We were excited to have novelist and musician Willy Vlautin join us for a discussion about his career in both fields and his newest novel, The Left and the Lucky, which John Mulaney called “electric.” Willy covered his influences, why it was great to learn that some random lady hates him, and the interplay between his career as a songwriter and writer of fiction.

Then, what’s it like to read everything a single author wrote over just one summer? For us, of course, this means tackling crime fiction master Dashiell Hammett’s entire output. Hammett might not be on the New York Times’ “Best Summer Reads” list, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t curl up on a beach towel with his highly polished stories of violence, irony, and bootleg whiskey.

Works cited this episode:

Don’t Skip Out on Me, Willy Vlautin

"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Joyce Carol Oates

The Night Always Comes, Willy Vlautin

Lean on Pete, Willy Vlautin

Northline, Willy Vlautin

A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

The Deverry Cycle, Katharine Kerr

The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells

Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan

The Sopranos, created by David Chase

The Millennium trilogy, Stieg Larsson

The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

iCarly, created by Dan Scheider

Executive Orders, Tom Clancy

Dombey and Sons, Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

Jazz, Toni Morrison

Sula, Toni Morrison

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

Spade and Archer, Joe Gores

The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum

We’re going to Hell with literary man-about-town Ed Simon, founder of the Pittsburgh Review of Books (with which our podcast is affiliated) and author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain. Ed helps us figure out why the legend of Faust still feels fresh in our world today, where nobody ever makes short-sighted deals that turn out badly in the end.

Then, we put Catcher in the Rye on trial. Does it deserve its vaunted position in the high school curriculum? And what do we want high schoolers reading, anyway, you big phony?

Ed Simon has several books out now.

Works cited this episode:

“Hypergraphia: On Prolific Writers and the Persistent Need to Produce,” Ed Simon, LitHub

“The New Fabio is Claude,” The New York Times

The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe

“Bart Sells His Soul,” The Simpsons

Hellraiser, dir. Clive Barker

Morphology of the Folk Tale, Vladimir Propp

“The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” Charlie Daniels Band

“Theophilus,” The Book of Drama, Hrotsvitha

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy D. Snyder

“High School English and the Making of American Readers,” Alexander Manshel, American Literary History

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

“Texts Most Frequently Taught in U.S. Secondary Classrooms are Nearly Identical to List from Decades Ago,” National Council of Teachers of English

Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Crucible, Arthur Miller

Macbeth, William Shakespeare

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Night, Elie Wiesel

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

King Dork, Frank Portman

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes

The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton

1984, George Orwell

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

Women everywhere have an indescribable urge to get up and go west. That would be weird if it was real; in the hands of Alice Martin, author of the novel Westward Women, it’s not only weird but an incredible conceit for a thoughtful work of literary fiction that’s among the best books we’ve read this year. We were lucky to get Alice as a guest.

This was followed by some deep thoughts about exposition in fiction, such as “what is it” and “is it for girls?” Turns out it’s for everyone, but there may be some expectations about how manly men writers don’t do much of it, because it’s not masculine to tell people what you’re thinking, I guess?

Westward Women is out now.

Works Cited this episode:

A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Caroline Kirkland

On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle

Bunny, Mona Awad

The Husbands, Holly Gramazio

Once and Again, Rebecca Serle

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy

Brighton Rock, Graham Greene

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison

Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov

The Housemaid, Freida McFadden

Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins

Legends of the Fall, dir. Edward Zwick