45: J by Howard Jacobson
(DON LAFONTAINE VO) IN A WORLD where dark humor is banned and only cheerful art prevails, one man’s humor, and one woman’s life, are dark enough to put them on the authorities’ watch list… The Sometime...
View Article47: My Struggle
The pursuit of post-romantic transcendence disguised as comic/horrific oversharing…or is it the other way around? Intricate structural artifice disguised as off-the-cuff rambling…or is it the other...
View Article50: Autobiography of a Corpse
Connoisseurs of negation, travelers from the land of pure being, Stygian toads that know they don’t exist, and a literary gift on the order of Kafka or Borges—wonders abound as the Sometime Seminar...
View Article51: My Real Children
Can a book with a moon-base in it be science fiction, but not because of the moon-base? If an interesting narrative structure combined with thoughtful, well-rounded characterization in a setting rich...
View Article52: Vanity Fair
The Sometime Seminar discusses Vanity Fair (1848), a sprawling comic novel of social climbing and falling by William Makepeace Thackeray. Topics covered include: Stereotyping, racial, social, and/or...
View Article54: With My Dog Eyes
The Sometime Seminar discusses late-modernist novella With My Dog Eyes (Portuguese 1986/English 2014) by Hilda Hilst. An excerpt from With My Dog Eyes in BOMB Supplementary links: reviews of With My...
View Article57: Ubik
THRILL as stock genre trappings warp and mutate under the power of weird genius! MARVEL as brains-in-a-vat reality paranoia crosses over into theology and metaphysics! WONDER as interplanetary travel...
View Article58: Great Granny Webster
Come for the elegantly hilarious descriptions of horrible food, terrible people and repulsive decor; stay for the razor-sharp psychological and socio-historical analyses. The Sometime Seminar discusses...
View Article59: The Colour out of Space
How much repetition-with-variation does it take to turn a schtick into a genre? What elevates trashy horror pulp to the stature of GREAT trashy horror pulp? And if we know that the thing behind the...
View Article63: The Ambassadors
If a novel is much more about mental states, processes and shadings than it is about external action, does that make it plotless, or does it make every word and implication part of the plot? And if the...
View Article6: Elizabeth Costello
Looking for something to listen to while you wait for that darn gatekeeper to grant you entry into the law already? This episode of The Sometime Seminar discusses J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a...
View Article10: The Childhood of Jesus
This episode of The Sometime Seminar discusses J.M. Coetzee’s newest fiction, The Childhood of Jesus. Roger also subsequently reviewed the book for the LARB. Supplemental links (mostly subsequent to...
View Article11: Arthur Gordon Pym
Is any sufficiently advanced genius indistinguishable from incompetence? How many living burials can a story contain before it just gets…weird? And just what is a weird tale, anyway? This episode of...
View Article16: The Bigendian Trilogy
Improbably cool heroes investigate implausibly cool mysteries at the behest of impossibly cool billionaires! Is cool-obsession just another form of geekiness? This episode of The Sometime Seminar...
View Article17: A Visit from the Goon Squad
When scalding oil rains down on a roomful of celebrities, is it hilariously satirical, or is it just hilarious? When a bunch of critics hail a book as an epoch-nailing masterpiece but you think it is...
View Article19: Bleeding Edge
Like your worlds finely observed, your characters whimsically named, and your plots enjoyably incomprehensible? You’re in luck! The Sometime Seminar discusses the just-released Thomas Pynchon novel...
View Article22: Walking to Hollywood
Is gonzo journalism plus W.G. Sebald plus mental illness a good formula for humo(u)r writing, a mask for sharp cultural critique, or just a mess? Who killed the movies, and who would want to resurrect...
View Article23: Seiobo There Below
Endless sentences and aesthetic bliss! The Sometime Seminar discusses László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below, a book of interconnected stories about aesthetic experience and/or religious ecstasy...
View Article26: Congress of the Animals and Fran
Wile E. Coyote meets Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same! If Krazy Kat could transcend the veil of illusion, would he ever be the same again? And how do you even read, much less summarize, much...
View Article27: Daniel Deronda
Writing a novel? Anyone can do that. Writing two novels? That’s sort of impressive…I guess. Writing a novel that seems like it’s really two novels, one a masterful tragicomedy of manners and the other...
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