This is the book everyone is talking about. It's a 50-year-old book, just republished by the New York Review of Books Classics. We disagree sharply on the book's merit, while finding time to discuss the challenge of reading big books, why Thelonious Monk loved the Hudson River, what happened to Harold Brodkey and a new biography of the Chinese master Li Bai.

We venture into science fiction this week with a classic by Ursula K. Le Guin, We also welcome a guest host, the writer Heston Hoffman, who dispels our anxieties about approaching science fiction. We pursue a number of interesting tangents, including gender, sexuality, genre fiction and what Heston learned from reading only female authors in 2018.

The Leopard is a classic of 20th century Italian literature. We dig deep into this novel of lost memories and aristocratic decline, while managing to reference James Joyce's sexy peaches, church relics, Soviet birth certificates and Michael Corleone.

This week it's Hrabal's classic 1975 novel "I Served the King of England." It's earthy, bawdy, hilarious and wise. Roman and I talk Soldier Švejk, the glory of pub talk and coffee and cigarettes with Thomas Pynchon and Samuel Beckett.

We're back to the German-speaking world with a brand new translation of "The Females" by Wolfgang Hilbig. We discuss divided Germany, gender, why capitalism used to be sexy and what the connection is between communist states and trash cans.

We can all remember where we were when we read certain books. Today we talk about memorable (and critical) early reading experiences. What is it about a certain book that freezes time in our minds? We talk Robert Bolano, Philip K. Dick, Barrington J. Bayley, Somerset Maugham, Henry David Thoreau, Captain Cook and why Roman was always reading novels in his high school math classes.

This week we look at a classic novel from the Austrian master Thomas Bernhard. "The Loser" chronicles the fate of two young piano prodigies who befriend and study with a fictional piano genius named Glenn Gould. Bernard spares no one in a book that is both hilariously funny and deadly serious. "The Loser" is a deep dive into the mind of an obsessive.

We revisit a classic this week. In the 1950s, Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov had to teach literature at Cornell University to make ends meet. He lectured on canonical European authors and his lectures were eventually collected into this book. Nabokov takes an eccentric, personalized approach to reading literature and we take a close look.

In our first podcast we look at novelist Tao Lin's new book "Psychedelics, Alienation and Change." We talk the history of drug literature, the logos, James Joyce, raw milk and more.