Send us a text

Using the anonymous messaging app, NGL, we asked our listeners for questions. And boy did we get some! Everything from Reuben's PhD, plagiarism scandals, past guest hotness levels, and much more!

Support the show

Send us a text

Reuben and Rio speak with Rio's friend Liam about Australian writer Max Easton's The Magpie Wing.

Order here: https://giramondopublishing.com/books/the-magpie-wing/
 
...or anywhere you order your books.

Support the show

Send us a text

Returning guest Paul Dalla Rosa takes us on a tour around some of his favourite places to eat and drink while we talk about his new collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, out now from Allen and Unwin in Australia and Serpent's Tail in the UK. We also chat about many other things, and we revel in the fact that this is the first time all three of us have recorded together outside of Zoom!

Buy Paul's book here:

https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/fiction/popular-fiction/An-Exciting-and-Vivid-Inner-Life-Paul-Dalla-Rosa-9781761066191

or here:

https://serpentstail.com/work/an-exciting-and-vivid-inner-life/

Read Paul's author interview series, Bad Artist Statements:

https://pauldallarosa.substack.com/

Support the show

Send us a text

Josh and Maddie from the amazing Evil Thespian podcast join us to discuss Oscar Wilde's one act play, Salome, and Wilde, the 1997 biopic directed by Brian Gilbert starring Stephen Fry and Jude Law.

Subscribe to Evil Thespian here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/evil-thespian/id1562330987.

Support the show

Send us a text

The wonderful Angela Nagle joins us to talk about Robert Hughes' fantastic study of modern art, The Shock of the New.

Subscribe to Angela's substack: https://angelanagle.substack.com/
Buy Angela's book, Kill All Normies: https://www.amazon.com/Kill-All-Normies-Culture-Alt-Right/dp/1785355430
 

Support the show

Send us a text

Gian from Twinkrev (RIP) joins Rio and Matt to talk about two Vegas movies: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam 1998) and Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995).

Support the show

Send us a text

This week: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of lot 49. Meaning, postmodernism, why Pynchon is like David Lynch (and Tolkien!) and more.

Support the show

Send us a text

Alice Gribbin, poet and author of the wonderful Notes of an Aesthete, joins the lads to talk about Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's luxurious novel of fading Sicilian nobility, The Leopard (1958).

Find Alice's work here: https://alicegribbin.substack.com/
Alice's twitter: https://twitter.com/asgribbin

Support the show

Send us a text

River returns for a very long, freewheeling and suitably drunken chat about Carson McCullers' novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and the 2013 film version of Tracy Letts' August: Osage County.

Southern Gothic and The South in fiction, the life and work of McCullers, ethno-narcissism, loneliness as a constant in the human condition, Harper Lee as a McCullers wannabe, family tales that could be true crime podcasts, gushing about Margo Martindale, the power of the Southern matriarch, eating "the fuckin catfish!",  the need for messy writers,  why The Heart is a Lonely Hunter could only be written by someone who drank themselves to death on the deck of a cruise ship, and much much more. Be prepared for long digressions!

Subscribe to River's Substack: https://riverpage.substack.com/

River's piece on Carson McCullers for the Washington Examiner: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/empty-suit-messiahs

Support the show

Send us a text

We discuss three articles that did the rounds recently.

Mitch Therieau's "Vibe, Mood, Energy or, Bust-time Reenchantment": https://www.thedriftmag.com/vibe-mood-energy/

Christian Lorentzen's "Authorial Fragility and the Enemies of Poptimism": https://www.gawker.com/culture/authorial-fragility-the-enemies-of-poptimism

and Ann Manov's "Has Fuccboi Killed Literature?": https://unherd.com/2022/02/has-fuccboi-killed-literature/

Talking vibes, vibe shifts, the internet as spectral realm, technopolitan occultism, critics vs fandom, cringe accelerationism, books reviews about discourse about books, rendering terrible online language in literature and more.

Support the show