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

We had a great time with Nina McConigley, author of the new novel How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, which hits all the beats you want from a book where a character named Agatha Krishna says, “We blame the British.” Nina shared with us her thoughts on how colonialism divided not only countries but selves, and where characters (and real people) find themselves within those divides.

Then, how can you tell if a translated work is good when you don’t know the author’s language? Maybe the translator created something great that isn’t really true to the original version, or brought down a great work with their bad translation. (Note to translators: We think you are cool and the above scenario is purely hypothetical.)

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is available now.

Works cited this episode:

Angels in America, Tony Kushner

Cowboys and East Indians, Nina McConigley

Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto by Mark Polizzotti

The Odyssey, Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa

Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell

On the Soul (De Anima), Aristotle, translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred

The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

We were fortunate to have Jared Lemus, author of the story collection Guatemalan Rhapsody, join us to discuss masculinity and empathy in fiction. Jared recently won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut story collection, and he was also once Nate’s co-worker. (Which is also a noteworthy achievement.)

Plus, what if the author was peering over your shoulder while you read their book? They aren’t, but what if you intentionally imagined that they were, and it was up to you to figure out what they’re doing with their writing? This is all just hypothetical and not a real topic from our podcast.

Works cited this episode:

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, Nina McConigley

Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

Paradise Lost, John Milton

“The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes

“The Intentional Fallacy,” W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and M.C. Beardsley

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Beowulf

We’re excited to welcome filmmaker and author John Sayles to the show. John spoke with us about his most recent novel, Crucible, which focuses on the impact that an egocentric automobile magnate’s uninformed plans has on the economy and other populations. Sounds vaguely familiar. We also dove into John’s career, screenwriting vs. writing fiction, and what makes Pittsburgh so great.

Then, our intrepid hosts returned to a topic hinted at last time: how much overlap there is between the books the two of us have read? What a shocker: we both read Moby-Dick!

Crucible by John Sayles is out now

Works cited this episode:

A Moment in the Sun, John Sayles

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt, John Bellairs

Want, Lynn Steger Strong

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Lisa Sunshine

Don’t Skip Out on Me, Willy Vlautin

The Killer is Dying, James Sallis

Pulp Fiction, dir. Quentin Tarantino

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

So your manuscript was rejected by another publisher. Will you revise your work to meet the shifting whims of the marketplace, or hold steady to your uncompromising vision, bragging all the while about the rejections you’ve accumulated like tumbleweeds tangled in a barbed wire fence? Meanwhile, we also wonder if one can ever truly read a book alone, or if the various social contexts are inextricable from that experience, like tumbleweeds tangled in a barbed wire fence.

Works cited this episode:

“Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with reframing rejection?” Brittany Allen, LitHub

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

“Host,” David Foster Wallace, The Atlantic

“In Defense of the Traditional Review,” Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Middlemarch, George Eliot

Sundial, Catriona Ward

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

She’s Come Undone, Wally Lamb

I’m Losing You, Bruce Wagner

Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

“The Couch,” Seinfeld, created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld

Beloved, Toni Morrison

Will Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, or any of the other fictional teen sleuths ever grow up? We spoke with Tom Ryan, whose novel We Had a Hunch throws adult versions of kid detectives into several harrowing grown-up situations, from hunting a serial killer to the slow-dawning realization that they’ve become middle-aged.

Plus: are contemporary works of art too literal? It’s no fun if a novel or a movie tells to your face its theme and meaning. That’s the message of our movie, Movies Should Not Tell You Their Meaning.

We Had a Hunch by Tom Ryan is out now.

Works Cited this episode:

Nancy Drew mysteries, Franklin W. Dixon/the Stratemeyer Syndicate

Hardy Boys mysteries, Franklin W. Dixon/the Stratemeyer Syndicate

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

Keep This to Yourself, Tom Ryan

The Treasure Hunters Club, Tom Ryan

Murder, She Wrote, created by Peter S. Fischer, Richard Levinson, and

The Silence of the Lambs, dir. Jonathan Demme

“The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies,” Namwali Serpell, The New Yorker

Anora, dir. Sean Baker

Cinderella, dir. Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, and Clyde Geronimi

Mad Men, created by Matthew Weiner

The Brutalist, dir. Brady Corbet

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

The Trial, Franz Kafka

Eradication, Jonathan Miles

The Housemaid, Frieda McFadden

Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann

The Daydreaming Boy, Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Outbreak, dir. Wolfgang Peterson

Friends, created by David Crane and Marta Kaufman

Field of Dreams, dir. Phil Alden Robinson

Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella

Mikey and Nicky, dir. Elaine May

The Parker novels, Richard Stark

Tender is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser