Out-of-Print

On this week’s episode, Sophie takes Emmeline and Alice through the intersection of craft, technology and religion. From the importance of girls making crochet knits for their friends, to community art pieces, to robots tending zen gardens, to media materialism, to nosy busybodies investigating craft communes, this episode asks the big question - not just if a machine can do it, but do we want it to?

With special thanks to Dr Ben Higgins at LMH for assisting in providing the primary reading.

See Out-of-Print live at the Roundhouse in January:

https://www.roundhouse.org.uk/whats-on/out-of-print-live/

Key Texts:

Assorted textual products of the Little Gidding Group
Little Clippings, Adam Smyth
Liturgy at Little Gidding, Regina L Walton
Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani
Programming Patterns: the Story of the Jacquard Loom, The Science + Industry Museum
Say bye to doomscrolling, experts say these grandma hobbies and crafts are trending, NBCDFW

Further Reading:

Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork, Whitney Trettein
Work by @dazychains on TikTok

Hidden microwaves, false dreams, and the tradwife movement. In this week’s episode, Alice takes the girls on a journey into Caro Claire Burke’s psychological thriller Yesteryear (2024) alongside Betty Friedan’s seminal second-wave feminist text, The Feminine Mystique (1963) to see what each of them reveal about the not-so-glamorous reality behind the lifestyle tradwives perform online. Both Yesteryear and The Feminine Mystique reveal the complexities behind a simple life and how the suburban housewives (of the 1950s and today) were impacted by living a life constrained to the white picket fence.

“The suburban housewife – she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife – freed by science and labour-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home.” - Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963)

Key Texts: 

Out-of-Print is back for Season 2! Join hosts Alice Garnett, Emmeline Armitage and Sophie Parke as they attempt to decode a new batch of books with contemporary social and pop culture in mind. In this episode, they’re delving into the complex literary history of student/teacher relationships, and asking whether the English classroom is the greatest site of self-discovery?

Texts Covered:
On Beauty, Zadie Smith
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks
The Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy
‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, Adrienne Rich
‘Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading’, Patrocinio P. Schweickart,
Three Women, Lisa Taddeo
My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell

Further Reading:
‘Managing Misogyny’, Susan Wheeler
Ordinary Light, Tracey K. Smith
Stoner, John Williams
Disgrace, JM Coetzee
‘Women and the Literary Curriculum’, Elaine Showalter

Resources for support:
Mind
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/guides-to-support-and-services/abuse/
NHS
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/getting-help-for-domestic-violence/
Women’s Aid
https://womensaid.org.uk/information-support/

For the season finale of Out-of-Print, our three hosts take on the nitty gritty topic of Side Characters, delving into their importance in a literary, cultural, and real-world sense. This extra-special episode covers Jane Eyre, main character syndrome, Troy McClure from The Simpsons, Noo-Noo, Alice's nickname at her local chicken shop, literary theory, some seriously questionable one-night stands, Edna Mode, open source investigation, Nietzsche, sauna juicing, flat vs round, shagging on the rugby field, and some very special listener submissions sent in from Glasgow, Scotland to Christchurch, New Zealand.

This episode is a mixture of studio recording and live extracts from the season finale, recorded as part of the Roundhouse Three Sixty Festival 2026.

Key texts referenced:

- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
- The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert + Susan Gubar
- The One vs the Many, Alex Woolch
- Main Character Syndrome, Anna Gotlib
- A Fish Called Selma, Season 7, The Simpsons

Further reading:

- The Supporting Cast, David Galef
-  Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster

Co-hosted and produced by Alice Garnett, Emmeline Armitage and Sophie Parke.
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This week, Alice – our self-confessed “gross girl”– takes the mic to discuss hangover cures, 18th century anti-blazon poetry, and the politics of being a party girl in 2026.

Key texts referenced:
- A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, Jonathan Swift
- Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva

Further Reading:
- Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130
- Astrophil and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney

By name and by nature, our very own 'Em' takes us through her love of whimsical grammar, and laments that the rise in generative AI has taken the not-so-humble 'em dash' from being an Emily Dickinson moment of pause to a sure sign your CV was written by CHATgpt...

Key texts: 
Emily Dickinson 'I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain' 
Emily Dickinson 'I Started Early – Took my Dog' 

Further Reading:
Goblinhood by Jen Calleja
'Deus in machina: Swiss church installs AI Jesus', The Guardian

Sophie is hosting this week and has managed to shoehorn an entire episode around a terrible joke she likes. This episode covers the powerful link between modern meme culture + Dadaism, online collectivism, what happens when community art lands in the hands of the powerful, and our three co-hosts living on very different parts of the internet.

Key texts referenced:

Further reading:

Is he actually a feminist, or is he putting it on? What does it really mean when a straight man wears a crop top? Do tote bags indicate malicious intent?

This week’s host, Alice, takes to the mic to explore the babygirlification of the straight man and the evolution of masculine archetypes from the ‘softboi’ of the 2010s to the performative male of the 2020s. 

Key texts referenced:
- Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin
- ‘Your Straight Boyfriend Isn’t Gay’ from Transtender, Chrissy

Further reading:
- Gender Trouble, Judith Butler
- The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin

Co-hosted and produced by Alice Garnett, Emmeline Armitage and Sophie Parke.
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It’s the pop star confessional poet crossover you never knew you needed! 

In this episode, Emmeline opens up discussion about whether the hottest lyricists of our time could ever hold a pen in the face of some of our greatest poets, and the answer is… complicated. 

Key Texts: 
-Charli XCX ‘Brat’ 
-Anne Sexton ‘The Double Image’ 

Further ‘Reading’: 
-Sylvia Plath ‘Ariel’ 
-Lily Allen ‘West End Girl’ 
-Robert Lowell ‘Skunk Hour’ 
-Lorde ‘Virgin’ 
-Taylor Swift ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ (proceed with caution)

Co-hosted and produced by Alice Garnett, Emmeline Armitage and Sophie Parke.

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This week, Sophie hosts on the concerning trend of founders on LinkedIn starting to write like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. This episode covers TikTok, LinkedIn close-readings,
Bateman’s morning monologue, the line between satire and stereotype, an alarming return
to the 80s, the death of context, and the time that Sophie lived with a cult member who is currently on trial for murder. 

Key texts referenced:
- American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis

Co-hosted and produced by Alice Garnett, Emmeline Armitage and Sophie Parke.
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