The Big Book Project

James Elkins returns to the show for his third visit to talk with Lori about Stories Like Illnesses, out October 6 from Unnamed Press. It is the first book or volume of his Five Strange Languagesnovel (though the third to be published), and Jim is careful to say these books are not a series, but rather a single novel, over twenty years in the making. Each of its five books (Weak in Comparison to Dreams, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, Stories Like Illnesses, and two more, yet to be published), can be read independently, and each has its own style, with the first three books unfolding over the same period time in the life of Samuel Emmer, a man who works for the local water department studying water-born parasites, as his life gradually comes apart.

Jim explains how his original, single novel became five books, why the third volume was the one he shopped to publishers, and what it took to weave the five back together again once Unnamed Press agreed to publish them. Arriving at the same time as Stories Like Illnesses is Elkin’s Ideas and Materials, a nonfiction companion written alongside the novel, rather than after it, and full of the doubts and resolutions he had while working on Five Strange Languages.

Lori and Jim get into why this novel about memories is the opposite of Proust, in that it is built on the idea that memories erode the more you revisit them, rather than blossoming with the taste of a madeleine. They talk about the “Asphyxiation” chapter in Stories Like Illnesses where five different narratives run in parallel columns and literally squeeze Samuel’s story down to a word or two per page; Jim‘s writing the novel in InDesign rather than Word; the jigsaw puzzle motif that runs through two of the books, and the wall-sized puzzle his own mother once finished with a marker; the modified piano scores old Samuel uses to conjure people he can no longer remember; and why, as an academic art historian, Jim made very sure that no fine art or working professors appear in the novel.

Watch above, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Links:

jameselkins.com

jameselkins.substack.com

https://www.unnamedpress.com

Anxieties of Experience, with Professor Jeffrey Lawrence

Lori talks with scholar, translator, and novelist Professor Jeffrey Lawrence about his book Anxieties of Experience:The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño. 

Lawrence's thesis is that authors in the United States have traditionally written from experience, ala the mantra, “write what you know.” Look at Ernest Hemingway or the Beats. In contrast, authors in Latin American and the Iberian peninsula come to writing from a tradition of voracious reading. Lori and Jeffrey get into how Borges's reputation amongst Latin American authors evolved during the twentieth century from being criticized by the left as a writer hiding in his library to becoming a master figure for authors like Bolaño, and why the American sections of 2666 and The Savage Detectives feel so real when, by every account, Bolaño never set foot in the United States.

The second half turns into a wonderful discussion on recommended Latin novels with Jeffrey recommending Cervantes, Mercè Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, Rosario Castellanos’s The Book of Lamentations, Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, and more! He also talks about two projects of his own: a translation of Marta Aponte Alsina’s PR 3 Aguirre, a 400-page novel about an American-owned sugar factory in Puerto Rico that he thinks would make a great big book for the show, and a Spanish-language bookstore he is opening in Manhattan’s East Village this October.

Watch above, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Translator David McKay returns to the show fifteen months after his last visit when we discussed Daanje's The Remembered Soldier, which would go on to win the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize. McKay's latest collaboration with Daanje is another monumental novel, The Song of Stork and Dromedary, out now from FSG. In Daanje's home country the Netherlands this novel did something no book had done before, winning both of the country's two major literary prizes in the same year.

Eleven chapters spanning 1788 to 2030. At the center is Eliza May Drayden, a parson’s daughter in a Yorkshire village who publishes one strange, badly received novel the same year her sister Millicent publishes a wildly successful one. Readers will recognize Daanje's sisters as modeled after the Brontës, and very early in the novel, like Emily Brontë, Eliza May dies young. What follows are stories of other women through decades and centuries reaching for this writer they can’t manage to recover, stymied by contradictory biographies, a notebook nobody can decipher, and an empty grave. Sisterhood is a strong theme in the novel, and recurring motifs punctuate the linkages among the various narratives.

Lori and David get into the altered Emily Brontë poems that open each chapter, how the novel is structured more like a long piece of classical music than a conventional narrative, and David's work translating the text. David also reads a passage from the book. It's a remarkable novel, and David, as always, is an engaging discussion partner.

