In this episode, we discuss a collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil. This collection revels in despair and decay, in erotic death. Come along with us into the depths of pain and sexual horror.

The spider tackles Painted Devils, a collection of strange stories (perhaps not horror but darkly surreal in a horror-adjacent way) by the author Robert Aickman. Dense and enigmatic, these stories use the uncanny to explore various themes, particularly the life of the artist. Recorded just in time for Halloween but then posted in the middle of January.

In which we discuss, among other things: 

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!