Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

We embark on a cosmic journey through Samuel Delany's 1966 sci-fi gem, Babel-17. This novel by the brilliant self-described “boring old Marxist” (the best kind of person!) has it all: a telepathic poet captaining a star ship, naked space parties, a 10-foot-tall cat-man pilot, and a cosmic throuple guiding the way. And let's not forget the discorporate entities—because we all need some more space ghosts in our lives. We get into linguistic philosophy, the category of the human, and what the whole Babel thing is about. We read the Vintage edition that includes the in-universe short story “Empire Star” and recommend getting your hands on Delaney’s other works like his novel Nova and his 1999 critical work/memoir, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue on New York’s porn theaters of the 1960s and 70s. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.

For Halloween 2023, we bring you one of the craziest novels of all time (or certainly of the eighteenth century). Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is a tale of horny Catholics – men and women, in the clergy and not – sexy nuns, ultraviolence, and, as Katie puts it, “dinosaurism.” See, Satan turns into a pterodactyl to open up a can of whoop-ass on the Monk. Based. Another extremely based thing that happens, this smokin’ lady monk named Matilda turns out to be a wizard, does a full-on black mass, AND DOMMES THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS HIMSELF. It’s trashy as hell, it’s metal af, and we’re talking all the classic gothic themes – sex, desire, critiques of power and patriarchy, and how eighteenth-century Britons are constitutionally incapable of being even slightly normal about the “Romish religion.” We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Nick Groom, but we kinda recommend the Penguin for the cover art alone, which really gets at the dinosaurism in question (it also has full frontal, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of The Monk). For more on the gothic and Lewis’s place within it, we highly recommend friend-of-the-pod Michael Gamer’s Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, as well as Angela Wright’s chapter on Lewis and Ann Radcliffe in The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Vol. I. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.

Hi again, nerds: we’re back after a long hiatus with more high school English class reads and some Jungianism on the side! JK about that last one, we would never. We’re talking about Aldous Huxley’s 1932 “science fiction” novel Brave New World, which is about how Fordism is bad (yes) but so is being slutty (what? Why?). Shakespeare is Good. Drinking alcohol is Bad. We sure hope you’re onboard for blanket moral judgments that don’t seem to add up to much in the way of world-building, because this novel is crammed with them. We discuss politics of gender and sexuality, what a leftist critique might amount to here, and why mysticism is tiresome. We read the 2006 Harper Perennial reprint with Huxley’s intro to the 1958 edition called “Brave New World Revisited.” We consulted Raymond Williams’s “Utopia and Science Fiction” from Science Fiction Studies (1978) and recommend it. Honestly, Science Fiction Studies is generally pretty cool. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.

Friends, it's the crossover event of the century - we join our comrades at You're Tall but I'm Standing in Front of You (if you don't know their podcast, it's amazing, hilarious, brilliant, and you should subscribe immediately) for a discussion of Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992). It's a film that dares to ask the question, "What if the book didn't totally suck ass?" *Note to listeners -- we've been on a bit of an unplanned hiatus due to various things beyond our control, but we're recording new content now and will back with new episodes for you in the spring. Follow You're Tall but I'm Standing in Front of You on Twitter @youretallpod or email them at youretallpod@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter @betterreadpod, Tristan at @tjschweiger, Megan @tuslersaurus, and Katie @katiekrywo. You can also find us on Instagram and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com.

There is still plenty of spookiness left in the season! To celebrate, this week we are bringing you Stephen King’s The Body from his 1982 collection Different Seasons, also containing Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil. We talk about poverty and violence in rural America, masculinity, class, epic, and the classic Philadelphia tradition Wing Bowl. We get into the 1986 film adaptation Stand By Me, starring Wil Wheaton, who is also the star of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s not that bald guy, it’s the kid. We read the Signet edition. Check out King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) or one of his 65 other novels (seriously) or hundreds of short stories (also seriously) if you are interested in haunted cars, scary sewer clowns, or the various terrors of New England. *Note to listeners: Megan is off this week. She’ll be back with us next time for The Monk! Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Happy Halloween, book jerks! Starting our fourth annual spookfest, we’re reading The Stepford Wives, which should actually be called The Stepford Husbands (they’re the scary ones, after all, and credit to Amanda Davis for the appellation). We discuss Ira Levin’s 1972 horror-satire to return to some familiar questions: what are husbands for? Why are neighbors such creeps? If you could make a robot wife, how big would you make her boobs? We reflect on genre, bourgeoisification, liberal feminism, and Sir Mix-a-Lot. We read the 2002 William Morrow reprint with introduction by Peter Straub. Check out Jennifer Rhee’s The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor for more on bots bots bots! Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