Watch above, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

And please check-out David's series of readings from the novel here: https://www.youtube.com/@the song of stork and dromedary

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Lori is joined by Jose Vergara, Associate Professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College, for a deep dive on Sasha Sokolov, the great destabilizing stylist of Soviet literature and a true writer’s writer. Together they read through Sokolov’s first two novels, A School for Fools (New York Review Books Classics) and Between Dog and Wolf (Columbia University Press), both translated by Alexander Boguslawski.

They get into: the boy narrator of A School for Fools, his double, and his “problem with time,” railroads, and the dreamlike stream of consciousness passages; the alternating prose and poetry of Between Dog and Wolf, the title’s meaning, birds, butterflies, and transformation as an escape from Soviet constraint. They also discuss Sokolov’s exile and his fascination with the “how” of art.

Sokolov's novels are not without their challenges, but Jose's indispensable annotated guide to Between Dog and Wolf can help you on your journey of this important work: https://encyclopediaofthedog.com/

Other books mentioned: Astrophobia and In the House of the Hanged, Essays, both by Sasha Sokolov, Maidenhair and The Light and the Dark (Mikhail Shishkin), and Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev).

⏱️ Chapters 00:00 "Time doesn't make sense to him" 00:47 Welcome and meet Jose Vergara 02:26 Why Sokolov is a writer's writer 07:45 Inside A School for Fools 11:12 The double and the problem with time 12:44 Veta, the railroad, and a passage read aloud 16:13 How to read a destabilizing novel 23:29 Birds, butterflies, and transformation 28:03 Deformity and disability in Sokolov 36:26 Between Dog and Wolf: structure and story 44:17 The river, the living, and the dead 46:58 A poem read aloud: "Return" 1:00:13 Influences: Joyce, painting, and music 1:04:41 Who Sokolov influenced: Mikhail Shishkin 1:09:00 Why these big books are worth the struggle

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject
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Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer is a 700 page novel about a man who wakes in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact but no memory of who he is or how he got there. On this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers chats with Jim to celebrate the 10th Anniversary Edition of his expansive novel, one of those rare, abundant books that rewards the most careful reading a person can give it.

00:00 A man who does not want his identity back
03:19 Waking in Guanajuato with no memory
03:56 Pessoa, Alvaro de Campos, and the poet of the absent self
11:07 Saramago and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
13:56 Gabriela, the ATM card, and memory in reverse
17:52 Douchebag, the VC who killed his inner self
25:59 Gomez, Raymond, and the money-laundering caper
35:24 Clocks, Proust, and every way to look at time
44:20 Blindness, the doctor's wife, and seeing the contagion
46:17 Seven years, 3:30 a.m., and writing to be surprised
51:41 Abundance, color, and the inner life
01:02:19 Too many books and the hunt for the real thing

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject

Effingers by Gabriele Tergit is an 800-page German Jewish family saga published by New York Review of Books Classics, and this week NYRB publicist Nick During joins me to talk about what makes it so special.

Nick and I follow three generations of the Effinger family from a watchmaker’s bench in small-town Bavaria to the grand houses and Sunday lunches of Berlin, across about seventy years of German history that ends with the catastrophic destruction of the family and German Jewish civilization in WWII.

We talk about Gabriele Tergit’s documentary style and her 151 short chapters, the way she gives us almost no interiority yet still makes these people feel vibrant and alive. We talk about Uncle Waldemar, the jurist who refuses to convert and decades later sees clearly what is coming. We talk about the remarkable women of the novel, and about the last hundred pages, where the dread finally lands. And we spend time with Tergit herself, a Berlin court reporter and author of Käsebier Takes Berlin (also published by NYRB), who fled in Germany in 1933 and finished this book in exile at a point in time when the world of Effingers and the type of characters that populate it, had vanished.

If you want to read Effingers in good company, follow The Big Book Project on Substack and subscribe wherever you listen. Come read the big books with me.

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus is a puzzling novel, and in this episode of The Big Book Project host Lori Feathers and guest Chad W. Post take on the first two hundred pages featuring an unreliable narrator, an unorthodox musical prodigy, and the transformation of art making into conformity to a systematized order.

The Big Book Project was created as a forum to share ideas about challenging novels, and today's conversation makes clear that questioning together is far more rewarding than puzzling alone.

