Unburied Books

Washington Post books editor John Williams joins us to discuss... John Williams' Butcher's Crossing, orginally published in 1960. The story, set in the 1870s, follows a Harvard dropout as he attempts to find a truer version of himself in the West. We talk about the book's challenge to Emersonian transcendentalism, American rapaciousness, and Western archetypes. (And worry not, we don't play the theme to Star Wars.)

References:
Stoner
William Maxwell
Henry James
Jean-Patrick Manchette
Eve Babitz
Barbara Comyns
Tove Jansson
Natalia Ginzburg
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Albert Bierstadt
Anthony Mann
Budd Boetticher
The Coen brothers
Clint Eastwood
"Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fred Schneider
The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville
Kurtz from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
John Ford's The Searchers
John Wayne
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
"Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving
Edward Abbey

Find us on Twitter or Instagram, and click here to view our most up-to-date episode schedule.

Writer and poet Vivek Narayanan joins us to discuss L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between. We talk about how Hartley, in this novel about a schoolboy's loss of innocence at the turn of the 20th century, explores childhood guilt and dramatizes the act of memory.

Follow Vivek on Twitter, and find out more about his work here.

References:
Ali Smith
Valmiki
Virginia Woolf
The Boat
Eustace and Hilda
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Fredoon Kabraji
Lagaan
The Ashes
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Find us on Twitter or Instagram, and click here to view our most up-to-date episode schedule.

Kim McNeill joins us to dicuss Thus Were Their Faces, a collection of short stories written by Silvina Ocampo and translated from Spanish by Daniel Balderston. We explore Ocampo's various renditions of cruelty, trace themes and motifs across her career, and use the F-word (feminism).

Follow along with Kim's splendid #NYRBWomen23 project here.

References:
The Levant Trilogy by Olivia Manning
The Tale of Genji
Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson
A Chill in the Air by Iris Origo
More Was Lost by Eleanor Perenyi
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Robert Walser
The Corner That Held Them
Sur
Victoria Ocampo
Jorge Luis Borges
Adolfo Bioy Casares
City Lights Books
Forgotten Journey
The Promise
Norah Lange
Mariana Enriquez
Remedios Varo
Helen Oyeyemi
Virginia Woolf
"Borges and I"
The Invention of Morel
Lucrecia Martel
Read Cynthia Duncan's article here
Ezekiel
Mary Olivier: A Life by May Sinclair
James Joyce

Find us on Twitter or Instagram, and click here to view our most up-to-date episode schedule.

Writer Valerie Stivers joins us to discuss Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking. Originally published in 1955, this cookbook celebrates the fleeting freshness and enduring joy of the summer season. We seek the origins of David's refreshing approach to cooking, ponder the uses of food photography, and learn how Valerie's David-inspired menu came together.

Find all of our guest's Paris Review columns here, and read her reviews for Compact Magazine here.

References:
Nikolai Gogol
Richard Brautigan
Writing at the Kitchen Table by Artemis Cooper
Norman Douglas
Antony Beevor
Giovanna Garzoni
Victoria Granof
Rachel Roddy
Erica MacLean
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan
Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child

Find us on Twitter or Instagram to join in on our #SummerofDavid. Here is our most updated episode schedule. To purchase books we've covered, please visit our digital bookshop. Buying them here helps to support the show.

NYRB publicist Nick During joins us to discuss Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village by Ronald Blythe, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 100. We talk about the tricky business of categorization, the tension between work and vocation, and the nature of agricultural society. 

Massive thank you to John Hoekstra, who composed our theme music.

References:

BookCourt 

Edwin Frank

Word from Wormingford 

The View in Winter 

John Piper 

Shell Guides 

John Nash

Cedric Morris 

Charfield

Studs Terkel 

Matt Weiland 

Antony Beevor 

Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman 

The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics 

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village by Mary Chamberlain 

Iris Murdoch

Writer Chris Lee joins us to discuss An African in Greenland written by Tété-Michel Kpomassie and translated from French by James Kirkup. The book follows a young man's dream to reach the Arctic. We investigate some tropes of travel literature, find surprising links between Togolese and Greenlandic culture, and thirst for some reindeer coffee.

