Overdue is a podcast about the books you’ve been meaning to read. Join Andrew and Craig each week as they tackle a new title from their backlog. Classic literature, obscure plays, goofy childen’s books: they’ll read it all, one overdue book at a time.
The podcast Overdue is created by Headgum. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Everyone get into two lines, break your bread, brush your teeth, get into bed, and listen to our episode about Ludwig Bemelmans’ original series of Madeline stories. We talk about the art’s blend of sketchy and beautiful, the rise of Pepito, and the voice acting in 90s educational CD-ROM games.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We have to go back. Back to FORKS! To celebrate 700 episodes of our show, we decided to celebrate the tenth anniversary of a companion novel celebrating the tenth anniversary of Twilight. Meet Beaufort and Edythe, who very much resemble Bella and Edward, and the rest of the genderswapped cast who inhabit this novel that is definitely not all different from the original novel at all, no way.
We livestreamed this recording on April 25th. You can watch the archive at bit.ly/overdue700.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This collection of short stories runs the gamut from biblical fiction to sci-fi mockumentary to "short story that inspired a very successful film named Arrival." Recurring themes include Creation, Thought, and Perception. Pretty heavy stuff! But Chiang tackles it all with creativity and flair.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Have podcast, will (time) travel! This is the time travel book-slash-romance novel you write when you’re enamored with a hot old-timey boat guy and his doomed Arctic exploration. It’s got a whole lot going on, for better or worse!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This is a podcast, recorded by two nincompoops, full of the novel The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, signifying...something? a recording in which we discuss the Modernism the italics the three sons the Mother the golf course the South and is Craig sick who knows this consciousness won't stream itself you know
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The Hunger Games are back, and so are we! Remember Haymitch Abernathy, the occasionally sympathetic drunk from the original Hunger Games trilogy? Well, here he is as a young man, being ground into dust by his authoritarian government and its media apparatus. Collins really wants to make sure that you Get It This Time.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We're up on the International Space Station this week, floating around with our coworkers/friends, looking at the earth as it speeds by multiple times a day. We're not really "doing" anything in like, a "narrative" sense. But it's a vibe, man.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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GREETINGS LISTENER. HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY? IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME. CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE BOOK SUPERCOMPUTER BY EDWARD PACKARD? Sometimes people make mistak. YES THEY DO. SHALL WE PLAY A GAME(BOOK)?
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Welcome to the infinite halls of Piranesi’s House. Don’t mind the flooded basement, or the cloudy attic, or the fact that staying here more than a day starts to really take a toll on your memory. Piranesi’s got it all written down, so he knows everything there is to know about the House. Or does he?
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's not every day you run across this skillful an abridgment of S. Morgenstern's classic tale of love and adventure, one that was also turned into a beloved feature film of the same name. But there's something weird going on here. Both author and abridger are editorializing a LOT, and I'm not sure I can even find the kingdom of Florin on a map. Oh well! It's probably nothing.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The time has come...to become...Animorphs! We had a blast diving into this 90s sci-fi hit for Scholastic. The kids: they become animals. The stakes: they become apocalyptic!
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How does one construct an identity? And what must you sacrifice to forge one all your own (and who is most impacted by your choices)? Bennett's acclaimed novel The Vanishing Half meditates on these questions and more in a story about passing, sister/motherhood, and acting.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This book's heavier social commentary is... leavened? Heightened? By being juxtaposed with some borderline-goofy corpse-hiding heist stuff. We think it works! Not all reviewers of the book agree.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys tells a haunting story of two young men whose identities are forever changed by their experiences at a brutal institute for boys in 1960s Florida. It's not easy subject matter, but Whitehead's wonderfully economic prose keeps it engaging all the way to the downright surprising end.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Sometimes you read a book that you heard about in high school, something that was taught as a sort of historical document that helped to explain why things are the way they are today. But sometimes it turns out that the book is actually about a whole lot of other stuff too! Including lots of (apparently) live debates about politics and food safety! It's a tough book to read right now, but it's an important time to remember where we've been.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Over 100 tales of trauma, inspiration, and a vague sense that Positive Thinking may not be all it's cracked up to be! This collection (and its surrounding media empire) can be heartwarming, but nothing quite as heartwarming as a sodium-rich can of condensed chicken soup with noodles.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
This episode is also brought to you in part by MasterClass.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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A prime example of the "healing fiction" genre, Before The Coffee Gets Cold has uncharacteristically low stakes for a time travel novel: no future of humanity to save, no butterfly effects, no risk of destroying the present by altering the past. It's more concerned with simpler questions: if you had just a little more information about things that happened in the past, how much would it change the things you do in the present?
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Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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New year, new podcast ideas! Time for a few announcements that won't fit into a regular episode.
In this special edition podcast update, we share some tweaks to our Patreon project. This includes the new Dusty Bookshelves newsletter, monthly Q&A streams, and more! Also, we'd like to thank you all for listening and for supporting the show.
For more info on the Patreon and how to get bonus episodes early, head to patreon.com/overduepod
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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In this award-winning novella, T. Kingfisher asks, "What if you DIDN'T want to wake Sleeping Beauty?" The protagonist Toadling is most certainly not the princess in question. She is, however, an "interesting, but sad" fae creature who tells her tale with a moving mix of warmth and tragedy.
Complete our listener survey at gum.fm/overdue.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
This episode is also brought to you in part by MasterClass.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Imagine waking up one day to find out that you're the heir to the throne of a tiny fictional European country. Now imagine that, after that, you still need to navigate the choppy waters of high school! Also you're flunking Algebra, which has somehow created an opening for your teacher to date your mom. Oh no!
Complete our listener survey at gum.fm/overdue.
This episode is brought to you in part by MasterClass.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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For this year's Happy Hornydays celebration, we go under the covers undercover with the FBI on a fast-paced mission to infiltrate the Zicari Crime Syndicate. This steamy little novella is more criminal than Christmas, but it still makes for a fun conversation about professionalism, brotherhood, and limousine intimacy.
Complete our listener survey at gum.fm/overdue.
This episode is brought to you in part by Play On Podcasts.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's time to jack in and try to decode one of the ur-texts of cyberpunk: William Gibson's Neuromancer. It's got everything you'd expect from a cyberpunk story (hackers, cybernetic enhancements, malevolent AI constructs) while also being the one of the reasons you have those expectations in the first place!
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
This episode is sponsored by Aura Frames and Brew Book Candle.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Ironically this week we are succumbing to gravity, reading the book that is the source material for a musical that is the source material for a pair of major motion pictures. But if the musical or movie Wicked led you to the book Wicked, we are here to tell you: these things are not the same!
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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What if a play didn't need a "plot" to move you? What if all it needed was a gun on a wall and a bunch of artists besot with unrequired love? That is what Chekhov's The Seagull accomplishes.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
This episode is also sponsored by Aura Frames and Uncommon Goods.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's the conclusion of our show-within-a-show dedicated to Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's The Iliad. We read it a few books at a time and had a more in-depth chat about it than we do about most books. This episode covers Books 20-24.
Episode 09: Everybody's "favorite" guy Achillies is finally back on the battlefield! The gods want this to go smoothly, so they step into the fray themselves. But Achilles isn't sparing ANYONE. Even a nearby river is getting messed up! Then we are finally given the main event: Achilles v. Hector. And wouldn't you know, another hero bites the dust.
Episode 10: The grand finale of Stop! Homer Time and of the Iliad itself. First, some big boys play some small games, and then two sworn enemies briefly share a moment of grief and admiration, even as their eventual doom hangs over them both.
For more information on our NEXT longread series (SIT ME BABY ONE MORE TIME), head to patreon.com/overduepod.
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Sing, goddess, of the creativity of Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles. This romance/war history deftly combines the existing canon of Greek epic and myth with a moving story about young Patroclus and his love Achilles. We read a lot of myth this year (including The Iliad) so we have a lot of feelings!
This episode is sponsored by Aura Frames and Brew Book Candle.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Misanthropy, anxiety, and societal alienation? In this economy?? This week's book and author aren't the most uplifting podcast subjects we've ever covered, but our discussion ended up being an oddly cathartic way to help process election results and the feelings downstream from election results.
This episode is also sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The Wind in the Willows is a classic novel for young readers. But, uh, why? Is it the animals that are basically just Edwardian gentlemen? Is it the deep longing for a nostalgic pastoral past? Is it the friend who is addicted to cars?! Surely, these are all universal childhood experiences.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's election season here in the US (please go vote if you're reading this on November 4th or 5th)! And to uh "celebrate" we have chosen to put together a one-hour-and-forty-five-minute episode on Dan Gutman's 1996 book The Kid Who Ran For President, a book that is pretty wild and only made wilder by Scholastic's characteristic late-00s-early-10s stealth updates that "modernize" the text while leaving everything about the story's context totally unchanged.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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An FBI agent seeks counsel from an imprisoned serial killer on how to apprehend an active serial killer. That's the elevator pitch for the *delicious* thriller Silence of the Lambs, which (along with its hugely successful film adaptation) helped to establish a lot of tropes currently *baked* in to how we tell stories about terrible crimes (whether True Crime or fiction). Scrumptious!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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I Am Legend is a foundational block for a lot of modern zombie fiction (even though its monsters are technically vampires). But it's much less interested in the dog than the 2007 Will Smith adaptation.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Do you need a ghost story to tell? Maybe one about a bunch of friends who probably shouldn’t be friends anymore? Then Cassandra Khaw has you covered with this flashy little novella about yokai, spooky weddings, and releasing one’s inhibitions.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Spooktober 2024 is here! And we're opening this month's spooktacular with a book about a cannibal dystopia, where people eat other people and where maybe we draw some parallels between how Special Meat is treated and how real-world non-special meat is treated?? Also we deal with the spookiness of a protagonist who Sucks.
This episode is also sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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For this new show-within-a-show, Craig and Andrew will be learning about the world of babysitting! We're going to read eight books in this seminal series, picking books where we meet new Club members.
This episode is a free teaser for our Sit Me Baby One More Time longread project. Patreon supporters can get new episodes monthly (Episode 1 is up right now!), but the rest won't unlock on the main feed until months after the whole series has wrapped! For more information on how to get these episodes as they are released, head to patreon.com/overduepod.
In this episode, you'll hear us discuss the background of The Baby-Sitters Club and author Ann M. Martin.
The full series reading list:
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Four wounded souls try to endure the end of WW2 in a bombed out Tuscan monastery. Ondaatje's novel digs into these liminal lives as they project themselves onto the blank slate that is [dramatic music] the English patient.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We want to be the very best (podcasters)! The best (podcasters) there ever were! And our true test was to talk about the novelization of the first film in the most successful media franchise in the world: Pokémon.
To join us for future bonus recordings, head to patreon.com/overduepod.
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Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Real horrorshow episode for you this week, malchicks and devotchkas! The best-known version of A Clockwork Orange might be Stanley Kubrick's 1975 film, which is based on a version of the story that is missing its last chapter. Burgess wants us all to know that he'd disown this story if he could, but if we're going to read it, we might as well get the ending as originally intended.
This episode is sponsored by the PBS American Masters: Creative Spark, find it on your favorite listening app.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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For our latest show-within-a-show, we'll revisit Ancient Greece through Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's The Iliad. We'll be reading it a few books at a time and having a more in-depth chat about it than we do about most books. These two episodes cover Books 15-19
Episode 7: Things start heating up in books 15 and 16, as Achilles finally sort of acknowledges that there's a war on and Patroclus rides out to meet his fate.
Episode 8: Now that we've bid Patroclus goodbye, it's time to fight over his body! The Trojans and Greeks scramble to control the fallen hero and the borrowed armor he wore. Achilles is heartbroken at the news and resolves to enact revenge. His mom overnights him some dope armor. Some horses cry and then give Achillies lip.
Find out more about how to get longread episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Are you in your prime? If you were, would you know it? And would you know what to do with it?! Miss Jean Brodie's in her prime, and she's going to teach all these girls about art history, being the creme de la creme, and how Mussolini made the trains run on time. Tune in for a story about how teachers can have a huge impact on your life while still remaining mysterious in their motivations.
This episode is sponsored by the PBS American Masters: Creative Spark, find it on your favorite listening app.
This episode is also sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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In The Odyssey, Penelope is mostly a side character who exists to be faithful to Odysseus (and clever enough to be compatible with him). Atwood's Penelopiad asks: what was Penelope up to? What did she want? What if the Homeric version of Odysseus' story isn't the true one? And what if Penelope's version isn't either?
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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In this classic novella, Leo Tolstoy asks, "What would it take for a guy who stinks to realize he stinks? And how would he feel about that at the end of his life?"
This episode is sponsored by the PBS American Masters: Creative Spark, find it on your favorite listening app.
This episode is also sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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And so the (initial) story of the world of Percy Jackson draws to a close. It's time to discuss the Battle of New York, the resolution of a prophecy, and the ultimate theme(s) of Riordan's blockbuster series.
This episode is sponsored by the PBS American Masters: Creative Spark and Jordan J. Hall's new story collection Mammoth, Massachusetts: A Collection of Speculative Folk Fiction.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The Magic School Bus series, beloved of 80s and 90s kids as both a book series and a TV show, depicts a school where every day is a field trip and every field trip is actually a fantastical voyage through time and space. I don't want to think what these permission slips look like.
This episode is also sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The book that put Murakami on the map in Japan is an intimate tale about youth, love, sex, and grief. So it's not surprise he settled on a Beatles song for his novel's title??
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Hello, cats and kittypets! If you're up for a Redwall-y, Watership Down-y exploration of warrior cat societies and territorial conflicts, boy do we have the dozens and dozens of books for you!
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Communities collide in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of 1930s Pottstown. Will the tensions become more than this town can manage? Since this is a James McBride novel, probably not! His work is characterized by a warmth of spirit that feels optimistic without naivete. So it shouldn't surprised you that folks of different backgrounds are finding common cause on all sorts of things - like how cool it is they all call somebody Big Soap.
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Emily Henry's Beach Read is a romance novel that's light on the romance, and also on beaches and reading. But it's still fun! An a good argument against aggressively pigeonholing books or their authors into any given genre box.
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Garfield creator Jim Davis decided to turn his PAWS, Inc. artists loose on multiple interpretations of our favorite orange feline. Behold, a truly absurd collection of tails -- I mean, tales.
EXPLICIT CONTENT WARNING: THIS EPISODE CONTAINS DISCUSSION OF AT LEAST ONE ODDLY EXPLICIT TURN OF PHRASE THAT REALLY CONFUSED US.
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Caw caw! Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a New Age messiah. Or is it? All we know is that this seagull loves to fly and craves perfection -- which is somehow an allegory for self-improvement?
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This podcast is about to REAL! In that we are about to talk about Realism and Naturalism, two things we definitely have an amazing handle on. And did Émile Zola have a handle on them in his notable novel Thérèse Raquin? Tune in to find out.
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Nora Ephron is known mainly for her films, but her voice comes through loud and clear in Heartburn, a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel about love and divorce and how much she doesn't like Washington DC.
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You find yourself facing a cherry tree. Is it on the level? Is it secretly plotting revenge against the President? Make a choice and dive into this revolutionary tale.
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To celebrate Bloomsday (however inadvertently), we decided to make our first foray in the work of James Joyce. His debut novel riffs on themes and characters that feature prominently in the rest of his canon, so join us for a discussion of modernist novel structure, semi-autobiographical lyricism, and what you should run off to smell if you find yourself crying in front of your family.
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Sometimes you read a book from 1940 and you get a little upset about how relevant its characters and themes remain more than 80 years later. Sometimes! McCullers' debut novel explores capitalism, alienation, and poverty in the American South at the tail end of the Great Depression.
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Often grouped with the other plays in García Lorca's unfinished "rural trilogy," The House of Bernarda Alba is a claustrophobic drama about control, conformity, and one mother's intimidating cane. Which daughter will get Pepe? Will that horse stop kicking the wall? Will grandma ever be free?? These questions and more on this week's episode.
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Percy Jackson and friends are back for the penultimate entry in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. This installment in Rick Riordan's mythological mash-up benefits from additional emotional complexity and deepened character relationships.
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For our latest show-within-a-show, we'll revisit Ancient Greece through Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's The Iliad. We'll be reading it a few books at a time and having a more in-depth chat about it than we do about most books. These two episodes cover Books 10-14.
Episode 5: It's time for a three-fer! This little triptych of books explores the combat of the Iliad from a few different perspectives:
Stealth (Book 10): Diomedes and Odysseus engaging in feats of derring-do. Non-lethal Damage (Book 11): Greeks and Trojans alike suffer setbacks but most of the Dramatis Personae survive. Siege (Book 12): Did you know the Greeks ALSO have a wall? And that the Trojans are besieging THEM?!
