The NewlyReads

Kylie takes on another NewlyReads Game. New stakes are introduced and street pennies are argued over. 

Kylie makes Dan read Hurston's beautiful short novel about a woman chasing her horizon. They discuss Hurston's reputation with her contemporaries, the novel's engagement with Transcendentalist ideas, and why it's so frequently taught in American literature courses. 

In this freewheeling bonus episode, Kylie and Dan assess Jarett Kobek's claim in I Hate the Internet that "the good novel, as an idea, was created by the Central Intelligence Agency." Kylie summarizes her dissertation research on the relationship between the American intelligence community and American fiction, Dan comes up with some wild metaphors, and they both weigh in on whether the CIA's influence on literary production prevented authors from developing new forms or ideas. Plus, a spontaneous NewlyReads Game and Dan's infamous T.S. Eliot impression!

An incomplete bibliography of great books on this topic that Kylie references in the episode: 

For more information on the Congress of Cultural Freedom, see Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. 

For more on the general relationship between American intelligence, literature, and university humanities programs, see Timothy Melley's The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State and Robin Winks's Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961.

For a more focused examination of how Faulkner was promoted as an American asset in the Cold War cultural battle, see Lawrence H. Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. 

And finally, for more information on the FBI's policing of black writers and thinkers in the twentieth century, see F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature , Barbara Foley's Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Richard Gid Powers's G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture. 

Dan Makes Kylie read Jarett Kobek's scree against our contemporary moment. Dan explains why I Hate the Internet is a valuable reflection of the way internet discourse has broken all of our brains, and Kylie attempts to process her frustration with Kobek's means to communicate his message.

As a bonus episode accompanying last week's discussion of Women in Love, Dan tests Kylie's knowledge of D.H. Lawrence's sentence level style with another installation of The NewlyReads Game! 

Check out our Instagram @thenewlyreads if you want to read the passages and test your close-reading knowledge before we reveal the answers, or drop us a line at [email protected] to tell us how you did.

Kylie makes Dan read D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920). Together, they discuss the novel's place in the Modernist canon, explore its depiction of a restrictive and generally doomed  Britain in the wake of WWI and industrialization, and acknowledge that sometimes you really do have to karate chop a demonic rabbit. 

Follow us on Instagram @thenewlyreads or drop us a line at [email protected] ! 

In the bonus episode on Nabokov's Pale Fire, Kylie and Dan discuss what characterizes Nabokov's sentence-level style. Then, they debut The NewlyReads game, a passage identification quiz designed to test the knowledge of the host who chose the novel under discussion. Can Dan identify which one of three passages comes from Pale Fire, and earn bonus points for ID-ing the authors of the other two passages? Can you, dear listener? 

Check out our Instagram page @thenewlyreads to see the quiz passages. Drop us a line at [email protected] to tell us how you did!

We'll be back in two weeks, after a short spring break, to discuss D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love. 

Dan makes Kylie read Nabokov's fictional scholarly edition of a poem by a fictional poet--it's fiction on fiction on fiction! They discuss the thin line between scholarship and conspiracy theories on Pale Fire, speculate on why Nabokov is rarely taught in English classes, and share anecdotes on why close reading is a helluva drug. 

In their second interstitial episode, The NewlyReads examine Jeff Vandermeer's first weird landscape by discussing "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris" from the collection City of Saints and Madmen. They talk footnote fiction, provide their rankings of Vandermeer's fictional worlds, and Dan explains why having Magneto-esque control over fungus would be the ultimate superpower. 

It's a podcast with a face! This week, Kylie has Dan read an author known with putting human faces on any old thing and calling it scary. Which, strangely, works every time.