin

Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzifal

Michael Warner Publics and Counterpublics

Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes

Oscar Wilde

Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus