On this episode, David is joined by reader and writer Derek Maine to discuss Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by everyone's favorite pessimistic, long-winded, Hungraian doom master László Krasznahorkai. By everyone, we mean ours. He's a favorite here at BOSS.
And we are happy to be joined by Derek Maine, author of CHARACTERS, published by Expat Press in 2022.
Join the two of them as they talk fear, form, apocalyptic shizz, and the faintest glimmers of hope.
Check out Derek's book: CHARACTERS and find him on TWITTER
George Salis, author of Sea Above, Sun Below joins David to discuss The Satanic Verses, the controversial, exuberant, magical, and magnificent novel by Sir Salman Rushdie.
They discuss the poetry, the allusions, and the history of this "Everything" novel in their own labyrinthine and interconnected way.
Meet Alfred Brown IV, educator and vocalist of the LA hardcore punk band Dangers. He’s into Amy Hempel. Like, really into Amy Hempel. Listen in for a deep conversation covering everything from the unintended emptiness of slogan-heavy lyrics to Hempel’s short story rhythm to questioning the need to categorize any type of writing — fiction, non-fiction, memoir, et al. — as anything other than just prose.
Make sure you check out Alfred Brown IV as well as his work in Dangers and Cultural Materials. Oh, and grab a copy of that Hempel collection and signal to the world that you are most definitely on the correct wavelength.
Pragmatic non-hierarchical structures! Breaking the space time continuum! The sociopolitical and philosophical dualities that exist between two planets — but also inside us all! Join David, Eric, and Nick as they dissect Ursula K. Le Guin’s often revered classic The Dispossessed. They wonder if the book is the left-wing equivalent of The Fountainhead, if the neon color scheme of the mass market paperback version was an agent of pre-bias, and if they are missing some key aspect of the book that makes this such a beloved tome to many a sci-fi reader. And perhaps most predictably, Nick finds another excuse to talk about the Warped Tour (metaphorically speaking, of course).
In this edition of The Substance of Influence Nick chats with Ross Farrar, vocalist of the Northern California punk band Ceremony, about the connections between the band’s latest record In the Spirit World Now and the classic Saul Bellow novel Humboldt’s Gift. Listen in as we discuss the similarities between Bellow’s blend of rough intellectualism and the literary underpinnings of punk music, why poetry should just tell you what it is, and the psychological impact of being on a Megabus for over ten hours. Additionally, convincing arguments are presented for why you should stop being a square, yo.
In this edition of The Substance of Influence, Nick chats with University of California-Berkeley English Professor Catherine Flynn about her new book, James Joyce and the Matter of Paris. Listen in for discussion on the (un)romantic Paris of yesteryear, the sources of all those cool modernist moves, and why Joyce’s fiction is, um, a bit smelly.
In other news, members of the B.O.S.S. reading group in San Francisco are now terrified about the potentially impending selection (read: assignment) of Finnegans Wake. Our deepest apologies in advance.
In this installment of the Books of Some Substance podcast, Nick is joined by University of California-Berkeley English Professor Catherine Flynn to dissect the endless permutations of Samuel Beckett’s oft-overlooked Watt. Is there meaning behind Sam’s lists upon lists upon lists? Is this a reality more real than realism itself? And will there be an opportunity for Nick to —most predictably — use the term “post-post-post modern”?
To language, we raise our glass, and descend into the Schopenhauerian darkness . . . but with a few delightful aphorisms destined for refrigerator magnets along the way.
You may be thinking: If I had a dollar for every time I felt like I was just sitting in the waiting room of life—except that the room was an open field with a single tree in it and my best bud just wouldn’t keep his boots on—I’d be rich! Or in a hit Samuel Beckett play. Whether it is about morality or acceptance or the morality of acceptance, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot resonates indefinitely. Listen in as David, Nick, and the recently returned Nathan talk it through, possibly existentially navel-gazing in the process.
Have you heard the bad news? God is dead. But in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, you can't keep a good god down—even when you murder a consumptive flim-flam man, seduce a fifteen-year-old, and blind yourself with quicklime. So put glass shards in your shoes, turn up your headphones, and drink every time we say "nihilism."
