Human Conditions: ‘Hope against Hope’ by Nade...

In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the ...  Show more

Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creatu ...  Show more

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham UP, 2020) recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers en ...  Show more

Irina Mashinski is a bilingual Russophone American writer, poet, essayist, teacher, and translator, whose works include Giornata and eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian. She is also the co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. In this episode, Irina talks with Ja ...  Show more

🎙️ This week on the Sumud Podcast, we’re joined by Ahmad Ibsais, a law student, writer, and poet whose work captures life, loss, and defiance under siege. Through his acclaimed newsletter State of Siege, Ahmad documents a generation’s struggle for justice, blending legal insight ...  Show more

The relationship between literature and "madwomen" has deep roots. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Suzanne Scanlon (Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen) about her efforts to reclaim the idea of the madwoman as a template for insight and transcendence. PLUS Jacke talks to A ...  Show more