Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’. Like ‘Michael’ (1800), it depicts the disintegration of ordinary lives under social and psychological pressures, reflecting Wordsworth’s inte ... Show More
Jul 13
London Revisited: The Road to Civil War
When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics who tried to blow him and half of Westminster up in 1605. But the plot failed, and with James’s reign ... Show More
26m 53s
Jun 28
Nature in Crisis: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between humans and the environment. Braiding Sweetgrass was an enormous success ... Show More
15m 19s
Jun 22
Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Jean Rhys
In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably didn’t know the work of her contemporary Jean Rhys, but if she had read ‘A Voyage in the Dark’ (1934), she mi ... Show More
20m 6s
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
Jul 2023
Take A Walk On The Wild Side
This week, AE Stallings, the new Oxford professor of poetry, on the lives of poets; and Ann Kennedy Smith considers the different faces of Cornwall.'Sleeping on islands: A life in poetry', by Andrew Motion'The American poet laureate: A history of US poetry and the state', by Amy ... Show More
1h 1m
Jun 2024
617 Politics and Grace in Early Modern Literature (with Deni Kasa) | Mike Recommends... James Baldwin! | My Last Book with Carlos Allende
Early modern poets - John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, Abraham Cowley - lived in a world where theological questions were as hotly contested as political struggles over issues like empire, gender, civil war, and poetic authority. In this episode, Jacke talks to Deni K ... Show More
1h 9m
Jan 2022
378 Liu Xinwu and the "Scar Literature" of China (with Jeremy Tiang) | Bharati Sneak Preview (with Mira Sundara Rajan)
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 conv ... Show More
49m 26s
Jul 2016
Ep. 4 | Motherhood, Mythology, and Marjane
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
39m 14s