Episode 6: We're past the halfway point, and the fighting continues, with the Trojans managing to make it behind the Greek walls to cause some trouble (not that we're ever really allowed to believe they might win). Poseidon aids the Greeks. Hera suits up and bones Zeus to sleep so that some other gods can get in on the action.
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This week we travel back to Bois Sauvage to revisit the work of acclaimed author Jesmyn Ward. Sing, Unburied, Sing introduces us to a family on hard times, preparing to welcome back a member from prison while also grappling with the ghosts that demand their attention. For more discussion of Jesmyn Ward, head to Ep 283 - Salvage the Bones.
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We're learning how to THINK AND GROW RICH with our good frenemy Napoleon Hill!
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Isaac Asimov's short story collection-turned-novel has very little to do with the mid-2000s Will Smith movie adaptation, which is a good thing. It's a lot less about robots rising up and killing their creators, and more about the law of unintended consequences.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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"We just found this bear at the train station and he seems cool? Like he's good at shopping and staring at people. Let's bring him home! Don't mind all the mess he makes." That's probably what the Browns said to themselves upon first spying a charming little bear at Paddington Station. Celebrate Children's Book Week with us by diving into the first appearance of this marmalade-loving lil scamp.
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Did you know that before Gillian Flynn brought us the book Gone Girl, the movie Gone Girl, and the concept of "Gone Girl-ing" someone, she wrote a murder mystery about a different kind of unhealthy family dynamic!
This episode briefly discusses self-harm.
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This graphic memoir (ahem) This collection of comics chronicles the life of an Iranian girl named Marji, whose experiences are heavily based on those of author Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi lived through the Islamic Revolution in Iran and its authoritarian aftermath, and her story is one of resistance, education, and the difficulty of finding yourself amidst societal upheaval. Note: our discussion is based on reading the Complete Persepolis, which combines Volume 1: The Story of a Childhood with Volume 2: The Story of a Return.
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Holes! We all need 'em, we all love 'em. This is a book where a boy is sentenced to dig a bunch of holes out in the desert because he was accused and convicted of a crime he didn't commit. That's bad! But he also discovers a little something about himself and his family, and makes a new friend. That's good!
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Lo's award-winning novel seeks to shine a light on marginalized experiences from mid-century San Francisco. What's most impressive is how she's synthesized all of her research into a couple of fresh, compelling characters - allowing the story to honor the historical record without feeling overly bound by it.
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Every week, one of our hosts reads a book and tells the other person (and you, the audience) about it. This week's book is about the topic of war and also the topic of peace. It has characters and themes. Find out more about all of this and more on this week's Overdue!
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com/overdue for 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.
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For our latest show-within-a-show, we'll revisit Ancient Greece through Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's The Iliad. We'll be reading it a few books at a time and having a more in-depth chat about it than we do about most books. These two episodes cover Books 5-9.
Episode 3: These three books include: gods intervening directly on the battlefield, a new Greek hero emerging, the Trojan hero getting a boost from Ares, Hector's wife and son, and a duel with no resolution. It's action packed but also somewhat restful? (Books 5-7)
Episode 4: A lot of folks in these two books remembering that Achilles exists. Zeus presides over more fighting, and it's going poorly for the Greeks. So poorly that Agamemnon tries to make good with Achilles but man that guy knows how to be mad, huh?? (Books 8-9)
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The first rule of podcasting is DON'T TALK ABOUT PODCASTING. The second rule of podcasting is please tell everyone about podcasting and specifically about this episode in which we cover Chuck P's notorious novel about masculinity, terrorism, and getting punched in the face.
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There There sets itself apart by being a book by and about indigenous Americans in an explicitly contemporary, urban setting. It's also got a neat perspective-shifting structure and interconnected characters.
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This bonus episode was recorded on LEAP DAY! So we leapt into The Mystery at Lilac Inn with our good friend young sleuth Nancy Drew! Let's play some Hot or Not, I guess?? Also we're talking Odies 2023!
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The third and final of White's whimsical children's books about animals, The Trumpet of the Swan asks important questions like: How do swans learn English? How can we better provide accommodations for those who need them? And how much money could a swan earn at a jazz club in the 1960s?
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Modern readers often experience C.S. Lewis as "the Narnia guy," but he's also one of the 20th century's foremost Christian apologetics. The Screwtape Letters, written from the point of view of a demon whose object is to send souls to Hell, is a deeply Christian work but its appeal comes just as much from Lewis' insight into what makes humanity tick.
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Toni Morrison’s second novel in her beloved Beloved trilogy, Jazz introduces the reader to a trio of characters united by an incident of tragic romance. Will the freewheeling optimism of the Jazz Age set them on the path of redemption or will they be bound to their painful pasts?
This episode is sponsored by Factor. Head to factormeals.com/overdue50 and use code overdue50 to get 50% off delicious, ready-to-eat meals.
This episode is also brought to you in part by Eavesdrop: Conversations Across Time, the new fiction collection by Juliana Nicewarner. Head to juliananicewarner.com for more information.
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Percy Jackson returns for another road trip across a mythological United States. Plenty of new characters are introduced -- and some of them survive!
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Our month of sequels continues with the first full-length novel in Martha Wells' Murderbot series. The book's extra length leaves it room to dig into themes that the novellas had only nodded at, and also has a whole bunch of extra murderbots in it.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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To kick off a month of sequel coverage, we get bone deep in the Locked Tomb follow up Harrow the Ninth. This obtuse but compelling sci-fi/fantasy tome plays with perspective, doubles down on the space wizards, and challenges the reader NOT to notice oddly specific meme references.
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An early-90s Bengali novel that was translated into English relatively recently, The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die has a lot going for it, but as with many books the thing we'll remember the most is the murderous horny ghost aunt.
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For our latest show-within-a-show, we'll revisit Ancient Greece through Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's The Iliad. We'll be reading it a few books at a time and having a more in-depth chat about it than we do about most books. These two episodes cover Books 1-4.
Episode 1: The Iliad drops us right into the middle of the action, where "the middle" is 9 years into a 10 year conflict and "the action" is a couple of easily-affronted guys who instantly get mad at each other. Then we're treated to some maneuvering among the gods, some Odyssean trickery, the Catalog of Ships, and the less-impressive Catalog of Boys. (Books 1-2)
Episode 2: Just as the Trojans and Greeks seem on the brink of a giant clash, pretty boy Paris is shamed out of the crowd and cajoled into dueling Paris' former husband Menelaus. Surprise, surprise - the gods intervene! And after a brief interval, the gods spur the two sides into bloody action. (More like Aga-neg'em-on, amirite.) (Books 3-4)
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Move along, everyone. Nothing to see here. No women navigating adult friendships and their identities as parents. No jabs at men in power who work overtime to cover up their shame. And definitely no kids that catch on fire. Move along!
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Time to celebrate winter with a chilly fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Also we're talking Disney's FROZEN!
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The Witch Elm has Dublin, and it has murder, and it has a squad of detectives, but despite all that it is not a book in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. This riff on her classic crime novel formula focuses instead on some of the suspects, namely Toby Hennessey, who doesn’t know if he can’t remember things because of head trauma or because for most of his life he’s been able to get by without acknowledging the existence of systemic problems.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Banned in many countries until the 1960s, David Herbert Lawrence's 1928 novel is both racier and tamer than you might imagine. What more would you expect from a book that uses both "the love experience" and [BLEEP] to describe, well, adult behavior? Caveat lictor: this episode features discussions of Adult Situations.
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Happy 2024, and happy Public Domain day! Time finally caught up to US copyright law a few years ago, and the result has been a steady trickle of new creative work that’s available for anyone to modify and adapt. This year’s Big One is the earliest version of Mickey Mouse, but the new batch of PD stuff also includes this week’s Pooh book, as well as Tigger himself.
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You can't spell Horny without Ho(-Ho-Ho)! In this year's Happy Hornydays celebration, one of the people finding love during the holiday season is Santa herself. That's right, this is an F/F steamy short featuring a gender-swapped Kristina Kringle and the niece (???) of Melchior (????) the Magi (?????). Sadly, the extremely promising lore goes somewhat underexplored.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This generation-spanning epic explores the experience of a Korean family living in Japan throughout (most of) the 20th century. We talk about Lee's use of time, her penchant for "minor" characters, and the recent adaptation of Pachinko for Apple TV+.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Despite being fairly well-versed in 20th-century fantasy, Mervyn Peake and his Gormenghast series has flown completely under our radar until now. It's a strange, florid, disjointed book with some fascinating character portraits, and also the most detailed description of a dude taking a bite of a pear that we have ever read.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Our previous show-within-a-show concludes! In this longread project, we worked our way through Neil Gaiman's signature graphic novel series THE SANDMAN. Some Patreon supporters got these episodes monthly, but every two months we combined them for general consumption. If you haven't heard, our current longread project is Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's ILIAD. That's right - STOP! HOMER TIME is back! But first, our final Sandman episodes.
In Episode 9: THE KINDLY ONES, things come to a head on this month's episode of our Sandman-focused show-within-a-show. A few people have it out for Dream, who is handling things with characteristic detachment. Matthew wants to know what happens to ravens when they're done. Someone gave the pumpkin guy a machine gun. It's a very long episode for a very long collection.
In Episode 10: THE WAKE, the Endless gather for a funeral wake. Dream rebuilds his domain. We ponder Gaiman's reasons for ordering the epilogues as he did. Plus, we share some closing thoughts on our time with The Sandman.
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In this episode, two gamers sit down to talk about one of the buzziest books of 2022. Zevin's blockbuster novel spans 30 years of advancement in technology and in the friendship of Sadie and Sam, two gifted game designers working out how they fit into each other's lives.
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When you make an AI too smart, you also give it anxiety and depression and an appetite for serialized television. These are the things that motivate Murderbot, the protagonist of the many Murderbot Diaries stories that Martha Wells has released in the short time between 2017 and now.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Percy Jackson and his pals are back in another mythology-packed middle-grade adventure story, this time (mostly) patterned after the voyages of our old pal Odysseus.
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Mssr. Merseault only likes a few things, unfortunately he must live his life doing plenty of other things for people he doesn't particularly care about. Such is the story of this seminal work of 20th-century fiction and absurdist philosophy. Join us as we grapple with an indifferent universe (and a compelling translation by Matthew Ward).
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What if a dog was your POV character? What if that dog's owner was JACK THE RIPPER? What if there was a game but you didn't know who was playing? All of these questions and more get asked in our Spooktober bonus episode.
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We joined Melody and Sabrina for episode 300 of Heaving Bosoms, where we all chatted about the made-to-order, big-on-TikTok, new-adult romantasy that is Rebecca Yarros' Fourth Wing. (It may be about the fourth wing, but it's the first of a planned five books).
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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For this new show-within-a-show, Craig and Andrew will be revisiting Ancient Greece through Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's The Iliad. We'll be reading it a few books at a time and having a more in-depth chat about it than we do about most books.
This episode is a free teaser for our Stop! Homer Time project. Patreon supporters can get new Stop! Homer Time episodes monthly (Episode 1 is up right now!), but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
On this episode, you'll hear us discuss the background of the Iliad and Wilson's great-as-usual Translator's Note.
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Based on the hit film--just kidding. Blatty's novel was swiftly turned into a landmark film adaptation just a few years after its release. And it's easy to see why: hauntings, sad priests, the patriarchy's fears about the social mobility of women. People couldn't get enough of that stuff. So let's dive in and hope we don't get possessed!
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How would the "breakdown" phase of an apocalypse novel function if the characters involved had already survived through multiple apocalypses? That's the perspective that this week's book brings, in addition to the subtle spooks that come from anticipating the end of the world.
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What if H.G. Well's classic tale of humanimals created by a mad scientist were recontextualized in southeast Mexico? Would you find yourself saying that the Yucatan is less an island and more of a peninsula? Sure, you might say that - but why waste time on pedantry when you can engage with Moreno-Garcia's themes of colonialism, paternalism, and class conflict!
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If you've ever done surgery on a dog to make it more like a guy, only to set it loose in the wilderness and gradually watch it shift back into being a dog, maybe you'll have some sympathy for Doctor Moreau. Otherwise it's pretty hard to get fully onboard with his whole badly-make-animals-into-people gambit.
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Welcome to Spooktober 2023!
We've all been through a bad break-up, right? We've all moved away to start fresh, we've all started a new job, we've all befriended witchy spider-ladies and felt a strange new power growing within us. Right? Tale as old as time.
We're joined this week by Natasha from the UNspoiled! podcast family, hear more of her work at unspoiledpodcast.com.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Welcome to our current show-within-a-show! We're working our way through Neil Gaiman's signature graphic novel series THE SANDMAN. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
In Episode 7: BRIEF LIVES, Gaiman digs deep into the concept of lifetimes while following Delirium and Dream on a quest to find their missing brother.
In Episode 8: WORLD'S END, a reality storm leaves people from multiple worlds stranded at a cozy free house. They swap tales to pass the timey-wimey time until an Existence Shattering Event passes by and they can all leave. This collection is most notable for the distinct art styles within each issue, including whatever the hell Boss Smiley is. #vote4prez
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This novel was the genesis of the Blade Runner film franchise, which means like many books it gets eclipsed a bit by its adaptation. But does the movie have a gadget you can use to make yourself feel specific emotions, including the emotion that makes you want to use the gadget more? I didn't think so.
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It's time to talk about market efficiencies in popular non-fiction aka the work of Michael Lewis. Specifically, we're chatting about his 2003 book MONEYBALL, which chronicles the work of Billy Beane to optimize the Oakland A's despite his owners not wanting to spend real money.
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This "Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream" is a landmark of Gonzo journalism, a sensational writing style of which Thompson is the OG. Thankfully, we did not have to journey to Las Vegas on our own. We're joined this week by Mel and Dave from Strong Sense of Place, a website and podcast dedicated to literary travel and books we love.
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What if you got playing cards in the mail? Playing cards that told you to help random people in your community? Would you do it? Could you do it? What does "helping" mean? And who is even sending these cards?? We answer MOST of these questions as we discuss Markus Zusak's The Messenger (aka I Am the Messenger).
This episode is sponsored by Microdose Gummies. To learn more about microdosing THC go to Microdose.com and use code Overdue.
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Our friends Renata and Kait are back to talk with us about Colleen Hoover and her debut novel Slammed. We dive into her recent reign as Queen of BookTok, the appeal of slam poetry, the lack of dads, and whether or not this work of New Adult Fiction worked for us.
Find more episodes of The Worst Bestsellers at worstbestsellers.com.
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It's time to meet the Queen of Suspense! To kick off her reign, Mary Higgins Clark spins a tale about a wrongfully accused women trying to reinvent herself -- only to be nearly caught by the monster she thought she'd left behind. It's more thrilling than mysterious, so it shouldn't be a surprise that we DO get an answer to the novel's titular question.
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You don't end up liking everyone by the end of Madame Bovary, but in kind of a funny way? Come for the book talk, stay for the butchered French pronunciation.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Who is Mr. Benedict? And why did he recruit four outstanding orphans to uncover and stop a madman's secret plot to takeover the world? Solve the puzzles hidden in this episode to find out! (Don't worry, you can just listen. There aren't any puzzles...or ARE there?!?)
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When a book's plot and characters don't break a ton of ground in and of themselves, you're left hoping that the writing and the perspective will be enough to make a book interesting—luckily for us, Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation is insightful and entertaining despite its narrow scope and well-trod material.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Bring on the battalion of Dad Books! Cornwell started writing the Richard Sharpe novels because he wanted something like Horatio Hornblower on land. Well, we haven't read any Hornblower yet but we can attest that this book sure is about a British rifleman fighting in the army during the Napoleonic Wars!
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Welcome to our newest show-within-a-show! We're working our way through Neil Gaiman's signature graphic novel series THE SANDMAN. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
In Episode 5: A GAME OF YOU, the story is about Barbie, her fantastical dreams, Barbie's friend Wanda, their neighbors Hazel and Foxglove, a vengeful witch named Thessaly, an authoritarian cuckoo bird, and MARTIN FLIPPING TENBONES.
In Episode 6: FABLES AND REFLECTIONS, Gaiman penned another set of one-off stories. Some are fables, others are reflections. Tune in to find out which is which!
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Imagine a version of the spaceship from Wall-E, but with racial and class divisions that mirror those in our own society. That's a (dramatically oversimplified) one-line summary of what's going on in this week's book.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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It's episode 600, baybee!!! To celebrate, we're embarking on a voyage through Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, some middle-grade fantasy-but-in-the-real-world fiction that passed us by when it came out in 2005. We'll be reading the first five books in the series, starting with The Lightning Thief.
