Book Spider

In this episode, the Spider hosts discuss the shortcomings of Sayaka Murata's Earthlings.

The Spiders encounter Mary Shelley's The Last Man, in which grief is transfigured into a radically inventive and astonishingly bleak post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel whose impact and legacy are undone by a complete lack of editing.

In this episode, the Spiders discuss the heady and intriguing His Master's Voice, a first-contact novel that turns the trope upside down, to good effect.

In this episode, the hosts of Book Spider, along with special guest Eddie Kim, discuss the recently released horror novel Gusano, written by founding spider himself, Patrick Barney.

In which the Spiders consider Acceptance, the third book in Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, and a step down from the focused mood and mystery of the first two installments -- though not without its virtues.

A discussion of Jeff Vandermeer's Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. The spiders find that it strikes an uncommonly good balance between that which is understood readily and that which can't be understood at all.

A discussion of Jeff Vandermeer's novel Annihilation, in which the Spiders can't help comparing it to Alex Garner's film adaptation, in particular the ways in which one character's arc turns her outward while the other's turns her inward.

In which we finish the Underworld Triptych. 

In this episode, we navigate the challenging and beautiful middle sections of DeLillo's Underworld. Before that, though, we listen to an excerpt from cohost Patrick Barney's new novel, Gusano. 

The first in a three-parter in which we tackle DeLillo's meganovel, Underworld. In this episode we discuss just about the first third of the novel. And: We crack ourselves up imagining a Werner Herzog baseball documentary.