This week, for their 20th episode, the Spine Crackers read French author Michel Houellebecq's controversial 2015 novel of religion, meaning-making, politics, and literature, Submission. 

This week the Spine Crackers read Hervé Guibert's brutally intimate and by turns hilarious and tragic semi-autobiographical account of AIDS and the early days of the crisis in the gay community in France. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Cameos by Michel Foucault and Isabelle Adjani. 

This week the Spine Crackers are joined by enigmatic friend of the pod Morgan to discuss the almost-as-mysterious author Evan Dara and their 2013 novel of community, capitalism, and economic destitution Flee. 

This week the Spine Crackers are joined and dramatically upstaged by the inimitable Scott Thomas of The Infinity Podcast and And the Best Picture Is... to read Hiroko Oyamada's lonely, evocative corporate dreamscape The Factory (2013). 

This week the Spine Crackers read Bass Cathedral, the fourth volume of Nathaniel Mackey's epic ongoing, beginning and end-less epistolary work of jazz, history, and identity (among many other things) From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. 

This week the Spine Crackers, along with OMEGA SPECIAL GUEST Daniel from the Viva La Dude podcast, tackle Helen DeWitt's genre and form-bending chonky boi novel about family and the nature of genius The Last Samurai (no not that one you rubes). 

This week the Spine Crackers read Guido Morselli's 1977 post-apocalyptic meditation on memory and selfhood Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing. If you have ever wanted to hear us sing, well boy howdy this is the episode for you!

This week the Spine Crackers read Anna Kavan's surrealist pseudo-autobiographical novel Sleep Has His House. This episode lives up the podcast's name, as disagreements were had, bones were broken, and feelings were hurt. Drama! Intrigue! Books!

This week the Spine Crackers head to British colonial Africa at some point in the flat circle of time with John Crowley's 1989 time-travel novella Great Work of Time!

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).