We couldn’t wait to read the new novel-length version of Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, and it absolutely did not disappoint. Published as a short story in 1944, collected in Eight Men in 1961, and finally published as the novel version last year, the book serves as a major touchstone in Wright’s work, negotiating the space between his naturalist “early” work and his philosophical “late” work. We discuss race, religion, space, and style. We read the 2021 Library of America version with Wright’s essay “Memories of my Grandmother” and afterward by Wright’s grandson Malcolm Wright. We also consulted the Harper Perennial 1996 reprinting of Eight Men with introduction by Paul Gilroy. We recommend Lauren Michele Jackson’s New Yorker article “What We Want From Richard Wright,” from May 2021 and Bill Mullen’s Tempest article “Richard Wright and the Police State,” from October 2021. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

We are back and bringing you The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 historical novel about stepping on twigs and tricking your friends by following them around in a bear costume. We chat about race, the novel's politics, and how an adult man could get tricked by a bunch of beavers. And the French and Indian War! We read the Penguin Classics version with introduction by Richard Slotkin. For more on this novel, we highly recommend Sarah Rivett’s chapter in Unscripted America (2017) “Indiginous Metaphors in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.” For some fun, we suggest Mark Twain's 1895 gem, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

We finish our conversation on George Eliot’s 1871-1872 behemoth Middlemarch with an in-depth discussion of the book as an historical novel and the historical contexts of its setting in the early 1830s. We all have different answers to how much we liked-liked reading this massive thing (Tristan is a big fan, Megan and Katie… less so), but we all loved Dorothea, and we did all legitimately love talking about this novel. AND we all agree that the scene where Mr Brooke gets rotten eggs thrown at him because he had one-too-many glasses of sherry before a campaign speech and went Chuck-Grassley-on-Twitter incoherent is among the finest scenes in 19th-century British literature. All landlords are bastards, folks. To finish, we play a delightful game where we debate which Middlemarch character you want running your mutual fund. We read the Oxford edition, edited by David Carroll with an introduction by Felicia Bonaparte. For an excellent reading of Middlemarch as critical toward mid-19th century liberal ideological assumptions, we highly recommend Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain, which we discuss on the show. *Note to listeners – we’re taking a short mid-season break, but we’ll be back with new episodes in a couple weeks. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

For our 100th episode (!!!), it’s only fitting we tackle a Big One. And George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) is certainly that – literally (it’s SO MANY PAGES). Middlemarch tells the stories of several intersecting characters all trying in various ways to find meaning amid the alienation of industrial modernity, and we discuss epistemology, philosophy, gender, class and bourgeoisification, marriage, capital-H History, politics. This kind of is a novel about everything. Also, failsons abound! It wouldn’t be Better Read than Dead without failsons. Don’t forget to join us next week for Part Two! We read the Oxford edition, edited by David Carroll with an introduction by Felicia Bonaparte. For more on Eliot’s interest in nineteenth-century science and its bearing on Middlemarch’s epistemological concerns, we highly recommend Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, which we discuss on the show. And for another good discussion of Middlemarch and its contexts, check out this 2018 In Our Time episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/middlemarch/id73330895?i=1000409248380. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

It’s a journey Out West with the book jerks–we’re reading Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947)! One of the many under-appreciated women’s novels of the midcentury, this account of Molly and Ralph Fawcett and their bonneted, foofy, bunny rabbit sisters Rachel and Leah moves us into a conversation about childhood, gender, and geography in the US. We also discuss Stafford’s hilariously punchy introduction, in which she apologizes for the book’s ending, as well as embodiment and publication genealogy. We read the reprinted (and beautiful) NYRB version from 2010. We recommend a recent article by Katie Collins in the Journal of Modern Literature called “‘Her Ruined Head’: Defacement and Disability in Jean Stafford's Life and Fiction.” Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

