Penknife

Penknife episodes:

• 09.11.2023

  S3E5: The Nightmare

  On April 8th, 1943 Otto and Elise Hampel, a working class couple from Berlin, are guillotined for leaving hundreds of postcards containing anti-Nazi messages in public places throughout the city. They, and their small everyday acts of futile resistance, are...

  
• 09.04.2023

  S3E4: Desperate Literature

  Fallada hunkers down on his farm where he plans to wait out the war writing and tending to his vegetable garden in sobriety. But the bomber jets buzzing overhead and the Nazi censors who only allow him to publish idyllic...

  
• 08.28.2023

  S3E3: All Men Are Cowards

  In 1932 Hans Fallada releases his big hit, Little Man, What Now? a somewhat autobiographical novel about a young middle-class family trying to survive in an age of mass unemployment and hyperinflation. As The novel can be read as an...

  
• 08.21.2023

  S3E2: A Thoroughly Degenerate Psychopath

  After spending less than two years in a posh sanatorium as punishment for the death of his friend, Fallada is released. Though he has few skills apart from writing and a murder charge on his record, the beginning of WWI...

  
• 08.14.2023

  S3E1: Lucky Hans

  Early morning October 17, 1911. Two teenagers climb a hill outside of Leipzig, Germany with the intention of killing each other in a duel. Rudolph Ditzen fires his gun and hits his mark but his friend Hans misses. Ditzen turns...

  
• 08.22.2022

  S2Ep8: Twilight of the Statues, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer

  In 2019 the Leicester City Council granted preliminary approval to place a statue of Joe Orton in the city’s cultural quarter. With the help of celebrities such as Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry and Alec Baldwin, the Joe Orton Statue Appeal...

  
• 08.22.2022

  S2Ep7: Tangier

  The story doesn’t end with Joe and Kenneth’s deaths. In fact, the most shocking part comes here: Joe Orton was a pederast. Despite the fact that Orton’s story has been told numerous times in a biography, documentaries and a biopic,...

  
• 08.22.2022

  S2Ep6: A Deliberate Form of Frenzy

  Kenneth Halliwell’s mental health is deteriorating.  After he and Joe return from Tangier in July of 67, a producer friend of Joe’s calls Kenneth a “middle-aged nonentity” to his face. This stings particularly because after failing as an actor, a...

  
• 08.22.2022

  S2Ep5: Diary of a Somebody

  In December 1966, Joe Orton begins keeping a diary that he maintains for the final eight months of his life.  Along with plenty of cottaging in public lavatories the diaries chronicle the death of his mother, the success of Loot,...

  
• 08.22.2022

  S2Ep4: A Necessary Amount of Filth

  Beginning in 1964, conservative England is shocked and outraged by Joe Orton’s work.  In his radio play The Ruffian on the Stair and then in his stage plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, Orton attacks church, state and family and...

  
• 08.22.2022

  S2Ep3: Malicious Damage

  At his local library branch Joe Orton is enraged to find out that they don’t have a copy of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  In retaliation for this grave injustice he and Kenneth Halliwell begin...

  
• 08.22.2022

  S2Ep2: Golden Syrup

  By 1953 Orton and Halliwell are both realizing they don’t have what it takes to make it as actors, but no matter, Halliwell is going to be a famous novelist and Joe, the less-educated and cultivated of the two, well,...

  
• 08.22.2022

  S2Ep1: A Shave and a Shag

  One morning in 1949 Kenneth Halliwell comes downstairs for breakfast and finds his father’s dead body awkwardly protruding from the stove. He turns off the gas, then steps over the body to boil water for tea. When he finishes his...

  
• 01.03.2022

  S1Ep10: Call the Time Eternity

  A Village voice exposé denounces Kosinski for using ghostwriters and casts aspersions on his entire literary career. Nine years later Jerzy Kosinski is a broken man. His writing career is over; he’s managed to write only one novel which was...

  
• 12.27.2021

  S1Ep9: Criminal Chic

  On July 9th, 1981 Jack Henry Abbott, Norman Mailer and Jerzy Kosinki get together at an expensive Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village to celebrate the imminent release of Abbot’s book. A week later Richard Adan is dead and Kosinksi and...

  
• 12.20.2021

  S1Ep8: Sexual Politics

  If you’ve made it to Episode 8 and part of you still likes Mailer and/or Kosinski, that’ll change with this episode. Jerzy Kosinski admits to having committed rape when he was a young man in Poland, and his adult behavior...

  
• 12.13.2021

  S1Ep7: American Dreams

  Mailer’s violent ways continue both off and on the page. He fictionalizes the stabbing of his wife in an absurd, grotesque little novel aptly titled An American Dream. Not to be outdone, Jerzy Kosinki and his finest ghostwriter get to...

  
• 12.06.2021

  S1Ep6: A Matter of Millimeters

  After spending the 1950s trying to follow up The Naked and the Dead with another hit, Mailer writes two poorly-received novels and mostly spends the decade getting stoned, drunk, angry and delusional. By 1960 he’s so far gone that he...

  
• 11.29.2021

  S1Ep5: The Comet

  In fall of 1965 a book called The Painted Bird is published and begins to make waves across the literary world. It’s the story of a boy separated from his parents for six years during WW2. It follows him while...

  
• 11.22.2021

  S1Ep4: The Future Is Ours, Comrade

  After defecting from Poland Jerzy Kosinski gets to work trying to make a name for himself in the States. He starts telling some incredibly tall tales about his childhood during the war and somehow manages to publish a few non-fiction...

  
• 11.15.2021

  S1Ep3: Hider in the House

  When writer Joseph Harms hears of our idea to make a podcast about criminal writers, he leaves a series of disturbing messages pointing us in the direction of one of Abbott’s famous penpals: Jerzy Kosinski.  Harms claims that Kosinski killed...

  
• 11.08.2021

  S1Ep2: No Resistance at All

    With Mailer’s help, Abbott is released from jail. His book, In the Belly of the Beast, is garnering rave advance reviews and is primed to be one of the biggest books of the summer. We take a close look at...

  
• 11.08.2021

  S1Ep1: A State Raised Convict

  Outside an East Village diner, in the early morning hours of July 18th, 1981, a writer named Jack Henry Abbott stabs waiter and fellow writer Richard Adan to death because Adan refuses him use of the diner’s bathroom. Abbott is...

  
• 10.31.2021

  Season 1 Teaser

  Penknife Season 1: Liberty and the Pursuit Coming Soon!