A.O. Scott on the Joy of Close Reading P...

Keza MacDonald, the video games editor at The Guardian and author of the new book “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play,” chose to write her first book about Nintendo because it has been so central for so long to the culture of games. “It was ... Show More

Xenobe Purvis’s slim but powerful debut novel, “The Hounding,” opens with a jolt: “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body. Marching up the river path, the villagers.”How did we get here, with five young sisters living in 1700s England being hunted by an angry mob that su ... Show More

The journalist, novelist and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman is best known for writing about rock music and pop culture in astute essay collections like “The Nineties,” “X” and “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.” But Klosterman got his start in college as a sports journalist, and with ... Show More

Wonder and strangeness commingle with the commonplace and universal in Danielle Chapman’s “Trespassing with Tweens.” In a not-quite mirroring, a human mother and her children stand and watch together in awe as a great blue heron flaps in and feeds its two offspring. The pleasures ... Show More

Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! After taking a look at Emily Dickinson's Poem #1 94 ("Title divine - is mine!"), Jacke talks to Cambridge University's Jess Cotton, whose biography of John Ashbery (John Ashbery: A Critical Life) charts Ashbery's rise from a minor avant-garde figure to the ... Show More

<p>Sasha Debevec-McKenney joins Kevin Young to read “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/hammond-b3-organ-cistern"><strong>Hammond B3 Organ Cistern</strong></a>,” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and her own poem “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/2 ... Show More

A haunting, haunted poem for us today: Beci Carver joins the podcast to discuss Thomas Hardy's poem for his late wife, "The Voice."Beci is a lecturer in 20th-century literature at University of Exeter and the author of Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014). Her articles have appea ... Show More

William Blake is considered one of the greatest artists and poets of the English language, yet he lived most of his life in poverty. Why? Many of his acquaintances considered him mad while friends who knew his art considered him 'brilliantly mad'. What was so different about Blak ... Show More

Carmen Giménez’s poem “Ars Poetica” is a stunning waterfall of words, a torrent of dozens of short statements that begin with “I” or “I’m.” As you listen to them, let an answering cascade of questions fill up your mind. What does this series of confessions reveal to you about poe ... Show More

<p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/1749254/open_sms">Send us a text</a></p><p>In Episode 168 of Book Talk, Etc., join Tina and Hannah for a discussion on books with low ratings! Today, we are sharing our thoughts on how low ratings influen ... Show More

Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that atte ... Show More

<p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/1749254/open_sms">Send us a text</a></p><p>In Episode 17 of Book Talk, Etc. Tina and Renee are sharing some backlist books they&apos;ve recently read! They share what they&apos;re loving lately, their lat ... Show More