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We're talking Mondays. We're talking lasagna. We're talking annoying dogs and bumbling owners. We're talking Lyman -- wait what? Join us as we dive into the Garfield deep lore (and learn to make a Garf of our very own).
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Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? If you're a wizard of Earthsea, you can make it smell however you want if you know it's TRUE name. LeGuin's beloved fantasy novel is notable for how it plays both against and into common fantasy tropes, delivering a proper hero's journey without the same Sturm und Drang we've come to expect in the genre.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Join us for our 600th episode recording at bit.ly/overdue600. We're talking PERCY JACKSON!
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We've covered vaguely spiritual self-help books before on the show, but The Alchemist is unique insofar as it attempts to wrap the broad platitudes of a The Secret up in a there-and-back-again adventure story. Please listen, as long as it fits with your Personal Legend.
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Our Patron's Choice Poll for June had a theme: Junebugs! And this novel by Weiss about a roach colony attempting to assert control over the apartment in which they live is uhh...well it won the poll. So Craig read it. And now he's going to talk about it.
Caveat lictor: this book is a strange one (also it's got more explicit sexual content than you might expect!)
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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It's summer, and we all need water to live, two things that make Sarah Moss's Summerwater feel timely this week. One other thing the book reflects is the Simmering Anxiety of Our Times!
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Meet Gulliver, a traveling English surgeon. First he's big, then he's small. Next he's wise, then he's a Yahoo! To wit, Swift's seminal satire is realer, grosser, and really grosser than either of us knew.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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This week’s book tackles aging and writing and the author’s determination to write a book about a gay character who is allowed to experience joy. These are all themes that hit us where we live as we trundle into early middle age ourselves.
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Flog the jib and shiver me timbers, it's time to set sail with the first of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels Master and Commander. It's equal parts ship jargon, ship action, and shipmen (aka sailors) pondering themes of isolation and authority. Plus, we get to the bottom of who exactly is the master and who is the commander.
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Welcome to our newest show-within-a-show! We're working our way through Neil Gaiman's signature graphic novel series THE SANDMAN. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
In Episode 3: DREAM COUNTRY, Gaiman needed a bit of a break after the Doll's House arc, and the result was a series of one-shots that contributed bits and pieces to the series' mythology without telling one larger story. Doesn't mean there isn't a lot to talk about, though!
In Episode 4: SEASON OF MISTS, there is a plot! Specifically, a plot about the Devil retiring and giving Dream the key to Hell and a bunch of other supernatural beings pleading their case for why they should get that sweet piece of real estate. Also a little kid sees some ghosts.
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This week: a non-fiction book that sometimes reads a lot like fiction, The Orchid Thief is only a little about the titular thief and a LOT about Florida and its history and its denizens. Plus, "orchidelirium," the part of the 19th century where the English aristocracy would just go wild for these bad boys.
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Mamma Mia! Let's-a go back to the 1990s and discuss Todd Strasser's novelization of the 1993 film adaptation of the Super Mario Bros. videogame franchise. It all makes about as much sense as the sentence you just read!
This episode was recorded with some of our Patreon supporters watching live. Find out how to join us for future episodes at patreon.com/overduepod.
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This novel about a wizarding school and its teen magicians feels like the finale of a series that you've heard about but haven't read. Which is...sort of the point? Born out of an in-universe work of fan fiction from a different Rowell novel, Carry On provides a great opportunity to dig into what helps a story inspired by another story succeed.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Several People Are Typing was mostly written pre-pandemic but failed to garner publisher interest until a virus locked us all inside our homes with nothing to turn to but our jobs and our friend-Slacks. It manages to perfectly encapsulate what it feels like to use Slack for anything, with a dash of creepypasta for good measure.
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To celebrate this year's Children's Book Week, we decided to discuss the work of children's author and illustrator Sandra Boynton, whose board books we both have and which are well known for their fun illustrations and whimsical poetry. Since they're each pretty short we decided to talk about a bunch of them, including:
1. Doggies
2. Dinosaur Dance!
3. Barnyard Dance!
4. Pajama Time!
5. Blue Hat, Green Hat
6. Moo, Baa, La La La!
7. The Going to Bed Book
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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We're talking about candy for the second week in a row, but this time the candy is literal, and the building is a factory and not a house. Willy Wonka is a mad candy scientist who flouts labor regulations and inflicts misery on children he deems insufficiently deserving. It's a fantabulous, scrumdiddlyumptious romp!
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It only took 500-or-so episodes to revisit the world of Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. We did, of course, have to wait for Egan to write her sequel (sort of) novel. This follow-up to a post-postmodern classic is focused on memories (digital and otherwise) and relationships (virtual and otherwise). It's got "what if the Meta but for everyone's memories" okay??
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This week's book is all about duality: science against magic, love vs. hurt, book about middle school alienation and also near-future climate apocalypse. And also there are birds!
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This week, Vanessa Zoltan from the podcasts Harry Potter & the Sacred Text and Hot & Bothered joins us to chat about Sally Rooney, her 2018 novel Normal People, our approaches to reading, and what it felt like when email really meant something.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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O podcast! O books! O episodes about hard-scrabble immigrants eking out an existence on tough Nebraska land. Cather's work - rich in memorable prose and compelling characters - could stand to be better known, but it still has blind spots common in American frontier fiction.
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Welcome to our newest show-within-a-show! We're working our way through Neil Gaiman's signature graphic novel series THE SANDMAN. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
In Episode 1, we do some table-setting on the series, and Gaiman -- then we dive into the first trade paperback Preludes & Nocturnes, which introduces Dream and his whole deal over the first 8 issues.
In Episode 2, we dig into the second book The Doll's House (which actually came out first). Dream is on the hunt to track down some rogue underlings, and a woman named Rose learns a lot about her family. Also there's a Cereal Convention!
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Heidi, Heidi, Heidi! Everyone's talking about this adorable ragamuffin, a precocious child who lights up every life she touches like a ray of God's perfect sunshine. This week we learn that living in a hut in the Swiss Alps is better than living in a city, and that if you roast a piece of cheese just right it sounds like the best food you could ever eat.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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WE FIND OURSELVES SHOOK BY THIS ROLLICKING RATTLING RIDE ALONG THE RAILS OF THE GHOST TRAIN.
This bonus episode was part of our Do Overdue 10th Anniversary Spectacular, in which we revisited books from earlier in the run of our show. It was also recorded with a live Patreon supporter audience online.
Find out how to join us for future bonus episodes at patreon.com/overduepod.
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We finally read a play by Volunteer State Williams! Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a rumination on a family falling apart in the South. It's also an interesting example of how revisions and rewrites can shape a story's legacy.
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This is a twist on a time travel story where the relationship between two enemies-turned-frenemies-turned-lovers takes center stage, leaving the actual mechanics of the time travel and all the world-building mostly unexplained. The dual authorship—each author wrote the chapters for one of the two characters—adds another interesting wrinkle.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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For our fourth Do Overdue episode, we revisit our first trip to Austenland and Jane Austen's final novel, a book Craig liked but didn't fully grok ten years ago.
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For our third Do Overdue episode, we return to a book that Andrew wanted to like more than he did, Donna Tartt's debut novel about murder at a small-town college. It went better the second time, thankfully!
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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The graveyard shift in this haunted not-IKEA proves rather spooky! This bonus episode was recorded live with an audience of our Patreon supporters. Find out how to join us for future bonus recordings at patreon.com/overduepod
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To celebrate ten (10) years (!!) of Overdue, this month we'll be re-doing some episodes based on books we read way back in the show's early years. This week we revisit our first-ever episode, talking about men, isolation, and tragic best friends who triumph against the odds.
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In honor of our 10th (!) podcasting anniversary, this month we'll be re-doing some episodes based on books we read way back in the show's early years. This week we revisit our second-ever episode, talking about love, cholera, and the time when both of those things could happen simultaneously.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Secret societies, extraterrestrial cultures, VR games, HARD SCIENCE- Liu Cixin's award-winning novel has it all. It's also set against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, grounding the story not only in science but in history as well.
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Super-dense fantasy isn't everyone's cup of tea, and even people who enjoy that kind of tea can sometimes find individual cups of tea that aren't to their taste. Still, any book with lion and bird people in it can't be all bad.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Enjoy a bonus episode of our spookiest show-within-a-show yet! We read a selection of eight spooktacular books from R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series, and then we realized there was a movie!
This episode was originally released in November 2022. Some Patreon supporters get longread episodes monthly, but every two months we release them for general consumption.
And our next longread project is SAND BY ME, a reading of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Natty Bumppo is here to guide you through the wilderness of a Canonical White Guy's famous adventure tale. Maybe he can help us track down why it became the template for some less-than-helpful stereotypes based on dubious historical records.
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You've got more Qs and we've got more As! This time around we talk more about our reading habits and our day jobs, our personal achievements in 2022, and the ASMR podcast that could have been.
For more information on our bonus episodes, visit patreon.com/overduepod.
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Are you a spy? If you are, you have to tell us. Are you a 6th grader? Well then, tell us if you identify with Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet, a girl with a keen but (perhaps overly) righteous eye just trying to get through adolescence.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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If you like Jane Eyre but you eye Mr. Rochester and his marital history with some skepticism, Wide Sargasso Sea is an entry in the field of “critically acclaimed fanfic” that might speak to you.
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Happy Hornydays everyone! We're back with another celebration of the winter solstice and the corresponding need to cuddle up with someone to keep warm. Come with us to a Christmas village where a Christmas cop hooks up with a Christmas cop-out.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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The "cold" in this classic spy novel is a metaphor, but it's still a chilling book for a chilly season! If you like double-, triple-, and possible quadruple-crossings and hate happy endings, this is a book that you'll want to bring in from the cold.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Look out the window. Do you see a love triangle? Characters that embody turn-of-the-century tensions? Or do you see a boring courtyard? Best ask for a new room, perhaps one with a view.
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The year may be ending, but some things are just beginning! Time for a few announcements that won't fit into a regular episode.
In this special edition podcast update, we drop the details on our next longread project SAND BY ME, remind you that we have a Q&A Bonus Episode coming up on 12/22, tease some plans for January and February, and thank you for listening this year!
For more info on the Patreon and how to get bonus episodes early, head to patreon.com/overduepod
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Not many authors jump from writing technical manuals to writing intense hard-to-categorize fiction about killing and becoming God, but apparently more people should try it!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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We've talked about National Treasure Beverly Cleary on the show before, but we haven't spent time with her most indelible character, one Ramona Quimby. Recorded on the eve of Craig's new-dadhood, we're joined by TV critic and parenting expert Kathryn VanArendonk to discuss yard apes, sick days, and how differently the book hits from the other side of the parent/kid divide.
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After the last food-related book we read, we figured we'd do a book about a tasty fried snack. Just a normal snack! Definitely nobody getting eaten in this book. At least not until toward the end.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/overdue and get on your way to being your best self.
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Enjoy another episode of our spookiest show-within-a-show yet! In case you can't tell by the name, we're reading a selection of eight spooktacular books from R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
Ep 7 - A NIGHT IN TERROR TOWER
Eddie and Sue get into trouble during a trip to London in this spine-tingling tale of history, magic, and time-travelling burger lovers.
Ep 8 - EGG MONSTERS FROM MARS
Jovial Bob Stine is back again with another scary tale about...eggs? Also there's a rogue scientist operating outside the confines of petty things like academia or morality.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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You've crash-landed on the mysterious Planet of the Dragons, and suddenly you find yourself drafted into another culture's war by the very first sentient being you run into. Oh well! Guess you have nothing better to do! It's a classic Choose Your Own Adventure setup.
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This week, Andrew's wife Suzannah sits in for Craig to discuss BookTok darling Casey McQuiston's book One Last Stop. An unlikely combination of gay romance and sci-fi elements, this one is the rare romance novel that will keep readers guessing.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Dear diary: Today we talked to our friend Natasha from the UNSpoiled podcast about a high-school-aged vampire novel with a popular screen adaptation. No, it's not Twilight.
The UNSpoiled! podcast: https://www.unspoiledpodcast.com/
UNSpoiled! on Twitter: https://twitter.com/unspoiledshow
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Sometimes, a book comes along that is the exact combination of horny, spooky, and appetizing that makes you need to come on your friends' book podcast and talk about it. A Certain Hunger is about sex and cannibalism, in that order, and we needed a total of four people to help process it in an hour-or-so of airtime.
Christina Tucker on Twitter
Kamille Washington on Twitter
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Your best friend passes away unexpectedly. Via witchcraft, you bring them back to life unexpectedly. Two of your ALSO-dead casual acquaintances/frenemies ADDITIONALLY come back to life unexpectedly. And the person that caused all these deaths is the least expected thing of all.
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You'll be on pins and needles for this one! The book that the Hellraiser series is based on, The Hellbound Heart introduces a race of not-quite-humans who can't tell the difference between pleasure and pain and so decide to get REALLY horny for pain!
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Carmilla is a double-whammy: an English-language vampire novel that predates Dracula by nearly three decades, and an edit from Carmen Maria Machado that both underlines the story's gay subtext and has a bit of fun with readers while doing it. Just try not to take her notes too literally and you'll be fine, probably.
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Enjoy another episode of our spookiest show-within-a-show yet! In case you can't tell by the name, we're reading a selection of eight spooktacular books from R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
Ep 5 - NIGHT OF THE LIVING DUMMY
Twin girls Kris and Lindy fight over whose ventriloquist dummy is better...until they realize the real contest: which dummy is more haunted??
Ep 6 - THE HAUNTED MASK
Carly Beth's friends like to scare her. But this Halloween she'll scare their faces off! (And maybe hers too??)
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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This love-letter to sci-fi, libraries, and friends forged through literature is also a fairy tale of sorts about a young girl saving her world. Is the magic real? Probably!
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Wilde's fairy tales probably aren't the best-known of his works, but that doesn't mean they don't get a little Wilde-y. Just don't expect many happily-ever-afters.
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What's up homeslice? We baked up a real feast for you this time. Quit loafin' around and bite into this episode on James Beard, baking, and bread. We even baked our own bread and tasted it on-air!
This episode was recorded with some of our Patreon supporters watching live. Find out how to join us for future episodes at patreon.com/overduepod.
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This podcast is taking off and it's got a lot of **bad guys** on it!
Actually...it's just us. As usual. But we are talking about a surprisingly faithful novelization of Con Air, one that really reinforces how much the motley crew of character actors elevated the 1997 film.
Con Air is our Patron's Choice episode for September. Find out how to vote on future Patron's Choice selections at patreon.com/overduepod
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It's us, back again with the first book in a (planned, as of this writing) multi-book fantasy series! The Lost Dreamer has a lot of neat ideas and a unique setting, but its abrupt ending and dearth of distinct supporting characters make it less strong than it could be.
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What do lawyers, airports, and thrillers have in common? They're all relevant to John Grisham's breakout novel The Firm! A Stepford-y secret, high-end copy machines, brilliant young law school grads -- this book has it all.
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This week's book, the first in a four-book series by the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, is about the friendship of two Italian women across many years and many phases of life. You won't BELIEVE which friend ends up being the brilliant one!
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This is a podcast about books.
This podcast is specifically about the book Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson.
It's a book full of short, declarative statements.
That is ultimately about loneliness.
Mostly.
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Welcome back, cats and kittens! We have another MEW episode for you to listen to right MEOW!
The Cat Who Saved Books is a book about books for book lovers. It does have a talking cat in it, and the cat kind-of-sort-of sets events in motion that leads to the saving of books. But "The Teenager Who Saved Books, And Also A Cat Was There Sometimes" is not as good a title.
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This week, Anne Bogel of What Should I Read Next? and Modern Mrs. Darcy joins us to talk about one of Graham Greene's most well-known "entertainments." It's time to answer the question: can a political spy thriller set in just before the Cuban Revolution be too silly?
You can find more from Anne at her website or on her podcast.
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Enjoy another episode of our spookiest show-within-a-show yet! In case you can't tell by the name, we're reading a selection of eight spooktacular books from R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
Ep 3 - MONSTER BLOOD
If you're like the kid in Monster Blood, you, too have been horrified by the prospect of needing to find progressively bigger containers for a slowly growing puddle of goop.
Ep 4 - SAY CHEESE AND DIE - AGAIN!
An evil camera with some sick splat stats returns to trouble some teens! Can our hero overcome his hubris or will he be doomed by his desire for revenge on his teacher?
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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This Man Booker Prize-winning novel has one question at its core: what if Thomas Cromwell wasn't quite the jerk we thought he was? Henry VIII's right-hand man definitely does dirty deeds on behalf of the King, but Mantel creatively fills in blanks in the historical record to imagine a man who wasn't so bad.
