In this episode, Jacke talks to Jeremy Tiang about his new translation of The Wedding Party, a Chinese classic contemporary novel written in the early 1980s by Liu Xinwu, one of the originators of what has been termed "scar literature." PLUS we feature a sneak preview of our conversation with Professor Mira Sundara Rajan, who has edited a collection of writi ... Show More
Today
837 Ghost Month (with Simon Wroe) | Madness and Murder - The Story of Charles and Mary Lamb
Jacke gets ready for the Halloween season with an episode filled with madness, murder, and ghosts! First, he recounts the story of Romantic period writers Charles and Mary Lamb. Although the brother-sister duo later became famous for their summaries of Shakespeare's tales, they e ... Show More
1h 15m
Oct 12
836 Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (with Robin Waterfield and John Sellars) | My Last Book with Daniel Olivas
What does it mean to live a good life? How can we accomplish it? For more than two thousand years, Western civilization has looked to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to help answer those questions. In this episode, Jacke talks to translator Robin Waterfield and scholar John Sellar ... Show More
56m 58s
Oct 8
835 Blackness in Iran (with Amy Motlagh) | My Last Book with Nicholas Boggs
What do Iranians - both home and abroad - think of race? Does "blackness" exist in Iran? And what can we learn about race and slavery in Iran from folklore, ethnography, literature, and films? In this episode, Jacke talks to author Amy Motlagh about her book Colorblind: Racial Th ... Show More
46m 4s
Jan 2025
Karissa Chen Brings Us A Chinese Love Story
Our first book show of the year is a first-time novelist, Karissa Chen. Her new book Homecoming is a novel a portrait in longing, an epoch love story between two characters torn apart by political unrest at the time of the Communist Revolution in China. It’s ambitious, it’s beaut ... Show More
30m 33s
Dec 2023
C Pam Zhang with Nihal Arthanayake
<p>This week on the Penguin Podcast, Nihal Arthanayake is joined by Booker Longlisted author, C Pam Zhang.</p><br><p>Together they discuss Zhang's latest novel, The Land of Milk and Honey, as well as the effects of extreme wealth on the human psyche, the place of pleasure and joy ... Show More
45m 57s
Jul 2021
The Penguin Podcast's Best of the Booker Prize
<p>To celebrate this year’s upcoming Booker Prize nominations, we've delved back into the archives and cherry-picked highlights from eight very special interviews. Hear about the inspirations, frustrations, and secrets behind the winners of the most prestigious prize in literatur ... Show More
30 m
Apr 2021
Feed Drop: The History of Literature - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
This isn't an episode of Overdue, it's a Feed Drop! We wanted to share with you an episode of The History of Literature, a podcast about great stories and why we love them.To use host Jacke Wilson's words, the show "takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of cr ... Show More
1h 1m
May 2021
16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic
Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard For the last seven episodes we've explored language, meaning, and their overlap with that thing we mean when we use language to say "poetry." In this episode we step back to some origins, including, at a meta-level, the origins of ... Show More
24m 57s
Aug 2024
Jane Austen, Simone de Beauvoir and Herodotus
What do Jane Austen, Simone de Beauvoir and Herodotus have in common? They all appear in three of this year’s Close Readings series, in which a pair of LRB contributors explore an area of literature through a selection of key works. This week, we’re revisiting some of the highlig ... Show More
31m 33s
Jun 2025
[BEST OF] The Chinese Revolution: Chairman Mao, Cultural Revolution, & Communist China
ORIGINALLY RELEASED Jun 4, 2018 In this episode, Breht is joined by Yueran Zhang, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Harvard University, to discuss the Chinese Revolution and the legacy of Mao Zedong. Together, they explore the historical context of China's revolutionary transformat ... Show More
1h 2m