Better Read than Dead Podcast

Next on the pod, we'll have Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, with George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin following. And we'll be wrapping up this weirdly extended season in the tradition of Better Melville than Dead -- The Confidence-Man.

We're talking linguistic philosophy, the category of the human, and more. We highly recommend lots and lots of Delaney's work, including 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.

Samuel Delaney describes himself as a "boring old Marxist," which, as boring old Marxist ourselves, we think slaps. But there's nothing boring about Babel-17 (1966). A poet starship captain, a cat-man pilot, and space throuples? Sign us up!

Happy bday to the realist one. Blasting our intro music in your honor, comrade.

excited as a person who only knows of this book from a passing mention in Northanger Abbey lol

yessss I've been waiting for this one

For more on Lewis and his place in the genre, we highly recommend friend of the pod Michael Gamer's Romanticism and the Gothic as well as Angela Wright's chapter on Lewis and Radcliffe in the Cambridge History of the Gothic, Vol. I.

As ever with the gothic, we're talking sex, desire, critiques of patriarchy, and how 18th-century Britons were incapable of being even slightly chill and normal about Catholics.

Happy Halloween 2023, comrades! We have maybe the most batshit novel of the British gothic on offer for you -- Mathew Lewis's The Monk.

Satan turns into a dinosaur at the end. A hot wizard named Matilda dommes the devil himself. Join us for a wild ride!

In a couple weeks, we'll have Matthew Lewis's insane gothic novel The Monk for you. Just in time for Halloween!

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. We recommend all Raymond Williams.

And we're back! With Aldous Huxley's totally incoherent Brave New World, a staple of high-school English classes and people into Jungianism (gross).

We're down with dunking on Fordism, but it would be cool if Huxley knew why it was bad.

IT'S HAPPENING

Comrades -- we're back this Sunday! Our Brave New World ep drops 10/8, and we have The Monk soon after.

‎Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective: Episode 1: Frankenstein on Apple Podca... ‎Show Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective, Ep Episode 1: Frankenstein - Jul 9, 2019

Teaching Frankenstein this wk and re-listening to the first-ever episode of @betterreadpod.bsky.social (lit from a left perspective ) bc it’s awesome you should subscribe

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...

You guys wanna know what our Halloween special this year is??

Babel-7!

We just recorded -- finally -- our Brave New World episode! It's real bad (the book, not the episode, which was tons of fun).

Will be out in a few weeks, with trashy ultra-goth The Monk to follow. Then Samuel Delaney!

Happy Bastille Day, BlueSky comrades!

Exactly four years ago today, we launched this little commie books podcast with a dream — what if we could combine our job of knowing stuff about books with our love of shitposting. We’re so happy to have you on this journey with us.

New eps coming soon!