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This week we take a bloodydamn dive into the depths of a society living on a terraformed Mars hundreds of years into our future. The humans of this alternate reality are, get this, enforcing a rigid caste system that benefits a privileged few, and it's our meathead hero's job to infiltrate that society and take it down from the inside.
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Killing Time is a classic Star Trek novel most notable for its "interesting" publication history. Della Van Hise was an OG fan fiction author who got the chance to bring her particular skills and interests to an official novel featuring Kirk, Spock, and a few other fan favorites.
Also, Andrew brought slides?
This episode was recorded with some of our Patreon supporters watching live. Find out how to join us for future episodes at patreon.com/overduepod.
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It's time to talk about expectant fatherhood. But whose? You'll have to listen to find out!
For our previous discussion of pending parenthood, tune into Ep 347 - What to Expect When You're Expecting
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In the world of hardboiled detectives, no one is harder boiled than Sam Spade, a guy who loves to get one over on both the criminals AND the cops while also romancing dames.
Find out how to vote on future Patron’s Choice episodes at patreon.com/overduepod
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Can we contain all of Tony Kushner's award-winning Angels in America, a Gay Fantasia on National Themes in one podcast? Probably! First we'll talk about Part I: Millennium Approaches, then we'll talk about Part II: Perestroika. And along the way we'll cover Roy Cohn, how to stage an angel, and the Kushner-to-Spielberg Pipeline.
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What if the kids who fell into that wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe all came back to the real world and needed extensive therapy to deal with the things they had seen and done? Welcome to Every Heart a Doorway, where a strong central conceit helps cover for a somewhat rushed mystery narrative.
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Tell me about a Complicated Man. Mishima's breakthrough coming-of-age novel about sexuality in late Imperial Japan has a powerful narrative voice and prose style. But the legacy of his work and his political goals has led to him being a bit of an "enigma" (as one listener referred to him) -- to put it lightly.
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The Scarlet Letter is often included as part of a high school reading curriculum because it's good at teaching people about symbolism, and it's good at teaching people about symbolism because it uses a half-dozen symbols roughly 700 times apiece.
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What if thirty years of history took place JUST beyond the doors of your hotel? And what if you weren't allowed to leave that hotel? And, get this, the hotel is in Moscow.
The beloved bestseller A Gentleman in Moscow fills its historical fiction with charming characters that you want to root for. But can we (or should we) figure out what it's trying to say?
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Welcome to our newest show-within-a-show! In case you can't tell by the name, we're reading a selection of eight spooktacular books from R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
In Episode 1, we do some table-setting on the series, Stine, and Scholastic books -- then we dive into the first entry in this long-running series of kids' horror books: Welcome to Dead House.
In Episode 2, we try to figure out what kind of grow operation Dad's got cooking up in the basement in Stay Out of the Basement!
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Whether you're a fan of Netflix's Bridgerton series or you just want an Austen novel with more modern language and more explicit sex scenes, the first novel in Julia Quinn's series about the Bridgerton family has something for you. Just, uh, watch out for the nonconsensual sexual encounter!! Oops!!
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Who wants to celebrate April with some modernist poetry??? This month, we allude to many of the allusions in T.S. Eliot's landmark poem.
Thank you to the Patreon supporters who joined us as we navigated this tricksy poem. Find out how to join us for bonus recordings at patreon.com/overduepod.
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August Wilson wrote a whole bunch of plays, all of which contain dialogue and take place at certain points in history. He's most notable for his Pittsburgh aka Century Cycle, so we decided to talk about one of the standouts: Fences.
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The first of four books in the Circle of Magic series, Sandry's Book feels a bit less self-contained than first-books-in-a-series normally do. You'll meet likable and well-drawn characters, but be prepared to finish the series if you want a more satisfying story.
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The inspiration for the hit trilogy of DreamWorks films is rather different than you might expect. It's still about a boy named Hiccup and his dragon Toothless, but the original has more burping, farting, and Dragonese than the films dared to show -- which is odd because those are the guys what made Shrek.
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The thrilling conclusion to the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest continues most of the plot threads introduced in the previous book. If you thought that The Girl Who Played With Fire was lacking in secondary and tertiary characters, boy have we got good news for you!
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This award-winning novel by a real writer's writer has elicited a broad range of responses, with some folks praising the prose and structure and others bouncing off its characters and style. But maybe that range of reactions was inevitable given the way Trust Exercise explores the slipperiness of memory and narrative.
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Is The Winter's Tale a tragicomedy? A dramedy? A romance? A problem play? Who knows! But we can say for certain it's a play about a king who gets jealous and makes bad decisions. Also a bear eats someone.
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Truly great butlers are work-focused automata, occupied only on maintaining and increasing the reputation of their employer. But what if there were more to life than that? This week, we follow one butler as he comes to exactly that realization.
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Enjoy the FINAL EPISODE of our latest show-within-a-show! We read Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes a few chapters at a time. Some Patreon supporters got these episodes monthly, but every two months we combined them for general consumption.
These episodes cover Chapters 48-74 of Part Two aka The End of the Story.
In Episode 13, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza bid goodbye to the Duke and Duchess of Prankdom...for now.
In Episode 14, we bid goodbye to Don Quixote and Sancho. And we learn just how mad Cervantes was about that unofficial Quixote sequel.
Next up: GOOSEBUMS, a Goosebumps miniseries!
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It's time to go back to school, where professional scientists Melody and Erin from the Heaving Bosoms podcast can help us talk about Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis. This STEAMy romantic comedy is one heck of a romp, and we have a heck of a time recounting it.
Caveat lictor: This episode is marked explicit because this book includes adult material!
You can find more from our new friends at the Heaving Bosoms podcast here.
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This week, Glory Edim of Well-Read Black Girl fame joins us to talk about Deesha Philyaw's inaugural short story collection. We also chat with Glory about her work with WRBG and some of her favorite interviews.
You can find more from Glory and Well-Read Black Girl at their website or on their podcast.
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My podcast is a fish. Faulkner's 1930 modernist "tour de force" (his words) takes one family's journey to bury its matriarch and splinters it into over a dozen increasingly-disjointed perspectives. The book's structure and characters are memorable but boy howdy are they difficult.
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The State of our Podcast is strong! We just have a few announcements to make that wouldn't fit onto a regular episode.
In this special edition podcast update, we drop the details on our next longread project GOOSEBUMS, discuss some tweaks to our Patreon project, and thank you all for making the show the success that it is!
To find out more about our Patreon changes, head on over to this post.
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This week we talk about the 1985-1995 comic strip Calvin and Hobbes by way of the 1992 collection The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes. The strip is totally inseparable from a discussion of its medium and the merchandising-averse guy who made it.
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Join us in the Everglades as Florida Boy rummages through the bayou in search of adventure! Will we make it out alive? Will we win the war? Tune in to find out!
Thank you to the Patreon supporters who joined us as we made these adventurous choices. Find out how to join us for bonus recordings at patreon.com/overduepod.
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This mystery novel featuring Perveen Mistry (get it?) is also an engrossing work of historical fiction. We learn about different religious and family structures in 1920s Bombay, and we also learn about how the story's split timeline impacts the narrative. Also, Cyrus sucks. Boo Cyrus.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We bring our weirdest and most chaotic vibes to our conversation about Black Buck and the forces that inform it, whether that's a bad thing or not is sort of up to you!
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Roll of thunder, hear our podcast! We're talking about Taylor's Newbery-winning novel about the Logan family working to survive in the Jim Crow South. Also, Andrew makes a joke about The Sims to try and liven things up.
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In response to the McMinn County, TN's unanimous decision to ban Art Spiegelman's Maus from its 8th-grade curriculum last month, we've both re-read the book to encourage a conversation about its continued importance and (sadly) relevance. Also, did you know that Art Spiegelman helped make Garbage Pail Kids?
We've made donations to HIAS Pennsylvania and The Fund for the School District of Philadelphia this week.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We're sharing a special preview of the new podcast, Well-Read Black Girl from Pushkin Industries.
Well-Read Black Girl is the literary kickback you never knew you needed. Glory Edim, author and founder of the Well-Read Black Girl community, sits in deep, honest and close conversation with authors like Tarana Burke, Anita Hill, Gabrielle Union, Elizabeth Acevedo and more. You’ll also meet book club members, literacy advocates, and Black booksellers to hear what they’re reading and what it means to be well-read.
In this preview, Glory talks with Korean American author and teacher Min Jin Lee. Min talks about how reading can radicalize young people — in a good way — and how, through storytelling, we can approach a "new reality” by creating a version of the world we want to see.
You can listen to Well-Read Black Girl at https://link.chtbl.com/wrbgoverdue.
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Clare Bell's novel about prehistoric big cats with language, culture, and fire is also a pretty engrossing adventure about being cast out from your home and discovering the world around you. Time to join the clan of the Red Tongue!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Enjoy another episode of our latest show-within-a-show! We're reading Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes a few chapters at a time. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
These episodes cover Chapters 27-47 of Part Two.
In Episode 11, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet a Duke and Duchess familiar with Quixote's adventures. LARPing and pranks ensue.
In Episode 12, the Duke and Duchess continue to deceive our heroes. There's a wooden horse, a bag of cats, and a governorship (finally).
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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The former hosts of Appointment Television join us this week to talk about Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, the book version of the TV show Peacock's Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. This book makes that show and all other Dan Brown books seem actually kinda better by comparison?
Follow Kathryn VanArendonk on Twitter.
Follow Margaret H. Willison on Twitter.
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Yaa Gyasi's debut novel tracks the lasting impacts of the slave trade across multiple generations and continents, through the eyes of two half-sisters and their descendants.
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Where did his animal-talking abilities come from? Why is he worshipped by animals all over the world? Why does this book talk about money so much? And why did so few of us read Dr. Dolittle in grade school?
This week, we tried to answer these questions (and more) with Alli from the SSR Podcast, a great show you should check out! You can also listen to our previous SSR Podcast collab: Vampires Don't Wear Polka Dots with the Bailey School Kids.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Two horrible dudes double team one sexy lady in this horny, Christmas-adjacent story. This episode is EXTREMELY explicit, so buckle up!!
For more on our bonus episodes, head to patreon.com/overduepod.
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We return to the Dragon Tattoo-niverse this week to discuss the second book of the Millennium trilogy, and to talk about each of the three dozen-or-so named characters tucked inside this book.
Need a refresher on Lisbeth and Mikke? Listen to our 500th episode on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We learn the art of military strategy, deception, and fire from Michael Nylan's 2020 translation of this classic text. We start by going in-depth on the contemporary political references in Nylan's Introduction to this edition, and then we go blow-by-blow and nugget-by-inspirational-nugget through Master Sun's timeless wisdom.
Here's translator Michael Nylan writing about the book for LitHub: "The Art of War is Actually a Manual on How to Avoid It."
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Jennifer Government is one of those near-future satirical works that probably felt a lot farther from reality back when it was originally written. Barry's predictions feel distressingly spot on here in 2021, and his prescience isn't exactly comforting.
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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.
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Sandra Cisneros' first novel is a collection of rapid-fire vignettes about childhood and friendship and race and America. We also check in with the darker side of our recurring guest host, the Iowa Writers Workshop.
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This contemporary Victorian story is chockablock with twists and turns, backstabs and broadsides, as well as Dickensian pornfiends. It also features a steamy lesbian romance between two women desperate to escape their own circumstances. We dive into what makes Fingersmith memorable, as well as where its structure overstays its welcome.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Enjoy another episode of our latest show-within-a-show! We're reading Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes a few chapters at a time. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
These episodes cover Chapters 10-26 of Part Two.
In Episode 9, someone enchants "Dulcinea" and Don Quixote fights a mysterious new foe.
In Episode 10, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza attend a wedding and do battle with a puppet show.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Groundhog Day meets the apocalypse in this week's book, in which the end of the world is approaching at an ever-faster pace through each of Harry August's successive lifetimes spent on earth. Hope you like paradoxes!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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DeLillo's award-winning breakthrough novel is a satirical rumination on the fear of death while living in a hyper-consumerist America inundated with information delivered by modern technology. Did we mention it was written in the 80s?
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This week's book observes society from the outside, asking occasionally uncomfortable questions about what it means to "progress" and to "fit in" and who gets to decide whether a person is doing those things.
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We close out Spooktober with a cornucopia of spooky stories from a state we both have a relationship to. Join us for a conversation about ghostly grandpas, paranormal presidents, and spectral students.
For more on our bonus episodes, head to patreon.com/overduepod.
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For the Big 500, we go to Sweden to solve a murder and also some financial crimes. And much like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, we also go on at some length about the specs of classic Macintosh computers.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Eight stories. Eight women (and plenty more). Eight experiments in genre and form that each explore modern horrors. Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection is filled with weird fiction and intimate nightmares, making it a fitting entry for Spooktober 2021.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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A run-down mansion decades past its former glory, a headstrong heroine, a creepy family, and mushrooms all come together to form a perfect, spooky storm in this week's episode.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Spooktober continues! A narrator wanders rooms in his old house, telling the reader stories about his life. Is he an old man responding to a psychological evaluation? Is he a ghost recounting (and selectively editing) his best and worst memories? Will we ever know peace from the miasma of possibilities?
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Spooktober 2021 kicks off with a book about a jerk who turned himself invisible and then was still a jerk! The titular invisible man is a forerunner to a hundred comic book villains, who all suffered some kind of scientific mishap at their own hands and then took it as an excuse to become Evil.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Enjoy another episode of our newest show-within-a-show! We're reading Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes a few chapters at a time. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
These episodes cover Chapters 43-52 of Part One, and the Prologue and Chapters 1-9 of Part Two.
In Episode 7, a few more ancillary characters get their moment in the sun before Don Quixote's companions "enchant" him and bring him home. But Cervantes has heard that Quixote rode again! If only those stories were out there somewhere...
In Episode 8, apparently everyone in Don Quixote's world knows about the novel Don Quixote now? And they sure have opinions!
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Natasha from the Unspoiled podcast joins us this week to hatch a podcast about Eragon, a book that borrows freely from every other fantasy/sci-fi story that existed as of its creation in the early 2000s.
Find more from Unspoiled here!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's time to solve the mystery of the Boxcar Children! (Or is it The Box-Car Children?) Warner's novel about a quartet of self-sufficient kiddos underwent a major revision 20 years after its debut AND it spawned dozens of mystery-focused sequels despite there not really being a mystery in the original. Tune in to hear about our own secret hideouts and to learn about Andrew's favorite new website for author research.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Craig and Andrew said they would record the podcast themselves. This very modern episode about a very modern novel discusses Woolf's signature writing style, the regrets of a postwar British people, and when (or where) you might find yourself Thinking Big.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning is mostly concerned with big historical questions like "what if nationality had nothing to do with geography" and "what if a boy could make toys come to life," but it also deals with things like "what if noticing gender were a fetish" and "what if all the world's leaders were secretly slamming each other."
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Everybody get up it's time to read now. We got a podcast goin' now. Welcome to the Space Jam!
Join us as we talk about a storybook edition of the 1996 cartoon basketball commercial Space Jam, starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny.
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After 488 episodes, we finally return to ol' Johnny Steinbeck. East of Eden mixes autobiography, pastoral fiction, and Biblical allegory -- a cocktail that has dismayed critics and excited audiences for decades. We dig into what works in this sprawling story and what might leave some readers wanting more.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This book is a work of "faction" (that's "fact" plus "fiction") about Richard Nixon's interactions with the physical manifestation(s) of Uncle Sam in the run-up to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. So, uh, a weird one.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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There are small flames all over the place! Well, specifically all over a family's house in Shaker Heights, OH in the late 1990s. Ng's bestselling sophomore effort dives into two different but intertwined families whose lives are flip-turned-upside-down by a conflagration of personal mysteries, teenage desires, and a tense adoption case.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Everyone! There's been a MURDER! And the person who committed it is still listening to THIS VERY PODCAST!!
While we try to figure this out you should definitely listen to us talk about Hercule Poirot, the unassuming-ish detective who is here to discover your deepest darkest secrets and chew bubblegum and is all out of bubblegum.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Join us for a trip back to Sherlock Holmes Times, as Melody and Erin from the Heaving Bosoms podcast help us talk about Kristen Callihan's Moonglow. The second book in the Darkest London series, Moonglow brings the romance and the supernatural lore in a way that keeps all four of us talking.
You can find more from our new friends at the Heaving Bosoms podcast here.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Enjoy another episode of our newest show-within-a-show! We're reading Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes a few chapters at a time. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
These episodes cover Chapters 28-42.
In Episode 5, Don Quixote rejoins the party. and everyone decides to shack up in the only inn/castle in all of Spain. Secondary characters step into the spotlight with their own stories, including a novel-within-a-novel called The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious.
In Episode 6, Don Quixote takes the backseat for a few more chapters. We have to close the book on Cardenio's Crew, finish the story of the Two Friends, and meet a few more ancillary characters who just love this inn.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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In this kid goth Victorian house, objects talk...but only to the people who can listen! Find out what happens to Clod Iremonger and Lucy Pennant in this creepy-yet-kid-friendly novel about a bunch of people who live near (and develop a symbiotic relationship with) trash.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The House of the Spirits is a multi-generational, lightly-magical-realism-y Chilean novel that eventually ends up being about Piochet's military coup, but it's also about the importance of studying events over a long span of time to come to a deeper understanding of why things happen the way they do. Something we could all stand to do more of, honestly.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This sensational punk novel from 1993 got attention because it depicts a LOT: drug use, sex, and all sorts of deviance in late 20th-century Edinburgh. You may even be familiar with the film adaptation starring a young Obi-Wan Kenobi!
We also discuss Welsh's connections to (and opinions of) local government, the joy of the beautiful game, and why Craig's cultural references stop in the mid 2000s.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We've got lesbian necromancers! We've got spooky mansion murder mysteries! We've got MEMES! What else could you need in your space fantasy? How about a lively chat debating the pronunciation of "Doge"?
Find out more about our bonus episode recordings at patreon.com/overduepod.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's beach season! And that means it's time for beach reads (whatever that means). We discuss the loose meaning of this genre-slash-marketing-term-slash-state-of-mind, plus a very recent book about a Russian spy who has made it to the top of a fictional (but all-too-recognizable) American tech company.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours is a late 20th-century homage to and interrogration of Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. One woman writes it, one woman reads it, and one woman lives it. Now you can listen to us talk about it!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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If you want to read a book where a well-adjusted character responds well to questions about their own sexuality, Giovanni's Room ain't it! But its depiction of one character's internal conflict is still compelling and relevant decades after its release.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Celebrated author and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates entered the world of fiction in 2019 with The Water Dancer. A combination of his appreciation for superheroes and his years spent researching the Antebellum South, it's a book that tries to marry critique of American history with supernatural adventure. It also argues pretty hard for the power of remembrance.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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If you've ever read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and thought to yourself "this book is an interesting read except for the part at the end where Tom Sawyer shows up" then buddy I have a book podcast for you (it's this one).
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This week we choose our own lunar adventure! Join us as we learn some moon facts, climb on moon rocks, and make some choices about whether or not to meet Moon Separatists.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Carolyn Keene wasn't a real person, and we suspect that the Secret of the Old Clock might not actually meet the technical definition of a "mystery"? But dang if that plucky Nancy Drew and her confident stride aren't fun to talk about anyway.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Enjoy another episode of our newest show-within-a-show! We're reading Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes a few chapters at a time. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
These episodes cover Chapters 15-27.
In Episode 3, Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, and his companion Sancho Panza - after getting their butts kicked up and down the Spanish countryside - bicker about the necessity of getting their butts kicked up and down the Spanish countryside.
In Episode 4, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza lose their donkey (or do they?) before encountering the scorned lover Cardenio. Time to learn this raggedy man's backstory!
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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It's disorienting to read the tenth book in a longrunning detective fiction series without reading any of the books that came before, but Gaudy Night is noteworthy because its heroine Harriet Vane is a precursor to many many women found in today's mystery novels. Just come prepared for the romantic parts and the parts about English high society that all make it take longer to figure out who did the crimes.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Tom Sawyer, a 19th-century amalgam of Zack Morris and Dennis the Menace, has much to teach us about the joys of boyhood and adventure in the pre-Civil War United States. Twain, by extension, has plenty to teach us about racial stereotypes and how they can bog down even the most charming of adventure stories.
Check out our previous Mark Twain episode on The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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April's bonus episode uses Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton’s illustrated sort-of-memoir Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology as a springboard to talk about being a Cat Person, loss, pandemic brain, and the fact that more books for adults should be illustrated.
Find out more about our bonus episode recordings at patreon.com/overduepod.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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What is Pippi Longstocking? A precocious nine-year-old child with a healthy disregard for The System? A Terminator? An elder god who dabbles in mortal affairs, eternally developing tests for us and finding us wanting? The answer might be "all of the above.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Téa Obreht's award-winning debut novel is about a doctor in a war-torn Balkan country, piecing together her grandfather's life one story at a time. Is it a magical realism? Is it mostly about animals? Is it surprisingly resonant with our Current Societal Moment™? Find out the answers to these questions and more on this week's episode.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Join us as we journey down a dark corridor to a parallel world where we are friends and host a book podcast together but our eyes are shiny black buttons and we give you a vaguely uneasy feeling when we invite you to listen to us... forever.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This isn't an episode of Overdue, it's a Feed Drop! We wanted to share with you an episode of The History of Literature, a podcast about great stories and why we love them.
To use host Jacke Wilson's words, the show "takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known." It's brought to you by the folks at the Podglomerate.
You can find more info on The History of Literature here.
And don't worry, there'll still be a regularly scheduled episode of Overdue on Monday. But in the meantime, enjoy listening to this discussion of this classic Russian novel!
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Clearly it is time we covered Beverly Cleary! In addition to her numerous books starring Ramona Quimby, the late titan of children's fiction penned several novels about a mouse named Ralph who rides a motorcycle. Not quite sure what else you need to know, to be honest. There's a kid named Keith. He and Ralph become friends. Also, we solve the energy crisis thanks to Ralph's motorcycle.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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"What if the Axis Powers won World War II?" is one of the most-asked questions in all of speculative fiction, but Jo Walton's Farthing asks "what if Britain didn't exactly LOSE World War II, but ended up sliding into fascism anyway?"
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This isn't an episode of Overdue, it's a Feed Drop! We wanted to share with you an episode of Storybound featuring Tommy Orange reading his short story "Copperopolis" with sound design by Ryan Dann.
Storybound is a radio theater program from the folks at Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate. Each episode is a chance to hear a contemporary author read their own work, designed with immersive sound environments.
You can find more info on Storybound here, and you can read more about the author and composer here.
And don't worry, there'll still be a regularly scheduled episode of Overdue on Monday. But in the meantime, enjoy listening to a professional writer professionally read their own words!
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What if Cinderella didn't fall for Prince Charming? What if she developed a rich, endearing relationship with the King's Huntress instead? Malinda Lo's retelling of Cinderella blends cultural traditions and remixes key tropes, but also remains true to the folk tale's reverence for love and magic.
(Listen, the big boat was floated while we were recording this episode. Our jokes were timely when we made them.)
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Welcome to our newest show-within-a-show! We're reading Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes a few chapters at a time. Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption.
These episodes cover Chapters 1-14.
In Episode 1, we do some table-setting on the author and translation, and then we dive into the first four chapters of the story. In Episode 2, our hero recruits the squire Sancho Panza and goes tilting after some windmills. Also we hear a whole story about a guy who died from lovesickness.
Join us as we meet this errant knight-errant!
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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What if Death was a job, that a guy did? On a Pale Horse has an interesting theology and viewpoint on morality, even if the book's women characters are paper-thin and Piers Anthony is kind of a jabroni.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's time to post at the top of the key and shoot some literary hoops! Pick and roll with us into a poetic novel about brotherhood, family, and passing the rock. Alexander's poetry in The Crossover is eclectic and energetic, which makes for a fun read whether you stan LeBron James or Nikki Giovanni or both!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We don't actually get to the center of the earth this week, but we do TRY to get there, and that has made all the difference. Fans of Craig's French accent get a lot to chew on in this one.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's been a couple of years, so we figured it was time for another listener Q&A! This time we tackle hard-hitting questions like "what kind of books does your baby like" and "what is the best pasta shape."
For more information on our bonus episodes, visit patreon.com/overduepod.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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What if the celebrated author of a classic children's novel wanted to write about Adult issues like spinsterhood, pariah-hood, and being told you only have a year to live? L.M. Montgomery asked this question of herself as she sat down to write The Blue Castle. Join us for a discussion of obnoxious families, fairy tales, and botched diagnoses.
Check out our previous L.M. Montgomery episode on Anne of Green Gables.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Returning guest Kamille Washington joins us this week to chat about A Promised Land, the first in former President Barack Obama's (planned) two-part presidential autobiography. We talk about the functions these books serve, both for the writer and the reader, and whether this book's recounting of Obama's early presidency squares with our experience with and memory of it a decade later (apologies to our listeners without a working knowledge of US politics, this one might be a little inaccessible).
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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N.K. Jemisin's award-winning Broken Earth trilogy concludes with two powerful magic users trying to harness the moon to bring about an apocalypse to end all apocalypses. We discuss how this book decides to stick its landing, including the impressive detour it takes to do an audacious amount of world-building for a closing entry in a series.
Just coming to the series now? Check out our episodes on the previous books: The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Gene Wolfe is a sci-fi author's sci-fi author, best known for his descriptive language and a penchant for unreliable narrators. To attempt to discover the REAL meaning of The Ziggurat, we take a break in the middle of this episode to read the story again. It only sort of helps.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We're celebrating the fiction-filled and fictional holiday of Short Story Week by sharing two short stories with y'all this week. First up is The Comet, a speculative sci-fi tale by civil rights activist and writer W.E.B. DuBois from his collection Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. After that is Woeful Tales from Mahigul, a short story collection within a short story collection by Ursula K. Le Guin from her collection Changing Planes.
Check out our previous LeGuin episodes on The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas and The Dispossessed.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's time to read a prominent work by a preeminent Canadian (specifically Québécois) author! Join us in Montreal in 1942 and meet a family with lots of problems but lots of heart.
Tremblay's known for insightful and whimsical character work, so it's fitting that we spend the bulk of the episode delving into the novel's deep roster of memorable characters. Also Canadian history is pretty interesting!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Ancillary Justice is a novel take on sci-fi's "collective consciousness" trope. What if, when cut off from the rest of its collective, an individual member of a collective consciousness just went on existing as an individual? And also what if they were thrust into the center of high-stakes intergalactic political drama?
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The second entry in N.K. Jemisin's award-winning Broken Earth series is centered on a mother/daughter pair of magic users, each learning new ways to use their abilities to heal their shattered world. It is, of course, the second book in a planned trilogy, so we discuss how well it sets up events that will be delivered on in the next book.
Just coming to the series now? Check out our episode on the first book: The Fifth Season.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's a bit late, but this year we trade a sexy holiday book for a murder mystery holiday book. After a local businessman/pervert turns up dead, it's up to Holly White and her friends in the town of Mistletoe, Maine to figure out who did it and to clear her best friend's name.
Find out how to join us for bonus episode recordings at patreon.com/overduepod.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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It's not referenced as often as George Orwell's 1984, but Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is in some ways a dystopia that's closer to our current reality: a society modeled around a production line, designed to pacify its citizenry while maximizing consumption in whatever way possible. Or maybe that's just our read on it!!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Welcome to the finale of Genie Babies, a magic carpet ride of a podcast from the boys here at Overdue! On this show-within-a-show, we're reading Husain Haddawy's translation of Muhsin Mahdi's manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights (also known by its westernized title, The Arabian Nights).
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes early, but we always release them for general consumption later on. In this closing episode, we share stories we've yet to discuss as well as some not included in our edition.
Stories covered include: Aladdin, Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves, the Story of the Golden Apples, and more.
Programming note: keep an eye on our social feeds for the announcement of our next longread project.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember."
Maggie O'Farrell's prize-winning novel Hamnet is one of remembrance -- a work of historical fiction about guilt, loss, and the people who live in the margins of a Great Author's biography. Come to marvel at how skillfully O'Farrell shunts William Shakespeare off-stage, stick around for the randy apple storage scene.
Thank you all for listening to our show this year!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Hey dicks and dames, this week we ankle down to the hoosegow to talk about Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. You better hope we can finish talking about it before we get our clocks punched!
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Our friend Sophie Brookover (co-author of Two Bossy Dames) joins us this week to discuss Never Tell, a romantic thriller written under a nom de plume by prominent politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams. It's about a talented criminal psychologist trying to move on from a violent past and the reporter she falls for after that past catches up with her.
Learn more about Stacey Abrams and her work in Georgia at fairfight.com.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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If you're into really focused, plot-driven fantasy, the vague and dreamy world of Palimpsest might not be for you. But if you're into people made out of bees and horny trains that adhere to no schedule but their own, you might just be able to spend a few nights there.
Note: this episode bears the Explicit tag because we do talk about some Adult Situations.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Welcome to another episode of Genie Babies, a magic carpet ride of a podcast from the boys here at Overdue! On this show-within-a-show, we're reading Husain Haddawy's translation of Muhsin Mahdi's manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights (also known by its westernized title, The Arabian Nights).
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption. In the first half, you'll hear us discuss what misfortunates befall a beloved hunchback and the stories his assailants use to save themselves. In the second, we meet a garrulous barber and his many unfortunate brothers.
Stories covered in Nights 102-170 include: The Story of the Hunchback Parts 1 & 2, which include tales from several subjects of the King of China and a barber who won't shut up.
Programming note: this is our penultimate episode of Genie Babies. Our next and final installment will be a mix of closing thoughts and stories we didn't have time to cover.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our podcast turns its lonely ears to you. Woo-woo-ooo
The Graduate is a story about the ennuied Benjamin Braddock, the provocative Mrs. Robinson, and the affair they embark upon that upends their lives. The iconic 1967 film adaptation is perhaps more famous than Webb's book, but the novel does contain all of the classic lines and moments you remember. Even the wedding and the bus at the end!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The Buried Giant is a sort of inversion of a typical fantasy novel - instead of a young person setting out to change the world, we get some aging heroes at the end of the Arthurian era trying to decide how everything is going to wind down.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This Pulitzer Prize-winning play is about two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, and the elaborate con that is their shared history. Tune in for a conversation about Suzan-Lori Parks' place in American theater, some patter from the street game three-card monte, and the open question that haunts your hosts: who is top dog of Overdue?
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Is Chrestomanci a type of magic? A government office? A person? Find out in the first of Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci novels. Join us for a discussion of the nine-lived Cat and his sister Gwendolyn, magical pranks, and mystical multiverses.
Looking for more DWJ? Check out Ep 201 - Howl's Moving Castle.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Matt Ruff's 2016 novel about two Black families fighting the forces of evil riffs on Lovecraftian fiction by focusing in on the cosmic horror that is America's racist past, present, and future. We dive into each of the interconnected stories and spend some time comparing the overall vibe to that of HBO's recent TV adaptation.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Geralt of Rivia is a witcher, which means he travels the realm witching. What does that mean exactly? It's a little unclear! But Sapkowksi's protagonist and the world he inhabits have proven popular enough to warrant several novels, videogames, and screen adaptations. Toss a coin to your podcast, why don'tcha?
For more on voting in the 2020 election here in the United States, head to votesaveamerica.com.
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If you wanted more of your books to be metatextual pseudo-screenplays then Demon Theory is for you! If you do not want your books to be that, however, Demon Theory may not be for you.
For more on voting in the 2020 election here in the United States, head to votesaveamerica.com.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The Opera's alive with the sound of music! It's time to dive into the serialized story-slash-novel that spawned one of the most successful musicals of all time. (The one by Andrew Lloyd Webber, maybe you've heard of it?)
It's pretty different, it seems?
For more on voting in the 2020 election here in the United States, head to votesaveamerica.com.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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This week we choose to travel to Mother Russia to make jingoistic jokes and hang out with Rasputin, every 90s kid's favorite historical figure! Not sure what's going on with the voices in this one.
For more on voting in the 2020 election here in the United States, head to votesaveamerica.com.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Welcome to Spooktober 2020! What's scarier than a story about a teenage girl who falls in with a family of vampires? 160 more pages than the original story and it's all from the sad vampire boy's perspective!
Meyer's companion novel to the original Twilight reminds us what we did and didn't like about the series, as well as fleshes out a bit of the story from Edward's gleaming eyes. But, really, it's just very long.
For more on the Quileute Move to Higher Ground Project, head to mthg.org.
For more on voting in the 2020 election here in the United States, head to votesaveamerica.com.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Welcome to another episode of Genie Babies, a magic carpet ride of a podcast from the boys here at Overdue! On this show-within-a-show, we're reading Husain Haddawy's translation of Muhsin Mahdi's manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights (also known by its westernized title, The Arabian Nights).
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption. In the first half, you'll hear us discuss the beginning of a "wacky" night with three sisters and their houseguests. In the second, we'll conclude the tales of the dervishes and get to the bottom of some magic mysteries.
Stories covered in Nights 28-69 include: The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies, which includes tales from three dervishes, two ladies, and a nosy caliph.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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This week we answer the question on everyone's minds: why, the last man? This mid-2000s graphic novel imagines a world without men, a specific kind of apocalypse with a different flavor from The Leftovers or other "what if X suddenly disappeared from Earth forever" fiction.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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C Pam Zhang's Booker Prize-listed debut novel focuses on a family of Chinese immigrants working coal mines, panning streams, and laying railroads in the American West. Her characters, myth-making, and lyrical style work to correct the historical record with specificity and humanity.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Michael Chabon's 2007 alternate history novel is a murder mystery featuring a hard-boiled detective, though neither the detective nor the murder mystery are the most memorable parts of it. The alternate history part, along with Chabon's prose, are enough to make up for whatever other shortcomings the novel might have.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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What if all we knew about alien culture was their garbage? Or is it their garbage? The Strugatsky brothers' most famous novel is about a world where stalkers crawl through hazardous Zones for precious artifacts. Also it's about hope, bureaucracy, and our relationship to the unknown.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We just couldn't resist another trip to Panem! This origin story for the trilogy's primary villain, Coriolanus Snow, takes us all the way back to the 10th Annual Hunger Games. Things are a little less flashy, but no less deadly. Struggle along with us through the hunger, through the games, and through the limits of fiction told through the antagonist's eyes.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Join us and our possibly imaginary gigantic anthropomorphic rabbit for a discussion about a play that just HAPPENS to be about a man who is friends with a possibly imaginary gigantic anthropomorphic rabbit. Funny how that works out!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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We've all heard that a tree grows in Brooklyn. But what ELSE grows there? A love of reading? A bootstraps narrative? We get to the root of the mystery this week on Overdue.
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Eggs is a book that has eggs in it, but also adolescent pain and friendship. Eggs!
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Lauren Oliver's first novel is about a teenage girl forced to relive the last day of her life over and over again. What can she change? What should she change? And how will she change? Find out the answers to those questions and more (namely, how all time loop fiction is beholden to the 1993 film Groundhog Day) in this week's episode.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Children of Blood and Bone takes familiar fantasy tropes and puts them in a new context, which makes them unexpectedly poignant and powerful.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Welcome to Genie Babies, a magic carpet ride of a podcast from the boys here at Overdue! On our newest show-within-a-show, we're reading Husain Haddawy's translation of Muhsin Mahdi's manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights (also known by its westernized title, The Arabian Nights).
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption. In the first half, you'll hear us discuss the some of the background scholarship as well as the stories that setup the collection. In the second, we'll dive deeper into some nested tales where demons truly thrive. In both halves, we'll grapple with the heaping helpings of misogyny that accompany these wild tales!
Stories covered in Nights 1-27 include: The Story of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad, His Visier's Daughter; The Story of the Merchant and the Demon; and The Story of the Fisherman and the Demon, which includes tales about King Yunan, a talking parrot, a She-Ghoul, and a stony prince.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Everything happens for a reason in James McBride's new novel. It's September of 1969 and a doddering Brooklyn deacon just shot the neighborhood's top drug dealer. The events set in motion touch every member of the community - from its 102-year-old founder to the fire ants in the boiler room - and help them build a future as the world changes around them.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Can our podcast truly capture the depth of a renowned Brazilian novelist's final work? This question mirrors one asked by the narrator of The Hour of the Star, whose attempts to portray a young woman's pitiable existence are hindered by his fears that he will never do her story justice.
Also, Craig talks into a sock.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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The Games may have ended, but we're still hungry! We travel back to Panem for the close of Collins' trilogy about Katniss, Peeta, and revolution. It's time to talk (a)political messages, rickety love triangles, the limits of a hero's POV.
If you aren't caught up on our Hunger Games journey, go give Episode 400 or Episode 410 a listen!
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Sometimes a book is about exactly what it says on the cover. Oyinkan Braithwaite's debut novel is plenty dark but surprisingly funny, exploring sibling dynamics heightened by the fact that there is serial killing involved.
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Craig loves dinosaurs, so Andrew let him talk for an hour about Steve Brusatte's recent book for dino devotees. Time to talk T-Rexes, Sauropods, and graphic depictions of the end of the world with our live Patreon chat.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
Special thanks to the Patreon supporters who joined us in the live chat. For more info on how to participate in bonus episode recordings, head to patreon.com/overduepod.
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Special guest Margaret H. Willison joins us this week to talk about the consensual, gay, historically accurate romance novels of KJ Charles.
Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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How could a dream upend your life? Would you stop eating meat? Embark on a ruinous affair? Desert your family?
Han Kang's The Vegetarian asks visceral questions about our capacity for violence and what'd be willing to give up to be rid of it.
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Candide is a novella-length takedown of the idea that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, as ordained by God. These days it's hard to believe we need a whole book about this but it's pretty funny anyway?
Our new theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Noted symbologist Robert Langdon has to "solve" a "mystery" that "references" Dante's Inferno! Let's see if he can crack the clues before the whole world succumbs to a transhumanist disease (yes, that's a real sentence that makes real sense.) For context, this was originally released in late May for some of our Patreon supporters.
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As we say in the pre-show, we've donated to the Marshall Project, which seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.
If you are able, we would encourage you to also support those fighting for the rights of Black folks in the face of escalating police violence. More donation links and educational resources can be found at: blacklivesmatters.carrd.co
Consider ordering some books from Black-owned independent bookstores. LitHub has a great list.
Want to support a beloved bookstore in Minneapolis? Help Uncle Hugo's rebuild.
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This week we read an (1) explicitly autobiographical (2) non-fiction (3) graphic novel, things we don't usually do! But we try to have a useful discussion anyway. This episode, like most of our shows, does not pass the Bechdel Test.
Our new theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis.
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Welcome to the last official installment of HELLBOYS, a Divine Comedy podcast from the boys here at Overdue! On this episode, we wrap up our journey through Robert and Jean Hollander's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every other month we release them for general consumption. This episode carries us to the end where we meet a Who's Who of Biblical heroes and stare directly into the face of God (Paradiso XXVIII-XXXIII). Then it's time to reflect on our ascension from Hellboys to Heavenlads.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Jhumpa Lahiri's second short story collection focuses on the experiences of second- and third-generation Bengali-Americans, people caught between the futures they're trying to build and the pasts they're trying to honor. Her direct, compelling writing style makes these slices of life particularly affecting, as do the characters and the misfortunes that befall them.
Our new theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis. We hope you dig it!
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Orlando is an English nobleman in the 16th century who, by the end the Woolf's tongue-in-cheek biography of the character, is an English noblewoman in the 20th century. It's quite a journey for all involved!
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My grandmother asked me to tell you about this podcast. It's about a book by Swedish author Fredrik Backman, and it's about a precocious young girl named Elsa and her quest to deliver her Granny's letters of apology.
It's a fairy tale - of sorts. It's also a story about coming to grips with the world's complications, with the ways in which we are all more than we appear at first glance, and with grief.
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Llama Llama Red Pajama
On a podcast with his mama!
We read llama books to kids
To make them close their small eyelids.
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What's a boy to do when his dad is the bumbling Chief of Police? Solve crimes, of course! Join us as we solve The Mystery of How Donald J. Sobol Wrote Detective Fiction for Kids!
Special thanks to the Patreon supporters who joined us in the live chat. For more info on how to participate in bonus episode recordings, head to patreon.com/overduepod.
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Fair warning: this book's a bit of a bummer! Agee's autobiographical A Death in the Family centers on the aftermath of the automobile accident that took his father's life in 1915. It's a poetic exploration of grief and trauma -- which may not be everyone's cup of tea these days! Ways we try to lighten the mood include: It's a Wonderful Life musings, Andrew's Heavenly Dogs, and a bunch of words that Craig may or may not have made up.
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For this, the highest of holy days, we've revisited the Choose Your Own Adventure-verse with R.A. Montgomery's Smoke Jumpers. Come for the information about what it's like to be a trainee firefighter, stay for the ranger who sounds a whole lot like Strong Bad.
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The arena calls our name again, and we must volunteer as tribute! It's time we talked about Suzanne Collins' second novel about the dystopic land of Panem and their annual Hunger Games. Tune in for a discussion of revolution, game design, and underbaked love triangles. Plus, Andrew goes a-Googlin'!
If you aren't caught up on our Hunger Games journey, go give Episode 400 a listen!
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Welcome to another installment of HELLBOYS, a Divine Comedy podcast from the boys here at Overdue! We're continuing our journey through Robert and Jean Hollander's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy a few cantos at a time.
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we combine them for general consumption. This combo episode carries us further into space where we meet some friars and Dante's grandpa (Paradiso X-XVIII) before inching closer and closer to God (Paradiso XIX-XXVII). We argue about God, learn about love, and cower before a giant eagle.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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The Shadow of the Wind is a complex noir-ish mystery set in post-WWII (and post-Spanish Civil War) Barcelona. Come for the endearing characters, stay for the Byzantine explanation of what is going on!
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Katherine Arden's debut novel is a potent mix of Slavic folklore, Russian history, and good old-fashioned fantasy. We dig into which of those ingredients work best within the scope of The Bear and the Nightingale's story, but first we take a moment to debut Andrew's new classic catchphrase.
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When Andrew read The Colour of Magic, people suggested that the beginning of the Discworld series was not necessarily the best place to start. Guards! Guards!, the eighth book in the series, is the start of its own contained-ish arc. According to our listeners and many readers, this serves as a more suitable jumping off point.
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There are some cars you just shouldn't get into! Michel Faber's thriller Under the Skin is about Isserley, the driver of one such dangerous vehicle. Why do all the men who get into her car disappear? Is she even really human? Are you? Hop in for the answers to these questions and more!
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Friday Black, a debut collection of short stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, deftly employs hyperbole to make the reader notice horrors of American life that have become less-noticeable through repetition. It’s also going to resonate with anyone who has spent any amount of time working retail on the day after Thanksgiving.
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We had a blast processing this novelization of the hit film Sonic the Hedgehog! Did you know it's based on a video game?! Gotta read fast!
Special thanks to the Patreon supporters who joined us in the live chat. For more info on how to participate in bonus episode recordings, head to patreon.com/overduepod.
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This week’s episode is our recent live show crossover event with Appointment Television at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. The Appointment Television and Overdue crews gather together to discuss the recent TV adaptation and compare it to the book from which it (and the film, and the ill-starred musical) sprung. Whether we figure out the relative superiority of books or TV as competing artistic formats is left up to the listener.
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In this challenging novel, award-winning author Toni Morrison explores how utopias are defined (and perhaps undermined) by their boundaries. The all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma survived for decades by cordoning itself off from the outside world. But what happens when the outside world starts gnawing at the people inside?
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This week's book is a cozy mystery, but for kids! Author Kate Racculia joins us for a discussion of The Westing Game, which was a major inspiration for her own work (and is a completely wild read, besides).
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What better way to celebrate a milestone episode than to make a bunch of teenagers fight each other to the death? Join us as we discuss the first entry in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, taking particular delight in its worldbuilding and its protagonist Katniss Everdeen. We also get into some of the film-informed Discourse that has surrounded the series since its release, and of course we take time to get our celebrities all mixed up.
(Special note: Want to come see us live with our friends from Appointment Television? Head to bit.ly/booksortv for info on our live show at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH on Thursday, February 20th. It's free!)
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Welcome to Febuwary! This week’s episode is a follow-up of sorts to Episode 291, in which Andrew read Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. The Wind Done Gone is labeled a “parody” for legal reasons but it feels somewhere in between a sequel and a critique, acknowledging the strong characters of the original but tearing down its rose-tinted nostalgia for the antebellum American South.
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Welcome to another installment of HELLBOYS, a Divine Comedy podcast from the boys here at Overdue! We're continuing our journey through Robert and Jean Hollander's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy a few cantos at a time.
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we combine them for general consumption. This combo episode carries us to the top of Mt. Purgatory (Purgatorio XXIII-XXXIII) and up into the stars (Paradiso I-IX). We walk through fire, visit a Garden of Eden, and meet some truly charming moon people.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In the future, all of mankind will be confined to an underground silo, wondering when and if the world outside will ever be habitable again. But if things aren't as bad as they seem? And what if everyone in the silo isn't as alone as they think?
That's the premise of Hugh Howey's Wool, a collection of stories woven together into a novel about secrets, duties, and revolution. Time to talk about climate change and what makes a short story compelling!
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The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids commence with a new teacher who just MIGHT be a vampire! It's time to get to the undead bottom of this...or is it?
We recorded this week's show with Alli from the SSR Podcast, a great show you should check out if you want a trip down memory lane to your middle school library. We were really honored to be included in SSR's "Manuary" lineup this year, and we hope you enjoy this hot collab!
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To put it mildly, a lot of stuff has happened since we released our episode on The Handmaid's Tale back in 2014. Among that stuff is the release of The Testaments, the 2019 sequel to the original book and a companion piece of sorts to the Hulu television series.
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It is better to be feared than loved. The ends justify the means. King Louis sucked. These are the (clearly) famous quotes from Machiavelli's classic yet innovative work of political science. It's time to talk power, political satire, and the wonderful translation by Tim Parks.
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Inspired by the raunchy humor and biblical events of Christopher Moore's take on Jesus, we recorded a rowdy bonus episode with our rollicking Patreon chat.
Want to join us for the next bonus recording? Head to patreon.com/overduepod to find out how.
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The Mists of Avalon is a seminal work of fantasy fiction that centers the women of Arthurian legend such as Morgan Le Fay. Its author was a terrible person. We talk about the terrible stuff first, and then we try to unpack why the book has entertained and resonated with so many.
Also - don't spend any money on this book! Donate to www.rainn.org instead.
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Book one in the one-book Sexy Sylvie series isn’t about a sexy Hanukkah miracle where one night’s worth of personal lubricant lasts for eight nights, but we had fun with it anyway.
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The Eyre Affair is the book that you would get if Ready Player One were about literature instead of the 1980s, and also if Ready Player One was more engaging or half as clever as it thought it was.
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George Selden wrote a charming story about a charming cricket named Chester who just charms the pants right off everyone living in New York City - including a cat and a mouse. And the illustrations by Garth Williams are also charming!
You know what's not so charming? Liverwurst.
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Andrew's got the week off so Craig's wife Laura joins the show again to talk about Kate Grenville's award-winning novel The Secret River.
The story is an an attempt to tell more truthfully the British settlement of Australia, as through the eyes of one man sent to the penal colony that would ultimately become the country we know today. The violence he witnesses - and participates in - against Aboriginal people defines him as well as the generations that come after.
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Welcome to another installment of HELLBOYS, a Divine Comedy podcast from the boys here at Overdue! We're continuing our journey through Robert and Jean Hollander's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy a few cantos at a time.
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we combine them for general consumption. This combo episode carries us through the first two thirds of the Purgatorio, covering Cantos I-XXII. We climb up God's "Learn Your Lesson" mountain, meet a bunch of Dante-thirsty paparazzi, and encounter one "hell" of a Virgil stan.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Elements of Ayn Rand's Objectivist worldview hold a lot of sway in conservative American politics, so we go back to one of Rand's most significant works to see what all the fuss is about.
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This week, we're joined once again by Gwen and Frank from the New York Public Library's The Librarian Is In podcast, this time to talk about Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (and the movie of the same name). It's a discussion of narrator reliability, "boy books," and the long and fruitful career of Louise Fletcher.
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What's up, daddio? Dig this, you cool cats: a podcast, burning with the soul of American individualism and the poetry of the open highway. Kerouac's legendary novel defined the Beat Generation, and it's chock-a-block with hallmarks of the era. Join us for a road trip back to the late 1940s -- an era of sweaty jazz, discarded marriages, and Benzedrine.
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James Henry Trotter has a hard life. He's suffered loss. He's been mistreated. But things start looking up when a giant peach and a menagerie of bug friends come into his life! Roald Dahl's classic story of a typically-sized boy and his atypically-sized fruit is a real crowd-pleaser, even if there's a bunch of stuff we didn't remember from our childhoods.
Natasha from the UNSpoiled! Show joins us to kick off Remember November festivities, wherein we read books at least one of us has read before. Breaking our own rules - how rebellious!
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This is Halloween. This is Halloween! Halloween. Halloween.
Join us for a bonus episode that includes a frightening chat, horrifying drawings, and a spooky spelunk through the world of Tim Burton's (children's book?) The Nightmare Before Christmas.
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Stop me if you've heard this one: a strange man who runs a motel with his mom (maybe) commits several murders before people get wise to him. At least one of them is in a shower. It's very creepy. Were you thinking of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho? Well we're not talking about it! This is a book podcast, silly!
Actually we do talk a bit about what the movie lifted from the book, but we also dive into topics such as the murders that inspired Bloch, Norman Bates' murder swamp, and the prolific writer/musician Chet Williamson.