(This episode’s summary was written by our guest, Kathleen Founds. Before she found herself dreaming up nihilism-themed drinking games on a classic literature podcast, Founds wrote the novel When Mystical Creatures Attack!, which won the 2014 University of Iowa Press John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book.)
In this latest installment of the Books of Some Substance podcast San Francisco State University English Professor Sarita Cannon returns to talk about the violent grace (or graceful violence?) of Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Listen in as Nick and Sarita talk about the curious relationship between Catholicism and the grotesque, how O’Connor can keep a live audience laughing right up until a story plunges into mass murder, and the intriguing, dark-prophet nature of The Misfit. Somewhat surprisingly, zero Glenn Danzig references were made.
On this, our first episode of The Substance of Influence episodes, David speaks with fiction writer and poet Chaya Bhuvaneswar, winner of the 2017 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize for her first book White Dancing Elephants.
They discuss authorial voice, being a reader and a writer, influence in general, direct influence in particular with Chaya's selection of the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and, of course, her wonderful collections of short stories.
You can find Chaya and her work at https://chayabhuvaneswar.com/ and on Twitter @chayab77
As always you can find us here at http://www.booksofsomesubstance.com/ and on Twitter & Instagram: @booksosubstance
In this episode of the Books of Some Substance podcast, Stanford English Professor Roanne Kantor stops by to chat with Nick about Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes. While providing a fertile ground to discuss what exactly Global Anglophone literature is, the 2008 novel also packs many a nod to Latin America greats García Márquez and Vargas Llosa and pairs well with that other stellar work about General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and 1980s Pakistan, Salman Rushdie’s Shame. A Case of Exploding Mangoes is also hilarious, thus asking the question: Is realism or satire the correct way to address topics as unsettling as the violence and oppression of a dictator’s regime? Either way, rest assured: The general dies in this one.
If by chance—and what else really controls it all other than chance?—you are into examining the futility of it all, or, of course, the scorn of it all, then the latest B.O.S.S. podcast on László Krasznahorkai’s The Last Wolf in which David, Stephanie, and Nick examine the tale of how a washed up German author tells the tale of traveling to the barren plains of Spain to encounter a warden telling a tale of how the area’s final wolf perished—yes, perished—all told to the Hungarian barman who doesn’t totally mind, even though this Stammgast isn’t Hungarian or even a good looking chick, is for you (the podcast episode, that is, but also the book, naturally).
Did you just stop at digging up her body? How crippling is your love?
That day they discoursed in a cool and oft solitudinous basement. Eric and Nick and Dean Rader of the University of San Francisco examined Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West and inquired what Cormac McCarthy had in mind. Sulphurous and detached and surgically endeavored as that mind may be. They passed through the beauty and bleakness of the prose and the ruinous afterimage of the bloodstained vacancies of emotions firestoked and withheld. They glanced upon the ragged edges of representations of history and race and staccato swells of animalistic fervor.
The judge!
His judgeness!
Gunpowder manufactured in a swatch of Miltonlike fury. Bloodslaked heart strings pulled by feats of erudition and eloquence. Interpretations laggard and dusty slithered out of flattened enormity. Agecurled pictures of America at its genesis and at its present left naked and creaking to wrench a somnolent populace from dreams into harsh plumes of introspection and reckoning.
A man sits down at a cafe. Pauses. Thinks. Writes a sentence. Pauses. Thinks. Writes another sentence. Pauses. Thinks. Will that next sentence be about solving an age-old puzzle of a pirate’s submerged treasure? Or perhaps it will be about cloning Carlos Fuentes? Or maybe it will just be about an attack of giant, shimmering silk worms. Only César Aira knows, but he ain’t looking back and neither should you.
On this episode of the podcast, join David, Nick, and Frida as they embrace the constant flight forward of Aira’s The Literary Conference. If your wholly unique collection of life experiences and consumption of art have led to an overlap of experimental fiction, surrealism, and B-movies, this one’s for you.
Is there anything beneath the iceberg of Ernest Hemingway's status than the Hemingway Lifestyle Brand™, with its hyper-masculinity, pared-down prose, and a shirtless, boozy, gun-toting Papa?
