The NewlyReads

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. 

New music! New segment! Weekly episodes! What more could you want? Today Kylie and Daniel dig in to a sentence from Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. We talk about scansion, the passive voice, and the ways that textual artists use their medium to convey meaning, and how sleuthing literature folks tease that meaning out.

Dan makes Kylie read Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Is it a cowboy tale? A work of high modernism? The source text for Slow West? (Probably not that last one...) Rustle up your cattle and join The NewlyReads as they meander through the long history of landscape description, why Catholics get a good rep in literature, and how Kylie got Goldfinched by this one.

Also, a big announcement: We're going weekly! Starting next week, after every traditional episode, we'll release a shorter companion episode that delves into each author's sentence-level style. So tune in next week for our Sentence Breakdown of a line that encapsulates the themes and style of Death Comes for the Archbishop.

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Kylie has Dan read Colson Whitehead's 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys. After Kylie shares the story of the inscription on her copy of John Henry Days, the NewlyReads discuss why Whitehead frequently baffles critics and where his career might be going next.

For more on the historical research that informs the novel, go to www.theofficialwhitehouseboys.org

Dan makes Kylie read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, the book that was under a lot of Christmas trees in 2010. (That's, uh, about the best we could do to tie this deeply misanthropic book to any kind of holiday theme...) Join us as we discuss Franzen's amazing ability to antagonize everyone on the internet and decide whether Freedom lives up to its classification as one of the 21st century's Great American Novels. 

Kylie makes Dan read a B-side novel from an A-lister of American fiction! In the 1897 The Spoils of Poynton, an old woman with Britain's most beautifully decorated house is faced with the horrifying prospect of a daughter-in-law with hideous taste. Somehow, this ridiculous premise leads to high drama: furniture is moved in the night, and tea biscuits are incriminatingly displaced! Listen as The NewlyReads discuss why James isn't a household name, the novel's strange mix of headstrong and totally indecisive characters, and why titles with dual meanings really are the best. 

The NewlyReads do poetry! This episode we discuss why feminism is rockstar-level awesome, the caves under New York City (populated by monsters? I don't know, but probably), the newest biography of Adrienne Rich, and why poetry can make us sweat.
 
 A note about the end of the episode: We had a problem at the very end of the recording, so we learned that our announcement of the next episode was cut off! Tragedy. It's The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James, though! 
 

In this special episode, Dan and Kylie wade into murky philosophical waters to investigate why we're able to laugh, cry, and rage over the fates of fictional characters.

If you want to know what's in Dan's copious notes referenced on this episode, here's some of the reading we did to prep for this recording:
--Bernard Paris, Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature, NYU Press (1997)
--Amie L. Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, Cambridge UP (1999)
--Baruch Hochman, Character in Literature , Cornell University Press (1985)
--Howard Sklar, "Believable Fictions: On the Nature of Emotional Responses to Fictional Characters," Helsinki English Studies, Vol 5 (2009) 
--Paisley Livingstone, Andrea Sauchelli, and Paisley Livingston, "Philosophical Perspectives on --Fictional Characters," New Literary History, Vol. 42.2 (2011)
--Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's "Fictional Entities" (2018)