This episode focuses on the second half of Eimear McBride's 2020 novel Strange Hotel, talking about the way her prose creates a parallel relationship between the reader’s repose to the text and the character’s response to memory. We looked at some more of that awesome McBride language, and had fun with quotes.

We focused on how the novel's language and structure create immersive memories and emotional depth, with specific attention to the narrative's shift from third-person to first-person perspective in the final pages. Then we talked a bit about stream-of-consciousness, and where Strange Hotel does or does not fit into that world—a conversation that’ll be ongoing in the Club. Hopefully this is only the beginning of McBride’s “experimental” phase.

Check out the Substack post with complete show notes, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

This episode focuses on the first half of Eimear McBride's excellent novel Strange Hotel, diving into its unique narrative structure, narrational techniques (including our old friend the present tense), immersive language, and use of memory. The discussion explores the novel’s Modernist inheritances and approach, including different levels of third-person narration and the use of scenic immediacy juxtaposed with accessed interiority.

We can see similar methods in writers from James Joyce to Rachel Cusk, and Strange Hotel is definitely one of those novels that shows the utility of the term “literary ancestry.” We take a close look at McBride’s skills in atmospheric prose, and leave everyone on a cliffhanger with plans made for a two-part episode (!) to further explore the novel's composition and readerly orientation—and whether this style is an example of stream-of-consciousness.

Check out the Substack post with complete show notes, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

The brilliant L’Esprit interns, Aerin and Anika, join the show to discuss their experiences working on the journal, their views on the state of literature, and a couple of short stories they wanted to check out.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did—we’re thrilled to have Anika and Aerin with us, and had a great time talking with them.

Merci !

Our first guest episode in the Cordelives Club! My friend Brian—poet, professor, lover of Paris—joins to talk about James Baldwin’s brilliant short story “Sonny’s Blues", and tunes in an absolute tour de force.

Brian takes us through the story from the sentence level out to the wider context of Baldwin’s life; we cover everything from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s to Baldwin’s influences from painting and music to the Parisian art scene to Biblical allegory to the way imagery and metaphor function in “Sonny’s Blues” to mediate identity and meaning. Fortunately for everyone, I pretty quickly understood just how well prepared Brian was for this conversation, and mostly got out of the way!

Check out Brian’s website, and order one of his books! We also have some links for further reading that came from our talk:

• The text of the story itself
• Baldwin’s Art of Fiction in The Paris Review
• A review of a new book about Baldwin and Beauford Delany
• An article on T. S. Eliot’s essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth”

I hope everyone enjoys this excellent discussion; I know I did. We’ll definitely have Brain back on the show, and we’ve got another fun episode coming on Saturday. In the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

This episode focuses on Muriel Spark's 1970 novel The Driver's Seat, diving into Spark’s author's technique of "getting in and out" of scenes and the way she mediates the reader-protagonist relationship. The third person present-tense narration continually—and fearlessly—drops us into the middle of scenes without explanation, using a strange, compelling distanced narration and making inexplicable temporal jumps to the future.

We talk about how the novel's effectiveness comes from this controlled instability and unique narrational distance, in that, despite following the protagonist Lise in limited third person, readers are kept at a distance from her interior thoughts. The discussion highlights how Spark breaks conventional rules by, among others, revealing early that Lise will be found murdered, yet maintains reader interest through compositional techniques rather than traditional character development or exposition. A very fascinating novel, one that might actually be “completely unique.”

Check out our Substack for the complete show notes in a few days, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Welcome to the first episode of Les Cordelivres Club, conversations in revolutionary criticism from Indirect Books. This episode focuses on Virginia Woolf’s short story “In The Orchard,” and the foundational mode of analysis for literary critique: a consideration of narrative and narration. What is the distinction between narration and narrative in literature? What is the narrating entity and how does it shape the story? How can authors create distinct worldviews and textures through discrete narrational modes, and what does this look like in “In The Orchard”? We explore these issues and more in the discussion. Check out our Substack for complete show notes in a few days, and in the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !

Welcome to our new series of applied literary criticism from the Free and Direct Podcast and Indirect Books! The Cordelivres Criticism Club takes its name from a social club during the French Revolution, and will be a place to celebrate our favorite literary texts--new and old, novels and stories, famous and obscure--as we look to analyze them from the inside-out. We'll have deep-dives, guest episodes, mini-series, and more. Find out more about the series on our Substack post, and join us for literary dissection through a revolutionary lens. Merci !

Join us for the second half of our home-and-home with the excellent ARTWIFE Mag! Editor Hannah Harlee talks with Dan about her background in writing and editing, founding ARTWIFE, and how she came up with that excellent name. We also get into the confluence of visual and literary aesthetics and how ARTWIFE builds their expansive literary community. A great conversation and a great magazine!

Our third episode is a wonderful conversation with the brilliant Diane Josefowicz about her new novella, L'Air du Temps (1985).

Diane starts us off with a reading, and then we get into the book: we cover narrative structure, novelistic composition--especially the theme of doubling and a mixture of past and present tense--the resonances to her own life and childhood found in the book, and the wider fictive world of her main character, Zinnia. Diane also shares how a true crime podcast and her background as a historian fueled the writing of this excellent book.

We hope you enjoy the conversation--and if you missed Jessica's review of L'Air du Temps (1985) in L'Esprit, you can find it here!

Merci beaucoup !

L'Esprit Literary Review editors Jessica Denzer and Dan White join Hannah Harlee of ARTWIFE Magazine to talk about the history of L'Esprit, what they look for in submissions, and the future of the journal, We also discuss Indirect Books and how our new press fits into the L'Esprit world.