Unburied Books

Dylan and Kassia return to discuss Castle Gripsholm written by Kurt Tucholsky and translated from German by Michael Hofmann. The novel tells the story of "the Princess" and her lover on holiday in Sweden. It's a simple summertime fairy tale ... or is it? We talk about metafiction, love and friendship, and the book's sly critique of 1930s Germany.

The Last Sane Woman review: https://therumpus.net/2024/07/16/the-archive-as-potters-field-hannah-regels-the-last-sane-woman/

NYRB Classics film adaptations list: https://letterboxd.com/greenchile42/list/nyrb-classics/

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Dylan and Kassia read Strange Pilgrims, a short story collection suggested by a listener.

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Dylan and Kassia discuss Howard Sturgis' 1904 novel Belchamber. It follows the coming of age of Sainty, a not-so-average English boy who prefers needlepoint to riding and Tennyson to girls. We talk about the novel's interweaving of comedy and tragedy, the nature of being a sissy, and, of course, Henry James' famous critiques.

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Screenwriter Howard A. Rodman joins us to discuss Jean-Patrick Manchette's Skeletons in the Closet, translated from French by Alyson Waters. This is a private eye novel set in Paris after the failed revolution of May 68. We talk about Manchette's playfulness with genre, the brutal yet slapstick violence in his books, and his collapse of high-versus-low distinctions.

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Tolkien enthusiast Alex Cuellar joins us to discuss The Silmarillion. One of us has to test the limits of our edurance for the fantasy genre.

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Leaf by Leaf host Chris Via joins us to discuss John Ehle's 1964 novel The Land Breakers. It is a story of love, sacrifice, and survival in an unspoilt Appalachian landscape. We talk about the book's nuanced character development, the violent birthing pangs of early America, plus the similiarities and differences between Ehle's bear hunt and Melville's whale watch.

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In this clip, we hear about how McNally Editions editor Lucy Scholes came to rediscover English author Kay Dick and her dystopian novel They.

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Author Linda Rosenkrantz joins us to discuss her 1968 "reality novel" Talk. In the summer of 65, Rosenkrantz took a tape recorder to the beach and documented her friends' conversations. She later shaped the transcripts from that trip into a sharp, funny, and unusually revealing book. We speak with her about her contrasting experiences with publishing then and now, her artistic inspirations, other tape recording projects, and more.

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Novelist Amit Chaudhuri joins us for a wide-ranging conversation as his first three books (A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, and Freedom Song) are republished as NYRB Classics. We talk about his uneasy relationship with the realist novel, the literary market's distortions of value, and the role place plays in his creative project.

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In this brief clip, publisher Kate Macdonald shares the story of writer T. H. White's most beloved dog, Brownie. In the full episode, we talk about Sylvia Townsend Warner's approach to biography, White's Arthurian cycle, and the unglamorous side of being an author.

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