108: By Night in Chile
Gothic intensity, psychological acuity and historical horror bleed into one another in a story of literary ambition entangled with fascism. The Sometime Seminar discusses By Night in Chile...
View Article104: Little, Big
What happens if you sprinkle late-19th-century-British fairy dust all over 20th-century upstate New York? What do you call it when a multi-generational family saga and a sweeping fate-of-the-world...
View Article103: Angel
It’s a fine-tuned realist novel…about an author of extravagant romantic novels. It’s middlebrow fiction…but extremely good. It’s Elizabeth Taylor…but not that Elizabeth Taylor. The Sometime Seminar...
View Article101: The Dog of the South
How many digressions can you dangle from a road-novel quest plot? How many varieties of crank and con-artist can you fit in a Buick Special? How much hilarity can you wring from the masterfully...
View Article98: The Female Man
A withering satire, a feminist utopia, a work of rigorous science fiction and a high-spirited postmodern genre-buster…all for the price of one book! The Sometime Seminar discusses The Female Man (1975)...
View Article96: Lilith’s Brood
Does utopia begin with extinction? Can gene-splicing aliens save humanity from itself? The Sometime Seminar discusses Lilith’s Brood (also known as Xenogenesis), a trilogy of science-fiction novels by...
View Article95: The Way We Live Now
In a large bag, combine shady financiers, dissolute aristocrats and marriageable heiresses; spice with lower-class stereotypes and brash Americans to taste; add one improbable paragon of old-fashioned...
View Article93: The Moonstone
Valuables vanish, comic/gothic stereotypes abound, the plot twists and the repressed returns as The Sometime Seminar discusses The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, which is by some accounts the...
View Article92: Norstrilia
Whiz-bang pulp exuberance + witty, inventive style + just the right amount of psychological depth and moral/political seriousness = ???. The Sometime Seminar discusses the midcentury science-fiction...
View Article89: Omensetter’s Luck
Tormented interiority squares off against dumb luck, in prose as sparkling as the stream of consciousness is muddy. The Sometime Seminar discusses Omensetter’s Luck (1966), William Gass’s first novel....
View Article88: The Last Man
It’s the end of the world as we know it! It’s the end of good writing as even the 1820s knew it! But we feel fine: it’s the beginning of science fiction. The Sometime Seminar discusses The Last Man...
View Article86: The Passion According to G.H.
Modernist novel meets mystical treatise, psychological self-investigation meets self-annihilating via negativa, smashed cockroach meets tongue. The Sometime Seminar discusses The Passion According to...
View Article85: Correction
The Sometime Seminar engages in an extended conversation concerning talks at some length about discusses Correction (1975/English 1979) by Thomas Bernhard. Download this episode
View Article84: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
How does a primitivist power fantasy become the kernel of a fleshed-out fictional world? How do you write an interesting story about an invulnerable hero? (Hint: giant snakes.) And when a pulp classic...
View Article82: Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Sometime Seminar discusses Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), a mysterious novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay which was adapted into a film directed by Peter Weir (1975). Download this episode
View Article81: New Grub Street
It’s a late-Victorian triple-decker novel about the poor souls who write late-Victorian triple-decker novels and the psychosocial tightropes they walk (or plummet from) while doing so. Plus thrilling...
View Article80: The Confidence-Man
An anthology of American chicaneries, an allegory of human nature and its dubious trustworthiness, a virtuoso feat of metafictional irony, and/or the shaggiest shaggy-dog story you’ve ever read. The...
View Article79: Sartor Resartus
The Sometime Seminar discusses Sartor Resartus (1836), a satiric novel about a fictional German philosopher by Thomas Carlyle. Download this episode
View Article78: The Bloody Chamber
How to re-estrange and re-enchant the most familiar stories in the world? Apply generous quantities of sexual drama, stylistic brilliance, emotional intensity and psychological complexity, and don’t...
View Article76: Nazi Literature in the Americas
The Sometime Seminar discusses Nazi Literature in the Americas (La literatura Nazi en América, 1996/English 2008), an encyclopedia of fictional authors by Roberto Bolaño. Supplemental links: Michael...
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