On this episode of the podcast, join Nick, Eric, and Stephanie as they find the answer to that question by analyzing the second best piece of war-time art after Top Gun: Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms
As always you can find us here:
On Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance
On the ole interwebs: www.booksofsomesubstance.com
You know the feeling. Or, perhaps, the lack thereof. It can happen to even the strongest human, the greatest writer, the toughest leopard capable of climbing the highest heights. But is it stagnation? Boredom? Regret? Or just your average case of gangrene? Only time (or one's continued sense of consciousness before the ultimate blackout) will tell.
Bust out your hiking boots and climb to Ngaje Nga, you life-wasting fools! It's the conclusion of Hemingway Short Story Month!
Join Nick and Stephanie as they dissect one of Harry Hemingway's most prophetic short stories: "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." BYOB.
As always you can find us here:
On Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance
On the ole interwebs: www.booksofsomesubstance.com
On this episode, the third in our Hemingway Short Story Month, David and Nick are joined by Stephanie to discuss the oft-anthologized "Hills Like White Elephants," an anis-soaked, dialogue-heavy, purgatorial little number in which two characters talk around the possibility of an abortion and a doomed relationship.
Find the story, and give us a listen.
Follows us on Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance
Check out our homepage: www.booksofsomesubstance.com
Hola Nada!
On this episode, our second in the Hemingway Short Story Month, join David and Nick as they discuss the story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."
Ernest Hemingway was born in nothing in Oak Park, nothing. As a young man he worked as a nothing for The Nothing City Star until nothing, when he volunteered as a nothing on the nothing front. He was severely wounded and decorated for nothing. In nothing, he joined the nothing nothing nothing in nothing. With the encouragement of such fellow nothings as Nothing Nothing, Nothing Nothing, and F. Scott Fitznothing, Hemingway published his first book, Three Nothings and Ten Nothings. With The Nothing Also Rises, published in nothing, Hemingway gave a voice to the "lost nothing" and was immediately recognized as the leading nothing of his nothing.
Howdy bright boys and girls!
Roll over in bed, face the wall, and forget the wrong people you double-crossed in Chicago with a new episode of the Books of Some Substance podcast.
This month we are reading four of Papa Hemingway's short stories. First up: The Killers, an elevated piece of noir with all the Hemingway trimmings.
Follows us on Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance
Check out our homepage: www.booksofsomesubstance.com
Ah yes, Sabbath’s Theater. Perhaps you remember that one uncle of yours reading it at family Thanksgiving ’96. Or maybe you noticed a dash of judgment in the eye of your local librarian upon recently checking out a quality hardcover edition. (Don’t worry, everyone’s just pumped that you still go to the library.) Maybe you, a literary-minded baseball fan, picked it up after reading The Great American Novel and encountered a different kind of curve ball.
Is Philip Roth’s filthiest tome anything more than just that? Is it not safe for work or is it not safe for 2018? If one tallies the profanities in the book, can the felt bias against women be numerically and categorically proven? Or is this grotesque tale a warning against the inherent emptiness and damaging consequences of letting the male id run free—and thus a surprisingly topical lesson—despite the high frequency of bodily fluids discussed therein?
Join David, Eric, and Stephanie as they navigate these uncomfortable territories with grace, with depth of thought, and with more than a few audible shudders.
Follows us on Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance
Check out our homepage: www.booksofsomesubstance.com
For Books of Some Substance’s 25th episode, Nick is joined by San Francisco State American Literature Professor Sarita Cannon to discuss Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
Listen in for insight into 1970s politics, writing books like songs, the importance of myths and ancestry, and Morrison’s knack for asking all of the right questions while not giving any of the answers. And, oh yeah, that whole flying thing.
In preparation for next month's reading of Song of Solomon, Nick is joined by bookclub mainstays Frida and Eric to discuss Toni Morisson's key work of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
Listen along as they discuss otherness, reading race, the inherently political, and their own confrontation with ways in which we read.
With Nathan still motorcycling through the Americas, David and Nick are joined by Johanna, a wonderful and informative member of the Books of Some Substance bookclub, to discuss Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead.
We talk Böll's style, violence in all its forms (institutional, linguistic, literal), fake news, 70s West Germany and the red scare, Amanda (Foxy) Knox(y), and, of course, like the appearance of Tlönian objects, a Borges reference is made.
Find a copy of the book, read it, and listen.
Follows us on Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance
Check out our homepage: www.booksofsomesubstance.com