In the penultimate episode of this season, there’s a lot of talk about Melville’s relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne as we get more of Melville’s life as he bounces through time, writes Moby-Dick and the creation of “its own kind of reader: an inexhaustible reader. A reader that didn’t yet exist . . .”

The "Grifters Gonna Grift" t-shirt is still available and still sexy.

Next episode will be next week at the regularly scheduled time and will cover the end of Rodrigo Fresán's Melvill. You can find the full reading schedule here.

This week's music is "Vertigo" by FM Belfast.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

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On the final episode of 2024, Chad, Brian, and Kaija talk about Nico C. and being unmoored from time, last words, footnotes and ellipses, some highlights from the past year, ice, and more.

The "Grifters Gonna Grift" t-shirt is still available and still sexy.

Next episode will be next week at the regularly scheduled time and will cover pages 189-245 of Rodrigo Fresán's Melvill. You can find the full reading schedule here.

This week's music is "Water" by Ra Ra Riot.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

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Lori Feathers (Across the Pond podcast, Involutions of the Seashell, Interabang Books, and Republic of Consciousness Prize USA) joins Chad and Kaija to talk about prizes—Melvill is longlisted for the NBCC Greg Barrios Prize for Translated Literature!—the narrative structure of Melvill, Nico C., and vampires. A lot of fun is had along the way.

The "Grifters Gonna Grift" t-shirt is still available and still sexy.

Next episode will be in TWO WEEKS and will cover pages 123-188 of Rodrigo Fresán's Melvill. You can find the full reading schedule here.

This week's music is "WHALE" by Yellow Ostrich.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

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[Note: If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please resubscribe to this feed. The other one will be going away in the near future.]

With Melville's Fidèle receding into the dark distance, we turn our attention to Rodrigo Fresán's Melvill, a bombastic book about Alan Melvill and Herman and the passing down of stories from one generation to the next. On this special episode, translator Will Vanderhyden joins Brian, Chad, and Kaija to talk about translating Fresán, about the style and word play found in his books, about the footnotes, about what's to come. They also talk about the line connecting this to Confidence-Man, and how to read footnotes. And about the interplay between two narratorial voices in this first part.

Also mentioned are this interview with Fresán on Between the Covers, this one with Will Vanderhyden on Beyond the Zero, and this new Fresán story ("Music to Destroy Worlds" (An Exoeriment)") in Southwest Review. 

And here's where you can get your own "Grifters Gonna Grift" t-shirt mentioned in this episode.

Next episode will cover pages 62-123 of Rodrigo Fresán's Melvill. You can find the full reading schedule here.

This week's music is "Sink or Swim" by Young Fathers.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

[Note: If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please resubscribe to this feed. The other one will be going away in the near future.]

Chad, Brian, and Kaija venture into the darkness and turn off the light on Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, one of the oddest, most slippery books to be included in the Two Month Review. They talk about transcendentalism, self-reliance, Melville's interludes, Jean Giono's Melville, and more. 

And here's the "Grifters Gonna Grift" t-shirt mentioned in this episode.

Next episode will cover pages 1-61 of Rodrigo Fresán's Melvill. You can find the full reading schedule here.

This week's music is "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness" by The National. 

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

[Note: If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please resubscribe to this feed. The other one will be going away in the near future.]

Opening with a couple of rants, this week's podcast is spicy and also tries to make sense of a few of the more perplexing parts of the book. There's a wonderful interlude in this section from the narrator themselves, and, apparently, nine jokes? And a magic trick involving coins. You'll have to listen to understand.

And here's the "Grifters Gonna Grift" t-shirt mentioned in this episode.

This week's music is "Jealousy" by Phantogram.

Next episode will cover all of of The Confidence-Man. You can find the full reading schedule here.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

[Note: If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please resubscribe to this feed. The other one will be going away in the near future.]

"Grifters Gonna Grift" merchandise coming soon! This episode exposes just how useful footnotes can be as we transition from dusk to darkness, with the confidence-men being replaced by the Cosmopolitan. Under Discussion: The WWE, how nothing ever changes, the New Adam, land ownership, stripping people of their "humanity," cognative fallacies, peace pipes, and more.

This week's music is "The Ballad of the Costa Concordia" by Car Seat Headrest.

Next episode will cover Chapters 27-38 of The Confidence-Man. You can find the full reading schedule here.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

[Note: If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please resubscribe to this feed. The other one will be going away in the near future.]

Chad and Kaija go it alone this week, talking about some of the more uncomfortable parts of the book to read in 2024, the Goneril story and the "evil touch," how almost every beat in this novel has a counterpart, the wonderful authorial intrusion discussing the "consistency" of characters, and, with glee in their hearts, the Herb-Doctor.

This week's music is "Is This What I Have Missed?" by Jerome Blazé.

Next episode will cover Chapters 20-26 of The Confidence-Man. You can find the full reading schedule here.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Not the happiest day in which to record a podcast, but Chad, Brian, and Kaija speak their fears and then dive into Melville's Confidence-Man, talking about grifters, the value of footnotes, and just how modern and amazing Melville's prose is. They guess at who the "confidence man" might be, the burnt over district of western New York, Mormons, and a lot more.

This week's music is "All Bets Are Off" by Japandroids.

Next episode will cover Chapters 10-19 of The Confidence-Man. You can find the full reading schedule here.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

After referencing Joytime Killbox on hundreds of TMR episodes, we finally break it down with the author himself! Conversation includes ideas about short stories and how they function, the nature of endings, and how Brian has grown as a writer since this collection first came out, while also examining the intent behind a number of the stories, and how they work.

This week's music is "All My Friends" by Broken Social Scene.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

Starting next week we'll kick of Season 24, which will include both Confidence-Man by Hermann Melville and then Melvill by Rodrigo Fresán. Full reading schedule available here.

Follow Open Letter, Two Month Review, Chad W. Post, Kaija Straumanis, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.