All aboard! This week we are bringing you a one way ticket...to murder! It's Agatha Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. We talk about stabby eye-talians, big ole mustaches and detective fiction, and bust out some top-tier French accents. You'll feel like you're riding a bicycle built for two past the Eiffel Tower with a scarf made of cheese tied around your neck. Oui oui! This is particularly impressive when you consider that our heroic clue collector Hercule Poirot is Belgian. Who knew? We read the Harper Collins edition (1990) and for more on Agatha Christie, film adaptations of her work, and the class politics behind Christie's popularity check out Eileen Jones's 2021 Jacobin article "The Crime of the Century." Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

It has taken your favorite commie book jerks nearly 100 episodes to answer the much-debated question – what is the horniest novel of the British 19th century? Comrades, it’s Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). We absolutely love this brilliant novel about the torrid love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and the mysterious, often sinister, Gothic villain/anti-hero Heathcliff. (Did we mention he’s her adoptive brother? He’s her adoptive brother. It wouldn’t be a Gothic novel if it wasn’t HAVING THOUGHTS about endogamy and incest.) We talk gender, sexuality, patriarchy, repression that’s kind of not, and racialization, as well as the pressure this novel puts on Victorian “realism.” This is one damp novel, folks. Who knew the Yorkshire moors were so turnt? We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by John Bugg. For a wonderful and concise reading of Wuthering Heights that explores Brontë’s novel as a critique of normative Victorian epistemology, we highly recommend Nathan K. Hensley’s blog post “The Lapwing’s Feather (Wuthering Heights)”: http://www.nathankhensley.net/blog/the-lapwings-feather-wuthering-heights. There is a ton of great scholarship on Heathcliff as a figure of otherness, but one book we recommend is Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger which discusses many texts but builds part of its analysis by thinking of Wuthering Heights in the context of the Great Famine, ongoing as Wuthering Heights was published. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

You’ve been asking for it (and by “you” we mean “nobody”), so here’s Naked Lunch (1959)! It’s almost unfair to accuse Burroughs of having written this “high,” because there’s really no version of a Burroughs novel that isn’t about being absurdly high and abject. This nightmare account of heroin, orifices, evil doctors, and grime gets us talking about noveliness and what isn’t a novel, the humor of the grotesque, and the question of literary nihilism. We consider if Allen Ginsberg was to Burroughs as Hawthorne was to Melville: helping him keep his sh*t together in order to write a non-insane novel and if he just gave up on this one. We also talk about Olympia Press, which published this along with The Ginger Man and Lolita, and why filthy-minded publishers are necessary. We read the Grove Press 2013 restored edition. We recommend Jennie Skerl’s writings on Burroughs, particularly the collection William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989. We also recommend Burroughs’s letter collections, published in two volumes by Ecco Press. Check out some of the weird side-projects he did, including collaborations with Kurt Cobain and Laurie Anderson. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

To kick off Season 6, we are joined by comrade, friend-of-the-pod, and Indiana University South Bend associate professor of English Benjamin Balthaser to talk about Mike Gold’s amazing proletarian lit masterpiece, Jews Without Money (1930). If you haven’t heard of this semi-autobiographical novel about growing up on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century, it’s because US reactionaries tried very hard to bury the history of 1930s communist literature – and succeeded for a long time. We talk about left efforts to recover that history, plus Gold’s moving, hilarious, sad, and often shocking portrait of life in a Jewish tenement. We read the 1996 Carrol & Graf edition with an introduction by ultra-lib Alfred Kazin. You must read this introduction to, like us, get very mad and so you will understand why we dunk so hard on it. Ah, the end-of-history ‘90s, folks. For more on Gold, you should definitely check out Benjamin’s outstanding essay in Jacobin, “Mike Gold, the Writer Who Believed Workers Could Speak for Themselves” https://jacobin.com/2021/07/mike-gold-literature-jewish-american-proletariat-red-left. And you should also check out Benjamin’s fantastic book, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War from University of Michigan Press. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Benjamin on Twitter @BL_Balthaser, Tristan @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

