Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective

We embark on a cosmic journey through Samuel Delany's 1966 sci-fi gem, Babel-17. This novel by the brilliant self-described “boring old Marxist” (the best kind of person!) has it all: a telepathic poet captaining a star ship, naked space parties, a 10-foot-tall cat-man pilot, and a cosmic throuple guiding the way. And let's not forget the discorporate entities—because we all need some more space ghosts in our lives. We get into linguistic philosophy, the category of the human, and what the whole Babel thing is about.  We read the Vintage edition that includes the in-universe short story “Empire Star” and recommend getting your hands on Delaney’s other works like his novel Nova and his 1999 critical work/memoir, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue on New York’s porn theaters of the 1960s and 70s.  Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.

For Halloween 2023, we bring you one of the craziest novels of all time (or certainly of the eighteenth century). Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is a tale of horny Catholics – men and women, in the clergy and not – sexy nuns, ultraviolence, and, as Katie puts it, “dinosaurism.” See, Satan turns into a pterodactyl to open up a can of whoop-ass on the Monk. Based. Another extremely based thing that happens, this smokin’ lady monk named Matilda turns out to be a wizard, does a full-on black mass, AND DOMMES THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS HIMSELF. It’s trashy as hell, it’s metal af, and we’re talking all the classic gothic themes – sex, desire, critiques of power and patriarchy, and how eighteenth-century Britons are constitutionally incapable of being even slightly normal about the “Romish religion.” We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Nick Groom, but we kinda recommend the Penguin for the cover art alone, which really gets at the dinosaurism in question (it also has full frontal, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of The Monk). For more on the gothic and Lewis’s place within it, we highly recommend friend-of-the-pod Michael Gamer’s Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, as well as Angela Wright’s chapter on Lewis and Ann Radcliffe in The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Vol. I. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.

Hi again, nerds: we’re back after a long hiatus with more high school English class reads and some Jungianism on the side! JK about that last one, we would never. We’re talking about Aldous Huxley’s 1932 “science fiction” novel Brave New World, which is about how Fordism is bad (yes) but so is being slutty (what? Why?). Shakespeare is Good. Drinking alcohol is Bad. We sure hope you’re onboard for blanket moral judgments that don’t seem to add up to much in the way of world-building, because this novel is crammed with them. We discuss politics of gender and sexuality, what a leftist critique might amount to here, and why mysticism is tiresome.   We read the 2006 Harper Perennial reprint with Huxley’s intro to the 1958 edition called “Brave New World Revisited.” We consulted Raymond Williams’s “Utopia and Science Fiction” from Science Fiction Studies (1978) and recommend it. Honestly, Science Fiction Studies is generally pretty cool.   Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.

Friends, it's the crossover event of the century - we join our comrades at You're Tall but I'm Standing in Front of You (if you don't know their podcast, it's amazing, hilarious, brilliant, and you should subscribe immediately) for a discussion of Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992). It's a film that dares to ask the question, "What if the book didn't totally suck ass?"   *Note to listeners -- we've been on a bit of an unplanned hiatus due to various things beyond our control, but we're recording new content now and will back with new episodes for you in the spring. Follow You're Tall but I'm Standing in Front of You on Twitter @youretallpod [https://twitter.com/youretallpod] or email them at youretallpod@gmail.com.  Follow us on Twitter @betterreadpod [https://twitter.com/betterreadpod], Tristan at @tjschweiger [https://twitter.com/tjschweiger], Megan @tuslersaurus [https://twitter.com/tuslersaurus], and Katie @katiekrywo [https://twitter.com/katiekrywo]. You can also find us on Instagram and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com.

There is still plenty of spookiness left in the season! To celebrate, this week we are bringing you Stephen King’s The Body from his 1982 collection Different Seasons, also containing Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil. We talk about poverty and violence in rural America, masculinity, class, epic, and the classic Philadelphia tradition Wing Bowl. We get into the 1986 film adaptation Stand By Me, starring Wil Wheaton, who is also the star of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s not that bald guy, it’s the kid. We read the Signet edition. Check out King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) or one of his 65 other novels (seriously) or hundreds of short stories (also seriously) if you are interested in haunted cars, scary sewer clowns, or the various terrors of New England. *Note to listeners: Megan is off this week. She’ll be back with us next time for The Monk! Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.