EP02 - Losing Your Way at a Picnic | Austen, ...

Seamus Heaney, “Blackberry-Picking.” Today we consider a lyric poem from Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney’s first collection (1966). In “Blackberry-Picking” Heaney recounts a memory from his childhood, or perhaps from the beginning of his childhood’s end.----------We started ...  Show more

George Orwell, 1984, Chapter One. The opening paragraphs of George Orwell’s novel seem innocuous, as a man named Winston Smith returns to his apartment building for lunch. However, from the first sentence onward Orwell estranges us from the world we take for granted and begins hi ...  Show more

Mightly push your powerful writing to the top of the highest literary peaks! Or… work on your craft. CONSUME: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett or its sequel, World Without End. Or, for a less committal and free option, the BBC fiction podcast "Home Front" CREATE: Think abo ...  Show more

Have you measured out your life in coffee spoons? Feeling like a pair of ragged claws today? Afraid to eat messy food while other people are watching? Or are you just channeling a little too much Polonius? If so, today’s poem–the classic modernist anthem of insecurity and isol ...

Sometimes a book is so meta it sort of breaks your brain! How to talk about a book that is all beginnings and no ends? How to discuss a book that enlists You, the Reader, in its chicanery? We try to get on the wavelength with Calvino's text. You be the judge of if we get there. O ...  Show more