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Come on into our spooky kitchen and let us cook you up a big steaming bowlful of creepypasta! This week's book began life as a series of Reddit posts that were later Kickstarted into a book self-published on Amazon, which is maybe the most early-2010s sentence that has ever been written. Join us for a lesson in creepy story etymology, and also a lesson in Skinhorse, the inside-out horse.
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Ever wanted to marry a ghost? Then boy do we have a book for you! Spooktober continues with Yangsze Choo's debut novel about a young woman in late 19th-century Malaya who winds up promised to a spectral groom.
It's a fun book that is almost overflowing with hallmarks of different genres. Coming-of-age concerns, supernatural fantasy, historical fiction, romance: it's got a lot going on! But the heart of it all is Li Lan's entertaining exploration of the afterlife, its characters, and its bureaucracies.
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We rip our way into Spooktober 2019 with From Hell, a 90s graphic novel from writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell about Jack the Ripper. The book presents one (possible, but unlikely) solution to the mystery, and our research leads us through a lot more.
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Please, sir, I want some more podcast! Dickens' classic novel about a lovable urchin named Oliver Twist is equal parts social novel, mystery, and bildungsroman -- or so Charlie thought. We dive into what works and doesn't work about its depictions of London in the Industrial Revolution, Oliver's moral compass, and the titular twist.
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Welcome back to HELLBOYS, a Divine Comedy podcast from the boys here at Overdue! We're continuing our journey through Robert and Jean Hollander's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy a few cantos at a time.
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we combine them for general consumption. This episode carries us through the back half of the Inferno, covering Cantos XVII-XXXIV. We travel through the Malebolge, meet a demon biker gang, and climb down the Devil himself!
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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The God of Small Things is about family, and loss, and India, and the caste system, and all of its disparate plot lines and character arcs come together in the end like a Seinfeld episode but with more tragedy.
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"What if women ended the Peloponnesian War, am I right?" asks Aristophanes in his classic comedy Lysistrata. Famous for its depiction of a sex strike that brings the warring Greek states to their unsexed knees, the play has been remixed countless times as generations of artists adapt its core conceit to their own times. So we figured we'd go back to the old Prince of Comedy himself to see what all the fuss is about.
Talking points include comedies of bad manners, Ancient Greek props, and the "lioness on a cheese grater."
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It's time to play some games! Craig's sister Jillian read Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games, one of several entries in his Culture series that explores a hegemonic utopia influencing as much of outer space as it can. Banks' ideas gameplay may be primarily analog, but he still manages to represent cultures and worlds with digital creativity.
Andrew may be away, but we still find time to joke about names, make some Gatsby references, and chat about Starcraft.
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Join us as we attempt to bring Pullman's epic god-fightin' trilogy to a close! We start with a brief recap of the first two books, and then we dive into what does and doesn't work for Andrew in the final installment. Train your spyglass on the Fall of Man, cut through bear armor with your subtle knife, and follow your golden compass to the origin of Dust.
Additional talking points include Andrew's new partyboy son, motorcycle elephants, and the debut of a new segment: Andrew's Dad Moment.
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Friend of the show Christina Tucker (Unfriendly Black Hotties, PCHH, her new newsletter, etc.) joins us to chat about Jeff VanderMeer's novel Annihilation. It's the first of his Southern Reach trilogy, a Weird Science Fiction romp through a mysterious zone called Area X.
We've got our own Area X going, replete with chicken sandwiches, Edward James Olmos, and a fun-loving chat of supporters.
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This week we welcome Renata and Kait from The Worst Bestsellers to talk about Becky Chambers' first entry in the Wayfarer series: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. It's a book that's equal parts cozy AND sexy, with plenty of aliens for you to meet and/or have...stirrings about.
Our conversation takes the long way from Star Trek to the Secret, exploring what it's like for folks who usually read Bad books to actually read a Good one.
Caveat lictor: sometimes you have to swear in space!
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The titular Tarzan of the titular Apes is a lot more than "Me Tarzan. You Jane." And Edgar Rice Burroughs is here to tell you all about how and why it's because he's the sire of an English nobleman.
Join us for a chat about the lost city of Tarzana, the Ernest filmography, and the invention of stabbing.
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Andrew's Appointment Television co-hosts Kathryn VanArendonk and Margaret H. Willison join us for a chat about siblings, rivalry, and this classic of modern parenting lit from Adele Faber and Elain Mazlish.
At the time of recording, Andrew's fatherhood was looming on the horizon, so Kathryn kindly shared with us how relevant the book felt to her own parenting experience. And don't worry, Craig and Margaret had plenty of wisdom to share as well.
Caveat lictor: Margaret's here, so there's swearing.
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It's time to make some more choices! Thanks to a benevolent small business owner, we've been transported back to the time of Arthurian legend and must face the biggest choice of all: food service or secretarial work!
Actually, we make plenty of fun choices in Ellen Kushner's CYOA riff on the Knights of the Round Table. So join us for a bunch of boons, magic, and mannerpunk!
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Philip Pullman followed up The Golden Compass with The Subtle Knife, the adventure of Lyra and Will on their quest to uncover the secret of Dust and (maybe, just maybe) save the world from evil forces within the Church. Like a lot of Second Stories in a Trilogy, the book builds on its predecessor's world by introducing new friends and foes and ending with a cliffhanger that ensures you'll come back for Book Three. We just have one question for Mr. Pullman: where are the bears?
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Welcome to HELLBOYS, a Divine Comedy podcast from the boys here at Overdue! On our newest show-within-a-show, we're reading Robert and Jean Hollander's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy a few cantos at a time.
Some Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption. First you'll hear our introduction to the show (and the translation) and our chat about Inferno I-VII. Then our journey alongside Virgil and Dante continues with an episode on Inferno VIII-XVI. Talking points include violent punishments for violent people, Dante's (literal) burn book, and Hollander's helpful student Edward.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The horror, the horror! It's time to talk about colonialism, y'all. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has inspired plenty of stories about a dude diving deep into nature to find another dude, so we figured we'd get to the...heart...of the matter. Listen and learn what exactly the horror, the horror means and why some notable writers want nothing to do with this classic text of 19th-century imperialism.
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Behind Closed Doors is about a relationship that seems too perfect to be true - except that instead of arguing about the “right” way to load the dishwasher and the way the other person leaves cabinets hanging open all the time, Jack Angel is a full-on sociopath who locks his wife Grace in a windowless basement room and plans to do the same to her younger sister. It’s hampered a bit by dry, straightforward prose, but it’s a page-turner nevertheless.
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"What if the Napoleonic Wars but with magic?" is a great elevator pitch for Susanna Clark's sprawling novel, but it only scratches the surface of what Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has to offer. Footnotes, Farnums, and factoids abound in this fun work of historical/alternate fiction.
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CW: This week’s book revolves around sexual assault, which we discuss in the episode. We don’t read the specific passage and we try to be as general as possible, but feel free to skip this one if you’re not up to it.
Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak is a pitch-perfect account of what it’s like to be Awkward In High School, in ways that are both funny and sad. That a two-decade-old novel still feels so relevant to our current cultural moment probably speaks poorly of us.
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This episode, instead of a book we read YOUR questions! Topics range from the five characters you'd meet at an Overdue dinner party to what makes a great diaper. We also have a blast chatting with our livestream audience.
As always, thanks to our Patreon supporters for making these bonus episodes possible! Visit patreon.com/overduepod to find out how you can support the show.
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Michel Faber's 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White has been hailed as a Dickensian novel with a saucy, modern narrator. How exactly does he pull that off in an epic story steeped in the history of Victorian London? And how does he play with our own expectations of the period? Find out in this week's episode!
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In this week's episode, we talk about the very nature of what makes a superhero (or an anti-hero, or a supervillain) a superhero (or anti-hero, or supervillain), in between talking about our ideal Father's Day and how Harry Potter and the D&D alignment chart informs how people of a certain age think about all fictional characters.
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Lorraine Hansberry's classic play A Raisin in the Sun endures for its insightful portrait of a black family in Chicago fighting for a better life. Inspired by her own family's experience with racial housing discrimination, it's a complex piece about who gets to get ahead, how, and why.
And of course, we had to balance the gravity of this gem from Hansberry's brief but momentous career with a deep dive on where raisins come from.
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Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived In The Castle shares some qualities with her best-known short story The Lottery; both feature small New England towns that are the site of some unfortunate mob action. Join us for a conversation about non-supernatural creepiness, unreliable narrators, and early flights.
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Our voyage ends with Book 24, which includes one more amazing Odysseus lie and a heaping serving of deus ex machina. Then it's time to reflect on our journey from high school English students enduring a long reading assignment to olive-oiled men who love a good epic poem. Thanks for joining us on this trek through Emily Wilson's translation of Homer's Odyssey!
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Caveat lictor: this episode contains mild spoilers for Drowning Ruth.
Christina Schwarz's debut novel weaves together three main threads: historical fiction, melodramatic mystery, and sisterhood. The result is an interesting portrait of women in Depression-era Wisconsin striving for self-determination.
Additional talking points include knock-knock tips, Jonathan Franzen's Oprah complaints, and the Tooth Fairy's pyramid scheme.
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Madeline Miller's Circe is a great chaser for Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, and it's an excellent exploration of a mythological character who has often been maligned. Miller's Circe is modern but also instantly recognizable and easy to reconcile with her classical depictions.
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We're almost at the end of our long journey, but before we wrap up with Book 24 and our closing thoughts, we took some time to sit down with Emily Wilson and chat about her wonderful translation of Homer's Odyssey. Among other topics, we talked with her about her process, Telemachus' entertaining whining, and why all these boys are oiling themselves up all the time.
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Look...if you had one shot (or one opportunity) to undo everything Lee Harvey Oswald ever wanted - in one moment - would you capture it or just let it slip?
Stephen King's time-traveling doorstop of a novel 11/22/63 takes us back to the good ol' days when men were men who made plans to assassinate presidents. Discussion points include time travel rules and how much time travel rules, past slang and past meats, and the introduction of Craig's new timehopping bud.
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We kick off May by looking back to the middle of March, courtesy of George Eliot's brick of a novel about an insular English community. Discussion topics include: marriage, weird inheritance rules, and the phrase "pleased as Punch."
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Just a heads up - this one has explicit language!
David Wong's John Dies at the End is a slacker comedy-slash-cosmic horror adventure that may not be for everyone. Talking points include our own hangups as readers of comedy writing, political incorrectness, and the legacy of Cracked magazine's SHUT UP jokes. Oh - and ska.
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This year's Children's Book Week - on the eve of the podcast's first child, no less - is about Raymond Briggs' weirdly existential and British Fungus the Bogeyman, and the much lighter and sillier Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri.
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Scott Lynch's 2006 debut novel is a "sword and sorcery crime novel" about a gang of thieves who get caught up in a power struggle for the fate of their city. The Lies of Locke Lamora bumps up against issues of class and privilege, but it's mostly a story about cool thieves doing cool cons.
Talking points include Omar Little, fantasy theatrics, and crossing the double-crossers.
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Ironically, running out of time to read George Eliot's Middlemarch gave us the time to get to H.G. Wells' foundational sci-fi novella The Time Machine, in which he invents the very concept (or at least the modern nomenclature) of a time machine. Wells' protagonist is, surprisingly enough, able to make guesses about sentient life from 800,000 years in the future that just happen to align with his present-day worldview.
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Our journey through Stephenie Meyer's world of werewolves, vampires, and teens has come to a close! We wrap up the story of Bella, Edward, and Jacob with Breaking Dawn. It's a book that could probably be at least two books and definitely suffered by the odd pacing of the series' prior entries.
Join us for a discussion of the mind internet, fan fiction and world-building, and just how much we HATE werewolf imprinting.
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In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut uses surprising humor and sci-fi wit to portray one man's experience of the horrific bombing of Dresden. But don't worry - you needn't have read Slaughterhouse One through Four to keep up with our episode on this classic.
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Here we go! We're closing in on the end, talking about Books 20-23 of Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation.
Odysseus and Penelope pray before the Suitor Bowl. Athena eggs on the suitors. Telemachus yells at his mom. Everyone competes in an archery contest. Then it's time to kill some suitors! Our Heroes' utter lack of mercy doesn't play especially well in Wilson's translation, but that's by design.
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This week's book takes us up to space, where the human race fights sentient lizards and hamsters and befriends a fast-talking all-powerful AI. It's sometimes as fun as it sounds! Sometimes not.
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It may not be that classic Audrey Hepburn joint, but Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's quite the fun, poignant portrait of a young socialite named Holiday Golightly.
Join us for a morning feast of names, symbolism, and crimes - the three food groups!
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Our SECRET SURPRISE BOOK this week is related to a SECRET SURPRISE LIFE EVENT for one of your co-hosts! Which one? You'll have to listen to find out!!
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Nnedi Okorafor's magical teen story Akata Witch centers on a young woman named Sunny who discovers that she has magical powers. She then enlists in an after-school magic club with the rest of her coven and sets off to play soccer and save the world. Join us for a discussion of buckeyes, magic schools, and more -- all with the help of a very rowdy patron chat.
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What if kids could live in a world where it was Christmas every day? What if the only way to get there was in a creepy car driven by a deathless vampire man? Joe Hill's NOS4A2 asks these questions and more! It's also the first of his books to engage more directly with the work of his father, a little guy named Stephen King.
Other talking points include The Post 2 (spoilers), beard secrets, and Andrew's spine-tingling take on Maxwell's Silver Hammer.
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This is a book all about empathy, which is occasionally odd given that its author has had Some Issues extending empathy to certain people over the years. Andrew also has some trouble reading a book made of paper.
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You want to be popular? You want your ideas to be heard? You want to get a great job? Then Dale Carnegie has the tips for you! His best-selling self-help volume How to Win Friends and Influence People has been helping business men for decades, so we decided to sit down and go over a few of the particulars.
PS We've also got a hot tip for anyone looking to get more chips at their office cafeteria.
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Richard Wright's Native Son has been called a "pamphlet" or "protest novel" by writers like James Baldwin, and while there are sections of the book that justify the label, Bigger Thomas and his deeds and motivations defy easy summation.
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Octavia Butler's Dawn imagines a future where humans are a rung lower on the food chain than usual. And after nearly extinguishing itself in nuclear fire, humanity's only hope is a mysterious alien species that has rescued them for specious reasons. It's a story about oppression and identity, bolstered by Butler's excellent world-building.
Note: Tune in after the episode ends for a preview of Mythology, a new podcast from the folks at Parcast.
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This week's book, which can be enjoyed by kingkillers and non-kingkillers alike, manages to be filled with meta-references to fantasy fiction without being annoying, which is rare enough to be the stuff of fantasy all by itself.
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Odysseus is still old and Telemachus still wants to help kill suitors! In these episodes of our show-within-a-show, we cover books 16-19 of Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey. We've got beggars, sad dogs, Instagram filters, and destructive nannies. What more could you want?
Remember, some Patreon supporters get these episodes early every month. Find out more at patreon.com/overduepod
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Louise Erdirch's National Book Award-winning novel The Round House is the story of a thirteen-year-old boy seeking justice for a terrible crime committed against his mother. Unfortunately, arcane laws and good old-fashioned racism stand in his way. It's a powerful book about one young man's growth, about the limits of and hopes for tribal law, and about the perils facing too many Native women. Also there's Star Trek and some grandparents making dirty jokes.
Content warning: The Round House is about a case of sexual assault. We don't read explicit passages, but the event does come up in our discussion.
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If you can't stand how hot these werewolves are, get out of the kitchen! This week we head back to Forks for the third of the four main Twilight books, and while we had kind of made our peace with reading these in our New Moon episode, we question the wisdom of that decision this time around.
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The Golden Compass (aka The Subtle Knife) has cute soul-Pokémon, multiple universes, and armored battle bears, so what's not to like?
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How is sex different than love? Is privacy a necessity for human identity? For political identity? DOES GOD POOP?
With the help of Milan Kundera, we attempt to answer these questions and more in this bonus episode on his classic novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Also, be sure to listen post-outro to experience the horrors of a Google Hangout gone wrong.
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This week we're joined by friend of the show (and one half of the hit newsletter Two Bossy Dames) Sophie Brookover to talk about Vladimir Nabokov's epic literary troll novel Pale Fire. The author may be dead and the reader is most certainly bad, but that doesn't mean we can't have a great time talking about Vera Nabokov, John Shade stans, and botched assassination attempts.
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The whole team at Overdue wishes you and yours a very horny Christmas and a sultry New Year with Stefanie London's A Dangerously Sexy Christmas, a book that is equal parts dangerous AND sexy!
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This week's episode is a recording of our live episode from the New England Library Association in Rhode Island in October. We talk about Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, which you may also remember from the Disney movie of the same name.
