Echoes of a Fairy Tale in a Devastating ...

Today, we want to bring back an episode from our archives. It’s about a book that has real beach read vibes. There’s a lot of water. It’s a relationship drama. And it’s also a daring story of survival. “Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck" made it onto ... Show More

If you can’t tell your Eurylochus from your Telemachus, fear not: Your primer on “The Odyssey” is here, just in time for Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of the 3,000-year-old epic. Madeline Miller, who reinvented “The Odyssey” in her best-selling novel “Circe,” explains w ... Show More

The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday this summer, giving Americans a chance to reflect on the nation’s past and imagine its future. Who better to help us make sense of this moment than Jill Lepore? The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, longtime staff writer at The ... Show More

Fantasy doesn’t always stay fiction. Sometimes it creeps into reality, and as we grow older those childhood fairy tales gain a whole new meaning. First, Sapphire reads a magical tale about a baker with a dark, delectable secret. Next, join Markeia as she follows a young occultist ... Show More

Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every ... Show More

Sometimes a book is so meta it sort of breaks your brain! How to talk about a book that is all beginnings and no ends? How to discuss a book that enlists You, the Reader, in its chicanery? We try to get on the wavelength with Calvino's text. You be the judge of if we get there. O ... Show More

The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first episode of Fiction and the Fantastic, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin explore two particularly mysterious stories in ... Show More

This week, the Reading discuss Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward and Persepolis by Majane Satrapi. Books Mentioned in this Podcast Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn WardPersepolis by Marjane SatropiSex Object by Jessica ValentiSex and Girls by Peggy OrgensteinAll the Single Ladies by ... Show More

Displacement, identity and the aftermath of warfare are themes running through today's episode on The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Author Jamil Jan Kochai talks with Ari Shapiro about why he used elements of science fiction like video games and magical realism to tell a largely autob ... Show More