Welcome to Halloween in December, when we discuss Mary Shelley's classic horror tale, its take on science and queerness, and why we wouldn't want to snuggle up to Lord Byron.

Things are getting craaaazy in corona lockdown as we discuss depictions of mental illness, horror and bad ideas for a date.

A little pandemic doesn't keep us from podcasting! Other stuff did. But we're back, discussing last year's Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's most celebrated novel Flights. We talk about its obession with human bodies, traveling and the rights of the orcish worker.

Apologies for the bad audio quality!

Recommendations:

EM Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Hans Scholz, Am grünen Strand der Spree

To end the year on a festive note we discuss a Christmas classic by one of the most highly esteemed writers in the English language. We talk religion, politics and corpse eating rats, so basically the same topics as at Christmas dinner with your family.

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We live in the end times, so it's only fitting that we talk to dytopian fiction scholar Annika (https://twitter.com/mydystopias) about Margaret Atwood's groundbreaking novel, its chilling realism, its flaws, and why some merch is just in bad taste.

Recommendations:

Priya Nair, “Get Out of Gilead”

Tillie Walden, On a Sunbeam

It Could Happen Here (podcast)

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Many people call Fitzgerald's magnum opus THE Great American Novel. Reason enough for us to talk about its treatment of its female characters, the American Dream and why we can’t stop saying “old sport”, old sport.

Recommendations:

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust

We discuss whether Ripley is evil, and if yes why Highsmith’s portrayal of his evil is so remarkable. We also talk about queerness, la dolce vita and Boris Johnson.

We discuss the book that kept Jonas away from the podcast for two years. It features Henry VIII, rises to power, falls from grace and fluids from unspecified orifices.

After a very, very minute break, we are back to discuss Emily Brontë's storm-tossed novel and the unreliability and unlikability of its characters.

Recommendations:

John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In

S-Town (podcast)

Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

In our next minisode, we talk about Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, their sadness, their indebtedness to H.C. Andersen, and their autobiographical nature.