Spine Crackers

This week the Spine Crackers read Dirty Snow, an existential pseudo-dystopian novel of life during World War II, by prolific Belgian noir specialist Georges Simenon. Listen to this episode in your happy place because this is not a fun read (though it is excellent and enjoyable in other sorts of ways). 

This week the Spine Crackers dig into a very unrealistic and not-at-all timely-or-an-exact-mirror-of-our-crumbling-reality novel The Lathe of Heaven by legendary science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. Alien turtles, dream realities, and psychological malpractice abound!

This week the Spine Crackers break into the strange and slightly (though understandably) misanthropic world of Jakov Lind, reading his 1962 novella Soul of Wood and a selection of his other short stories, most of which are centered around WWII and its aftermath. 

This week the Spine Crackers celebrate the most wonderful time of the year (in the case of one co-host, perhaps a bit too much) by talking through two of Charles Dickens' lesser known Christmas novellas: "The Chimes" and "The Haunted Man"

This week the Spine Crackers read noted Japanese author Natsume Sōseki's proto-modernist novel The Miner  (1908). 

This week the Spine Crackers read Czech author Bohumil Hrabal's comedic, erotic, historical adventure I Served the King of England, first published surreptitiously in 1971, and formally released in 1983. 

This week the Spine Crackers read Roberto Bolaño's 1996 fictional pseudo-encyclopedia Nazi Literature in the Americas. 

This Thanksgiving week the Spine Crackers read Paul Auster's 1989 coming of age-ish novel Moon Palace. 

This week the Spine Crackers read weird-fiction author Michael Cisco's first novel, The Divinity Student (1999). 

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was a Welsh author whose horror stories are often seen as a precursor to the "weird fiction" of today. This week the Spine Crackers read his two novellas "The Great God Pan" and "The White People."