If you ever see Tom Lutz on Jeopardy! and the Final Jeopardy category is, “The Year 1925,” call Vegas and put your life savings, house, and 401(k) on his winning the game.

His new book, 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia (Rare Bird Books), is an exhaustive collection of entries on the cultural, scientific, and historical scenes; across 800 pages, entries range from “Wilbur Cortez Abbott’s The New Barbarians” to “Zeitgeist.” The philological coincidence that makes that word the last entry is perfect for the book, which captures the spirit of its time in a manner that is accessible, erudite, and addicting. As a novelist, historian, professor, critic, and founder of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tom has lived among books his entire life, but he is far from bookish: like his writing, he’s energetic, often funny, and engaging. Listen to us talk about Hemingway, Mencken, and the now-forgotten Joseph Hergesheimer.

Join me for a conversation with Nick Davis, author of Competing with Idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz -- A Dual Portrait, about his grandfather Herman, great-uncle Joe, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

In this episode, I talk to Eric G. Wilson, author and professor of British Romanticism at Wake Forest University, about this fruitful pairing of a writer and filmmaker.  When I first asked him what he wanted to discuss, he replied, “Coleridge and Hitchcock” almost instantly.   Both of these artists were, in Eric’s words, “obsessed with obsession” and the work of each one illuminates the other’s. “Coleridge is like a proto-Freudian or proto-Hitchcock,” Eric says.  “His work has the doubling and obsessions that show up all the time in the twentieth century.  He’s the perfect writer to shed light on Hitchcock as a filmmaker.” 

Steven Powell, a true believer and fellow fan of the Demon Dog of Crime Fiction, has been reading and writing about Ellroy for years.  His terrific new authorized biography, Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, is a study of the man and the American mythology he has both satirized and sustained.  I interviewed Steven on the New Books Network and we had such a good time talking about Ellroy that we decided to have another conversation. In this episode of Pages and Frames, we talk about Ellroy’s 1990 novel L. A. Confidential and Curtis Hanson’s 1997 adaptation.  

Marshall Poe is widely known as the Editor-in-Chief of the New Books Network; his voice greets listeners before each episode.  But he’s also an accomplished historian, whose 2023 book The Reality of the My Lai Massacre and the Myth of the Vietnam War explains how the events of March 16, 1968 were generalized by reporters, psychologists, activists, and filmmakers to create a number of myths about the war that now seem unshakable.  Early in our conversation, he states, “What you think about the My Lai Massacre is probably wrong.”  He adds, “This has something to do with the way it has been presented in popular culture, but also with the way it was presented at the time.”  To many people, the Massacre was a spontaneous event, conducted by war-weary G.I.s who were walking through the jungle and “snapped” because that’s simply what the war “did” to people.  As Poe explains in his book and our conversation, that’s not what happened at all.  

Ted Conover, author of Cheap Land Colorado, joins me for a discussion of Nomadland.

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Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and someone with great taste in books: look at her YouTube channel and you’ll find her speaking about Chesterton, Lewis, Dostoevsky, and Flannery O’Connor.  She also has a terrific Substack, The Scandal of Reading.

Earlier this year, I read her edited version of O’Connor’s unfinished novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage? and was struck by how much I missed O’Connor’s voice and how grateful I was that somebody assembled these drafts into a book.  I interviewed Jessica on the New Books Network and am glad to say that she is the first guest on the Pages and Frames podcast.  We talked about Wildcat, Ethan Hawke’s film about O’Connor’s life and work.  Thank you, Jessica!  

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