Two Month Review

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hello!

I meant to write a proper post welcoming you to the Three Percent substack earlier this week, but have been too anxious and distressed to do it right . . . Still am, if I’m being honest, but we all need a distraction, and talking about books are mine.

This Substack will be, for the time being, a duplication of the Three Percent blog, which has been active since 2007, but, honestly, feels like it belongs in 2017. The way in which publications of this sort are shared, read, discovered, and appreciated has changed dramatically over the past 17 years, starting with the elimination of the Google Reader in 2013. So, in order to reach the widest readership possible, we’re moving over here.

What can you expect from this? Well, starting in January 2025, I will have slightly more time to read, research, and write, and intend to put a lot of my efforts into creating content for this Substack and the Mining the Dalkey Archive one (which is restricted to only Dalkey titles and stories from the press’s past). Over here, I’ll be getting back to basics: writing about forthcoming translations, updated and relaunching the Translation Database, running excerpts from Open Letter titles and ones from other publishers, writing occasional reviews, ranting, explaining some aspects of publishing especially as they concern the field of translation, and posting all of our podcasts.

Which brings me to today’s post.

Back in 2017, we launched the Two Month Review as a way of discussing “challenging” works of literature slowly, over a series of podcasts, providing an entertaining and smart way of entering books that might otherwise seem intimidating to some readers. It’s been an incredibly fun ride in which we’ve discussed everything from Gaddis’s J R to Volodine’s Radiant Terminus to Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy to Guðbergur Bergsson’s Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. Sometimes we love the book, sometimes opinions are mixed. Regardless, these are evergreen seasons that can be appreciated whenever you decide to engage with a particular book—although we also structure them with enough recap and citations that, even if you haven’t read the book, you can follow along and get a lot out of these. (Conversations tend to expand into more abstract ideas about art and literature and the craft of writing.)

Our twenty-fourth season kicked off yesterday with the attached episode on Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man. We decided to start this season with this book before turning to Melvill by one of our favorite authors, Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden. The full schedule of episodes and what pages are being covered each week can be found here in case you want to follow along.

If you haven’t heard of The Confidence-Man . . . buckle up. All of Melville’s works are amazing, but this somewhat cynical send-up of grifters taking place on April Fools’ Day on a steamboat is something else. In the words of Rodrigo Fresán, it’s “Pynchon before Pynchon.” It’s funny, asks big questions about faith and mankind, and is simply wonderful to read.

Which I hope you do! (Seems like a good time to examine how grifters gain power . . . if you know what I mean.) Or at least listen along. And if you like what you hear, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, where you can also subscribe and get the episodes a day before they come out here. And you can even watch the episodes on YouTube if that’s something you’re into.

Enjoy! And I’ll be back next week with some info about a new Open Letter title, and possibly some more teasers of what’s to come.

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.