Here's a few of the threads that we pull on in this episode: how much should we trust Zeitblom the biographer writing almost fifty years after the fact, insisting on his fabulous recall ability, and probably in love with his subject; Zeitblom's commentary on his own manner of writing Adrian's story; the coded use of Esmeralda's name; and, the twelve-tone system that Schoenberg made famous.
Throughout the discussion Lori and Chad keep returning to the tension underneath it all--humanism set against order, sentiment against system, during the decades in Germany when these arguments carried consequences far beyond music.
We hope that anyone who knows of Doctor Faustus only by reputation will find in this episode a reason to read and discuss it with us. Subscribe and follow along. Share your thoughts in the comments.

#DoctorFaustus #ThomasMann #TheBigBookProject

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject

(Lori recorded this interview on a different device, and we apologize for the poor quality of her audio.)

For five decades Steven Moore has been one of the most thoughtful champions of the kinds of novels we read at The Big Book Project — the abundant, stylistically ambitious works that reward slow attention. He is the foremost scholar on William Gaddis, the editor who worked alongside David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest, author of a two-volume alternative history of the novel, and a former editor at Dalkey Archive Press. If your bookshelves are groaning under the weight of capacious fiction there is a very good chance that Steven Moore played some role in getting it out into the world.

In this conversation Steven joins host Lori Feathers to discuss his new collection, Last Time "Around": Essays, Reviews, Interviews. They discuss why Gaddis turned toward the nineteenth-century Russians, what W. M. Spackman understood about style that most critics still miss, and why a sense of humor is closer to a sense of rebellion than to mere lightness.

The conversation moves into the question of artistry, that elusive quality that separates literature from fiction, and Steven argues for the kind of close attention that asks why an author chose dusk rather than twilight — the choices that take a second reading to even notice. They discuss the small presses that have come to the rescue of literature, dwindling book coverage, and whether there is still an audience for the big, brainy, erudite novel of the kind that once changed Moore’s life. Toward the end Lori draws Steven into a round-robin, asking Steven to opine on novels by, among others, Lucy Ellmann, Susanna Clarke, Mervyn Peake, Joseph McElroy, Gertrude Stein, John Cowper Powys, and James Elkins.

If you love long novels, dense novels, novels that ask something of you — subscribe to The Big Book Project on YouTube and follow along on Substack. Host Lori Feathers reads the abundant works of fiction with fellow bibliophiles, one extraordinary novel at a time.

https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject

Watch the full episode on youtube: 

As we continue reading The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Richard Bailey joins me to talk about Part Two of the novel. Richard is my fellow bookseller at Interabang Books and simply, one of my favorite people to talk to about books, ideas, and the creative process. As we continue to try to understand who Kristian is, the direction and intent of his photography, and the influences on him of the mysterious Hans and the Faustus story, Richard and I discuss, debate, and challenge each other about Kristian’s character and the philosophical underpinnings of the novel. I hope that the discussion enhances your own reading of the novel.

The name Fernando Del Paso was new to me two and a half years ago when author, publisher, and Dalkey Archive Press alum Martin Riker introduced me to Palinuro of Mexico. What a revelation this late Mexican novelist! Here was an author who wrote wildly, exuberantly, and explored consciousness, memory, and the ineffable mysticism of the world in such a compelling way. It didn’t take me any time at all to go out and purchase a second-hand copy of his only other novel to be translated into English, News From the Empire, a thematically different novel than Palinuro, but with that signature, uncontainable writing style. It’s such a pleasure, then, to find a fellow fan of Del Paso, who, like me, wants to foist these novels on adventuresome readers in the US. 

Ron Restrepo is one of the most intrepid readers I know, and I had fun talking to him about News From the Empire. We discuss that wonderful style, the novel’s polyvocal narration, and how Del Paso interrogates notions of empire and historiography. I hope that this conversation will persuade you to read this exuberant, funny, and tragic novel. Or if not, perhaps you will enjoy our discussion of the brief reign in Mexico of two European royals: Maximillan of Hapsburg Austria and his Belgian bride Charlotte, the daughter of King Leopold, I, and how Europe’s imperial ambitions in Latin America were debated, at times resisted, and other times poorly implemented, with the United States, France, Spain, and the Church in Rome each exercising its power in pursuit of conflicting interests.

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