In this episode, the hosts of Book Spider discuss Jean Toomer's Cane, a collection of poems and stories that evoke rural Georgia of the early 1900s. The critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls attention to Cane's use of black, white, and especially mixed-race characters to represent the American experience, an astounding literary innovation never used before or since. 

The podcast's second go-round with author Dana Spiotta sees us dig into her most recent novel Wayward, which makes a bold effort to argue for nuance and subtlety in the sociopolitical chaos following the 2016 election (for everyone except finance bros, who remain one-dimensional shitheads).

This week, we discuss Böll's compelling but messy multigenerational, German POV reflection on the World Wars, evil, and their impact on the lives of common people. 

This episode, the Book Spider gang discusses an early suspense / psychological thriller novel, Rebecca, which deals with the melancholia a nameless narrator experiences when she marries a rich man and moves to his huge estate on a whim, only to find that the memories of her husband's first wife haunt the very ground upon which she walks. 

This week we're dissecting a book which mixes fiction and nonfiction in ways which are enigmatic, compelling, and -- to some readers -- morally suspicious. Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World follows the fictionalized biographies of several scientists and mathematicians as they discover the principles which become quantum mechanics. This odd genre hybrid is admirable, gripping, and only partially satisfying, despite great critical acclaim.

This week, we discuss Ferris's famous "we" novel about late 2000s office space culture, and get briefly melancholic about what work friends felt like in the pre-pandemic world. 

This episode, which discusses the modern-day sci-fi classic Eifelheim, features a rarity: all three podcasters agreeing on the quality of the text. Enjoy!

In this episode the three Spiders do their damnedest to wrap their heads around Lookout Cartridge, which is generally agreed to be the best novel by Joseph McElroy, an enigmatic postmodernist who is often considered an underrated peer of DeLillo, Pynchon, Gass, Gaddis, and the rest of the '60s and '70s greats. 

This week, we discuss Calvino's willful commitment to celebrate the act of reading by refusing to give readers what they want - over and over and over again. 

In this episode, we compare two novels with dog protagonists and discuss form, technique, and how a writer can represent nonhuman minds.