References:
"A Year of Reading the World" by Ann Morgan
Lynn Davis
Tennessee Williams
BBC Interview
Jupiter's Travels by Ted Simon
The NYRB Classics Book Club
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Guston in Time by Ross Feld
Conversations with Beethoven by Sanford Friedman
The Open Road by Jean Giono
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

To purchase books we've covered, please visit our digital bookshop. Buying them here helps to support the show.

Librarian, author, and critic Nancy Pearl joins us to discuss May Sinclair's Mary Olivier: A Life, originally published in 1919. We talk controlling mothers, Victorian roles, and the mysterious passage of time. Listeners unfamiliar with the plot may want to read the book before tuning in.

References:
Virago Modern Classics
The Little Review
Ulysses by James Joyce
Told by an Idiot by Rose Macaulay
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Villette
The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer
I'm Not Complaining by Ruth Adams
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
Mary Oliver
Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
Dolores by Ivy Compton-Burnett
A House and Its Head
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov
Elizabeth Taylor

To purchase books we've covered, please visit our digital bookshop. Buying them here helps to support the show.

Edwin Frank, editorial director of the NYRB Classics, joins us to discuss the evolution of the series. We learn how the books are selected, how the project has grown, and whether or not there was a secret plan all along.

Endless thanks to John Hoekstra, who composed our theme music.

References:
The Iliad and the Odyssey adapted by Jane Werner Watson and illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Hobbit
The Reader's Catalog
J. R. Ackerley
Alberto Moravia
The Woman of Rome
The Winners by Julio Cortázar
The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat
Nicolas Poussin
The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo
Ezra Pound
Anchor Books
Peasants and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov
Edmund Wilson
Eileen Chang
Vasily Grossman
The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Andrey Platonov
Victor Serge
Tove Jansson
My Dog Tulip
The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin
His Only Son by Leopoldo Alas
Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós
The World of Odysseus by M. I. Finley
Mary Beard
Haute vulgarisation
Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind by Lyall Watson
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
"The Task of the Translator" by Walter Benjamin
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
American University in Cairo Press
Sharjah International Book Fair
Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Red Thread
The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys
Travels in China by Roland Barthes
The Peach Blossom Fan by Kong Shangren
Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane
Rider on a White Horse by Theodor Storm
Signet Classics
James Wright
Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy
The Adventures of Sindbad
Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann

To purchase books we've covered, please visit our digital bookshop. Buying them here helps to support the show.

Historian Antony Beevor joins us to discuss Stalingrad written by Vasily Grossman and translated from Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. We talk about Grossman's observational powers, the boundaries between history and literature, and the context surrounding the book's narrative. Listeners unfamiliar with the plot may want to wait until they've read the book to tune in.

Read more about our guest's work here.

References:
A Writer at War
Luba Vinogradova
Christopher MacLehose
Andrew Nurnberg
Arthur Grimm
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Life and Fate
The great man theory
Guernica by Pablo Picasso
Michael Howard
Margaret MacMillan
Catherine Merridale
Operation Foxley
John Erickson
Operation Uranus
Konstantin Simonov
Ilya Ehrenburg
Vasily Zaitsev
Anatoly Chekhov
Enemy at the Gates
Treblinka
Pablo Neruda
Stefan Zweig
Chess Story
Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

To purchase books we've covered, please visit our digital bookshop. Buying them here helps to support the show.

Film critic Farran Smith Nehme joins us to discuss In a Lonely Place written by Dorothy B. Hughes and adapted into a movie by Nicholas Ray. We talk about the book's unique approach to suspense, the film's relocation of the characters from the margins of Hollywood to the center, and some of our guest's favorite noirs. Listeners unfamiliar with the plot may want to wait until they've read the book (and watched the movie) to tune in.

Check out Farran's Sight and Sound list here. As promised, you can view Dylan's Ray ranking here and Kassia's top 100 here.

References:
The Lady Vanishes
Nicholas Ray
Ride the Pink Horse
Robert Montgomery
Sarah Weinman
Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s
Gone Girl
Mary Higgins Clark
Ryan Murphy
Burnett Guffey
Humphrey Bogart
Louise Brooks
Lauren Bacall
Gloria Grahame
Noir Alley
Noir City Film Festival
The Maltese Falcon
Out of the Past
Laura
Otto Preminger
He Walked By Night
Lawrence Tierney
Imogen Smith
Detour
Decoy
The Missing Juror
Cure
Decision to Leave

To purchase books we've covered, please visit our digital bookshop. Buying them here helps to support the show.