You may be thinking: If I had a dollar for every time I felt like I was just sitting in the waiting room of life—except that the room was an open field with a single tree in it and my best bud just wouldn’t keep his boots on—I’d be rich!  Or in a hit Samuel Beckett play.  Whether it is about morality or acceptance or the morality of acceptance, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot resonates indefinitely.  Listen in as David, Nick, and the recently returned Nathan talk it through, possibly existentially navel-gazing in the process.

[Update (8/12/19): After recording and releasing this podcast, it has come to our attention that Sarvis has been barred from teaching in Florida public schools following allegations he engaged in inappropriate communications with students on social media.  We in no way condone this alleged behavior.  This episode will remain available and those that choose to listen may do so at their discretion.]

In this edition of The Substance of Influence, David and Nick speak with Caleb Michael Sarvis, managing editor of Bridge Eight Press and author of the short story collection Dead Aquarium or (i don’t have the stamina for that kind of faith) available from Mastodon Publishing.  They discuss the lasting impact of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, the perks of interpreting the past as fiction, and, of course, all those damn nutria down in Florida.

Check out Caleb’s work here and follow him on Twitter.

Have you heard the bad news? God is dead. But in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, you can't keep a good god down—even when you murder a consumptive flim-flam man, seduce a fifteen-year-old, and blind yourself with quicklime. So put glass shards in your shoes, turn up your headphones, and drink every time we say "nihilism." 

(This episode’s summary was written by our guest, Kathleen Founds.  Before she found herself dreaming up nihilism-themed drinking games on a classic literature podcast, Founds wrote the novel When Mystical Creatures Attack!, which won the 2014 University of Iowa Press John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book.)

In this latest installment of the Books of Some Substance podcast San Francisco State University English Professor Sarita Cannon returns to talk about the violent grace (or graceful violence?) of Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find.  Listen in as Nick and Sarita talk about the curious relationship between Catholicism and the grotesque, how O’Connor can keep a live audience laughing right up until a story plunges into mass murder, and the intriguing, dark-prophet nature of The Misfit.  Somewhat surprisingly, zero Glenn Danzig references were made.

On this, our first episode of The Substance of Influence episodes, David speaks with fiction writer and poet Chaya Bhuvaneswar, winner of the 2017 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize for her first book White Dancing Elephants.

They discuss authorial voice, being a reader and a writer, influence in general, direct influence in particular with Chaya's selection of the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and, of course, her wonderful collections of short stories. 

You can find Chaya and her work at  https://chayabhuvaneswar.com/ and on Twitter @chayab77 

As always you can find us here at http://www.booksofsomesubstance.com/  and on Twitter & Instagram: @booksosubstance 

In this latest installment of the Books of Some Substance podcast David, Nick, and Eric go for a disorienting ride through the comedic darkness of László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango. This paragraph-shunning tome from the “Hungarian Master of the Apocalypse” is perfect for the reader seeking that good ole bleak, rain-soaked, mud-packed, worm-eatin’, dust-filled vibe.  Listen in for a rousing discussion in which we unlock all of the secrets: why Satantango can feel like an amalgamation of influences while being entirely its own; whether or not the point of Irimiás’ scheme remains entirely unclear; and why it is that Nick owns so many black T-shirts.

In this episode of the Books of Some Substance podcast, Stanford English Professor Roanne Kantor stops by to chat with Nick about Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes.  While providing a fertile ground to discuss what exactly Global Anglophone literature is, the 2008 novel also packs many a nod to Latin America greats García Márquez and Vargas Llosa and pairs well with that other stellar work about General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and 1980s Pakistan, Salman Rushdie’s Shame. A Case of Exploding Mangoes is also hilarious, thus asking the question: Is realism or satire the correct way to address topics as unsettling as the violence and oppression of a dictator’s regime?  Either way, rest assured: The general dies in this one.

If by chance—and what else really controls it all other than chance?—you are into examining the futility of it all, or, of course, the scorn of it all, then the latest B.O.S.S. podcast on László Krasznahorkai’s The Last Wolf in which David, Stephanie, and Nick examine the tale of how a washed up German author tells the tale of traveling to the barren plains of Spain to encounter a warden telling a tale of how the area’s final wolf perished—yes, perished—all told to the Hungarian barman who doesn’t totally mind, even though this Stammgast isn’t Hungarian or even a good looking chick, is for you (the podcast episode, that is, but also the book, naturally).

Did you just stop at digging up her body? How crippling is your love?

That day they discoursed in a cool and oft solitudinous basement. Eric and Nick and Dean Rader of the University of San Francisco examined Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West and inquired what Cormac McCarthy had in mind. Sulphurous and detached and surgically endeavored as that mind may be. They passed through the beauty and bleakness of the prose and the ruinous afterimage of the bloodstained vacancies of emotions firestoked and withheld. They glanced upon the ragged edges of representations of history and race and staccato swells of animalistic fervor.

The judge!

His judgeness!

Gunpowder manufactured in a swatch of Miltonlike fury. Bloodslaked heart strings pulled by feats of erudition and eloquence. Interpretations laggard and dusty slithered out of flattened enormity. Agecurled pictures of America at its genesis and at its present left naked and creaking to wrench a somnolent populace from dreams into harsh plumes of introspection and reckoning.