In our Season 5 wrap-up, we try to stir up a little controversy amongst Yr Worships’s favorite book commies by rerunning Pilgrim’s Progress as a series of debates about the Greatest Hits (™) from past pods. A fierce argument breaks out over whether we have to lose Tristram Shandy or Ulysses from our boat to make it through the Slough of Despond – until we remember some jackass put a crate of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the hold. Which Season 5 failchild will we use as a life raft? (Pierre, obv., he’s pretty and buoyant what with entirely lacking a brain.) But never fear, we come together and make it to the Celestial City. Of communism. We’re off for a couple months, comrades, but will see you in the spring for Season 6! Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

You all demanded it, so we delivered! Delivered you from evil. Today we have The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) otherwise known as John Bunyan’s Excellent Ambien Adventure. It’s about his dream of a Christian named Christian who sets off on a little journey to the Celestial City where the grass is green and the girls are into religious allegory. We follow our hero with his backpack full of sin as he meets wingmen like Faithful who is full of faith, a guy named Help who helps him, and a woman named Lust of the Flesh whom we should not have to explain any more about. You get it. Do we find salvation? Does Christian make it to Mount Zion? Is it a good idea to do mixed martial arts with a fish monster who wears bears as shoes? We answer all these questions and talk about genre, allegory, interpretation, and some Puritans who buckled their hats too tight. We read the Norton edition, with notes and introduction by Cynthia Wall. If you still can’t get enough of Pilgrim’s Progress, we highly recommend Gregory S. Jackson’s article “A Game Theory of Evangelical Fiction” (yes there is a Pilgrim’s Progress board game and yes there are pictures included) and David M. Diamond’s “Sinners and ‘Standers By’: Reading the Characters of Calvinism in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” And check out our Joseph Andrews episode, which David guest hosted! Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Today in “men are trash,” and enslaving, colonialist white men are the trashiest of trash, we bring you Sir Richard Steele’s 1711 Spectator retelling of the “Inkle and Yarico” story. For 150 years, versions of Inkle and Yarico were among the most famous narratives of British colonialism in the Americas, and we discuss a few of the most important examples. It’s a story in which an English merchant is saved by a Native woman, gets her pregnant, and promptly sells her into slavery. (As we said, the trashiest of trash.) We talk constructions of race, imperial violence, genre, and why this story was read in so many ways in the eighteenth century. We read from and highly recommend Frank Felsenstein’s English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. For more on Inkle and Yarico and racist European representations of Native people from Columbus through the eighteenth century, we also recommend Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

Even we, three very experienced Book Jerks, weren’t really prepared for the nightmare that was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, aka Dicks out for Fash. One of us is Bolshier than ever, another has a distracted but still Polish mind, and the third is just a broken woman. We hope that you have your loins thoroughly girded, because this episode is sure to punch you right in those same loins. If you have haunches, watch out for punches to those too. We talk unsexy sex, Lawrence’s revolting fascist politics, disability, and… coal mining? We read the Penguin edition with the gross cover and intro by Doris Lessing. We do not recommend that you read this or any other edition, because your brain is much less smooth having not read it. We discuss it on the show and recommend Terry Eagleton’s chapter on Lawrence in The English Novel, because it is genuinely hilarious. We also recommend Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society and The Country and the City, because they both mention Lawrence and we all need more Raymond Williams in our lives. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

If you like dunking on useless aristocrats, novels brimming with the psychological tension of unfulfilled desire, and ships, have we got a great one for you! Persuasion (1818) is Jane Austen’s last completed novel, and as it involves boats, it is obviously Tristan’s favorite. We talk changing class forms, the novel’s interest in bodies and time, and capital-H History as both a lens onto the personal and the national/global. Katie also tells us what the U.S. version of a knighthood is – having a rest stop named for you on the New Jersey Turnpike. We read the magnificent Oxford edition with notes and introduction by friend-of-the-pod Deidre Shauna Lynch. There’s so much excellent Austen scholarship, but you can start with Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning or another favorite of ours, Claudia L. Johnson’s Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.