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Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver successfully melds and renews a whole stack of classical fairytales in a story that is anchored by women and deals with real-world anti-Semitism without ever feeling too heavy.
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Minecraft, one of the most popular games on the planet, has lots of lessons to teach us! Lessons about persistence, about ingenuity, about punching trees. In this kid-friendly novel, Max Brooks details the "true story" of his own experiences on a Minecraft island, weaving together nuggets of wisdom with the game's particular flavor of discovery.
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The boys are back in town! Odysseus and Telemachus make it home to Ithaca in this episode of our show-within-a-show, which covers books 12-15 of Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey. We've got sirens, vaping, swineherds and some god-granted old dude cosplay.
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The Wheel of Time turns, and we release a new podcast episode. This week, we close out Remember November with a look at the first book in a, um, fourteen book fantasy series with which Andrew is intimately acquainted. The Wheel Of Time has its issues but if you want to talk about extremely detailed magic systems and meticulously crafted fantasy worlds, you’re in the right place!
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Travel with us back to the Jazz Age and meet Irene and Clare, two women who practice "passing" to get by in New York City. The tragic characters of Nella Larsen's insightful novel Passing show us how suspicions and social status can conspire to bring about a terrible end between friends. Other talking points include the Harlem Renaissance, Arby's vs. Applebee's, and boy oh boy how we wish Larsen had written more books.
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When we talk about judging books by the standards of their time, we’re usually dealing with books that have been written many many decades ago, but Lynne Reid Banks’ The Indian In The Cupboard isn’t far removed from our own childhoods. It’s easy to see why the book resonates with kids, but it’s also frustrating to see Banks acknowledging the gap between pop culture depictions and reality even as she feeds into so many stereotypes.
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Remember November commences with us revisiting John Knowles' A Separate Peace. This book about a broken leg boy bored Craig to peaces in high school, but it turns out some books resonate more strongly than you might think.
Tune in for a conversation about male friendship, stairs and trees, and Kurt Vonnegut's fourth cousin Norb.
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What's spookier than doing a CYOA book with a live bonus episode audience? CHANGING THE COURSE OF HUMAN HISTORY! Actually, this adventure wasn't TOO spooky but we did meet our least favorite passenger on the Titanic: Jessica.
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This week we revisit a classic Spooktober trope, the haunted house! Richard Matheson's Hell House definitely does not belong in the upper echelon of haunted house fiction - though it's a page-turner that forwards some interesting theories about the causes of haunting, it's also gratuitously sexually violent in some ways that don't feel great!
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This week's episode, on Thomas Olde Heuvelt's English-language debut novel, is a good reminder: don't accuse a woman of being a witch, kill her, and then taunt her as she despondently traipses through your small town. Bad things will happen. This seems pretty self-evident but apparently it's not.
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R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series has been spooking tweens since 1992, selling millions of copies and spawning numerous offshoots and film projects. This week we discuss one of the earliest in the series: Say Cheese and Die!
Find out what happens when a group of kids stumble upon an evil camera and just can't. stop. taking. PICTURES!
We apologize in advance to any fans of the early 90s Ford Taurus. We kid because we love.
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What's scarier than an authoritative government that censors and corrupts its artists? The literal devil! This week we're talking about The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, a seminal work in the 20th-century Russian canon and an exploration of just how weird stuff needs to get for the devil to introduce you to Pontius Pilate.
Spooky talking points include witch cream, vices, and Joseph Stalin's Haunted House.
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Welcome to Spooktober 2018! Our first book this year is Carrie, Stephen King’s first published novel. Even if you know what happens—and you have probably at least encountered the pigs-blood-prom-night thing through cultural osmosis at this point—the way King builds to and follows that iconic scene keeps this book plenty spooky.
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After reading a whole bunch of books, we’ve finally gotten to the odyssey part of the Odyssey! Giants, dead people, sort-of-goddesses—these books have it all.
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Just like Bella can't resist her vampire beau Edward, we couldn't resist returning to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. So we sharpened our fangs and grew out our wolfbeards for a lengthy discussion of the second book in the series, New Moon.
We bemoan the dearth of quality humans in Bella's life. We discuss our #TeamJacob leanings despite some concerns about his "Nice Guy" persistence. And we express our frustration with a book that doesn't WANT to be a metaphor for power dynamics despite being about a teenage girl DEALING WITH SUPERNATURAL MONSTER BOYS.
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What can be said about Thomas Pynchon's postmodern classic Gravity's Rainbow? Well, it's nearly a thousand pages long so what CAN'T be said, am I right??
Join us for a slightly longer than normal conversation about sexual antics, post-war war machines, and the difficulty of Difficult Books About Difficult Men.
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Louis L'Amour's The Walking Drum, a historical novel set circa the 12th century in Europe and the Middle East, is less concerned with being an adventure story and more concerned with telling the reader about worlds that are different from their own. Mathurin Kerbouchard isn't always the most complex character, but the things he learns, the places he goes, and the people he meets all come together to form a novel that evokes American Westerns but is set far away from the American West.
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How far would YOU go for your kids? asks Craig DiLouie in Suffer the Children. Would you listen to a whole podcast about KIDS WHO EAT BLOOD?!
This episode was recorded live over the Internet with some of our Patreon supporters in the audience. Find out more about our Patreon project at patreon.com/overduepod.
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Johnny Tremain is sort of Revolutionary War fan-fiction and sort of World War II propaganda, but it nevertheless remains a part of the canon because it shows us a side of these characters that most elementary school history books exclude. Natasha from the Unspoiled podcast joins us for a journey through this occasionally extremely violent childhood classic.
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If you want to relive the 2008 financial crisis, this is the book for you! Behold the Dreamers is the story of the crash through the eyes of immigrants who work for bankers, but Imbolo Mbue resists making any individual character into a hero or villain. That might not always be satisfying, but it makes for a more nuanced story.
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NOTE: This episode does contain explicit language.
Welcome back to our good friends Margaret and Sophie! They're here to tell you all about Erich Segal's classic tearjerker Love Story. Get ready to hear about tears, jerks, and unfortunate fate of the original cool girl.
Other talking points include: saying you're sorry, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and preposterous privilege.
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This week we solve a mystery with the Hardy Boys, the indistinguishable sons of a famous detective. They’ll conquer men in wigs, slightly worse detectives, and Hobo Johnny on their way to earning a thousand bucks. Good night!
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The Diary of a Young Girl, frequently referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, chronicles the author's time hiding with her family during the German occupation of Amsterdam in the 1940s. It's also a shockingly personal account of a young woman's quest for self-knowledge. Anne shows remarkable candor as she battles to be her best self while enduring the most trying of circumstances.
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Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is slave fiction with just a hint of magical realism mixed in to heighten the stakes. Whitehead uses a slightly fluid sense of time and location to better highlight the links between the institution of slavery and race in America throughout its history.
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The experiment continues! It's the show-within-a-show where we read Emily Wilson's new translation of The Odyssey a few books at a time and having a more in-depth chat about it than they do about most books.
These episodes cover Books 4-7 of The Odyssey. First, Telemachus gets oiled up and talks to some more people about his dad, and the gods finally free Odysseus from his long torment. But he'll make it home now, probably! Probably. Then we chill with Odysseus as he meets the lovely Phaeacians.
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You may remember Dennis Lehane's 2001 novel Mystic River from the award-winning 2003 film of the same name. What elevates this murder mystery from other crime procedurals is its attention to human detail, its exploration of our collective moral failings and how they intersect.
LISTENER BEWARE: We do spoil the heck out of the ending so that we can get into a conversation about youth violence and the American cultural conversation about guns. Unless you're just DYING to read it, we think you should press ahead and enjoy the episode. We even have fun talking about Mystic Pizza and Boston!
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Just what the heck is a Ya-Ya, anyway?? We tackle this and other topics—including physical abuse, parenthood, midlife crises, and other topics we have little-to-no direct experience with—as we cover Rebecca Wells' best-known novel.
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V.E. Schwab's popular Shades of Magic series started with this novel about Kell, a magic man with a magic jacket, and Lila, a thief who dreams of becoming a pirate. They're brought together against forces conspiring to destroy *multiple* Londons, and their journey is one of power, blood magic, and hidden potential.
Talking points include Multiple Clevelands, elemental magics, powerful bloodlines, and how to snag that million dollar podcast deal.
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This week's episode on Brian Jacques' Redwall was recorded live at the 6th Annual Philadelphia Podcast Festival. Thanks to everyone who was able to join us and to the festival for having us back!
We hope you enjoy our wide-ranging discussion about this animal adventure, which includes a quiz about GWAR, good mice and bad rats, the questionable size of ANYTHING, and how badly we stan for Constance the Badger.
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You know Aristotle, the Greek philosopher from the 4th century BCE? What if he was a detective who helped solve mysteries? That's exactly what's going on in Margaret Doody's 1978 novel Aristotle Detective.
This episode was recorded live over the Internet with some of our Patreon supporters in the audience. Find out more about our Patreon project at patreon.com/overduepod.
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We didn’t plan to discuss Cristina Henríquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans during a particularly fraught period in the United States’ immigration debate. But if this book or our discussion can help anyone develop more empathy for those who come to the US from elsewhere, it will have done its job (or one of its jobs, anyway).
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What was it about the first Mistborn book that netted Brandon Sanderson a job wrapping up the Wheel of Time series? That's the central question we attempt to answer in our discussion of Brando Sando's acclaimed novel.
Join us for a discussion of allomancy, burning orange soda, fantasy heists, self-help magicians and more.
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Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke’s first successful novel, starts as a story about a surprisingly chill (if mysterious) alien invasion, but eventually it’s also about the end of the human race. It’s not the aliens’ fault, for once! But they’re definitely, you know, AROUND for it.
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Margaret Craven's 1967 novel I Heard the Owl Call My Name is about a young Anglican vicar's work with a First Nations parish in British Columbia. The simplistic tale centers on the problems facing a culture at risk of disappearing and the work of those who fight to save it.
Talking points include white saviors, romanticized myths, and a run of tree puns that will leaf you breathless.
ALSO: Come see us in Philly on June 23rd! Tickets available at bit.ly/overdue2018.
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Welcome to a new experiment! For this new show-within-a-show, Craig and Andrew will be reading Emily Wilson's new translation of The Odyssey a book at a time and having a more in-depth chat about it than they do about most books.
Patreon supporters get these episodes monthly, but every two months we'll combine them for general consumption. First you'll hear our introduction to the show (and the translation) and our chat about Book 1. Then our journey across the wine-dark sea continues with our episode on Books 2 & 3. Talking points for that one include rowdy town council meetings, Athena's god moments, and Poseidon slash-fiction.
Find out more about how to get these episodes monthly at patreon.com/overduepod.
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What would you do if you could suddenly zap someone with an electrical charge? What would you do if someone you knew could do it, but you couldn't? What would you do if the world got flipped entirely upside down because said electrical power inverted the world's power dynamics? Well, you're about to find out!
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We couldn't think of a better way to celebrate our 300th episode than with a *biting* discussion of Stephenie Meyer's blockbuster hit Twilight.
Will klutzy cipher Bella Swan and perfect baseballboy Edward Cullen make it? Can you practice abstinence in the world that gave rise to Fifty Shades? And when you become a vampire, does it make you HOT?
Find the answers to these questions and more in our tricentennial extravaganza!
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We head back to the Choose Your Own Adventure well this week to solve some rock and roll mysteries - will we get brainwashed by a cult? Will we save rock and roll? You'll have to listen to find out!
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If your kid's all strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? PIGGLE-WIGGLE!
Betty MacDonald's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series chronicles a kindly magical lady as she helps all manner of parents with all manner of difficult children. Won't bathe? Make them a garden! Won't share? Make them a pariah!
Join us as we celebrate Children's Book Week 2: A Podcast and share our concerns about parenting in the magical 1940s.
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For April, we covered W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, a dense yet moving novel about a man discovering his stolen past. The book's themes get a little heavy at times, but thankfully our rowdy chat is always ready to help lighten the mood. Talking points include death by pun, stolen time, and Craig's "real" name.
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Who better to help us discuss Grace Metalious' 1956 novel about small-town scandal than a couple of Big Apple librarians like Gwen Glazer and Frank Collerius?
Our friends from The Librarian Is In were in Philly, so we invited them over for an uncut discussion of misbehaving teens, skeletons in cellars, and...jimmy caps.
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Kezia Saint Martin is an unwilling heiress, a woman who uses multiple pseudonyms so she can do the work she loves. Lucas John is a paroled convict, a strapping Patrick Warburton type who fights for reform in the prison system. Danielle Steel's 1977 novel Passion's Promise shows us how these two unexpected lovers are both alike: the prison of society's expectations is literally the same as actual prison!
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"I read a book one day and my whole life changed," opens Orhan Pamuk's best-selling novel The New Life. Like much of Pamuk's work, The New Life dives deep into how art helps and hinders our efforts to process the world, drawing specifically on the tensions of the East-West dichotomy.
Other talking points include dangerous buses, life-changing books, and in-fiction fiction.
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Put another quarter in the coin slot folks, because it's time to talk about Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. Topics include bad fan culture, the narrowness of the characters' "exhaustive" knowledge of 80s popular culture, and why the critical response to this book has shifted so much in just a few short years.
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Sue Grafton's Alphabet Mystery series stars Kinsey Millhone, a no-nonsense private eye operating in California. "A" is for Alibi is the first book for feature Kinsey, so we spend much of the episode talking about how it sets up the series and how Kinsey fits into the pantheon of crime fiction protagonists. Also, Andrew comes up with his OWN alphabetic mysteries.
This podcast cannot be used for evidence in a court of law.
PLUS: We updated our Patreon project! Check it out: patreon.com/overduepod
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Gone With The Wind is an American classic, both in that it is a classic book written by an American author and in that it does a bad job wrangling with America's original sin, slavery. We try to do justice both to Mitchell's characterization and sense of place while also accounting for her blind spots.
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E.B. White's Charlotte's Web is a beloved classic for plenty of reasons. It's got bloodthirsty spiders, hungry hungry rats, and some terrific, radiant, humble pig named Wilbur. But somehow Craig hadn't read it until THIS WEEK.
Other talking points include: otter tacos, animal sentience, and the saddest feelings anyone's ever felt about a spider.
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Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the Earth were flat and also being carried by four gigantic elephants who were all standing on the back of a giant space turtle? Us too! Which is why Terry Pratchett's Discworld series remains relevant 35 years after its inception in this week's book, The Colour of Magic.
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Audrey Niffenegger's novel The Time Traveler's Wife is equal parts romance and sci-fi. It's a love story about the limits of free will and the power of destiny. It is also a way hornier book than we gave it credit for.
Talking points include James Cameron's avatar, time-travelling hi-jinks, and chrono-impairment as a metaphor for absence, loss, and the gravitational pull of love.
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For February's bonus episode, we spin, twirl, and jump our way through a conversation about Meg Howrey's The Cranes Dance. This book about sisterhood and ambition draws heavily on the author's experience as a successful professional dancer.
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Octavia Butler’s Kindred is ostensibly a sci-fi/fantasy novel about time travel, but it also draws heavily from the tradition of first-person slave narratives. Butler’s characters, whether white slaveowners, the slaves themselves, or the time travelers in between are all allowed ample nuance, even as Butler puts the brutality and inhumanity of the era on full display.
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Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and...then what? N.K. Jemisin's award-winning novel The Fifth Season kicks off her Broken Earth trilogy with a tale about serial apocalypses and oppressed earth mages. SPOILER ALERT: We talk about a critical plot point about 40-45 minutes in.
Other talking points include: anniversaries, Super Nintendo RPGs, and internet trolls.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah is about a lot of things—it's a love story, it's an immigrant story, it's a story about the Obama moment—but it has the most to say about race. It's about being black in America, but not from the perspective of a black American. It's about how race works in different cultures, and among different people from the same culture. It's about hair. And it's a fascinating read, every step of the way.
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Jesmyn Ward's second novel Salvage the Bones is the story of a family in rural Mississippi in the twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina's landfall. Equal parts intimate and mythic in proportion, Salvage the Bones is a moving portrait of perseverance.
Join us for a discussion of feline biological warfare, Medea Medea Medea, and unfortunate canines.
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In the wake of Ursula K. Le Guin's tragic passing earlier this month, this week's episode covers her Nebula-award winning The Dispossessed. Part of the "Hainish Cycle," the book deals with capitalism, socialism, anarchism, and human nature in ways that resonate strongly in our current moment.
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Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses may be the first book we've covered to have caused a full-blown International Incident. Rushdie's notorious fourth novel tackles issues of immigration, identity and revelation, but it's the passages inspired by the life of the prophet Muhammad that sparked the most outrage.
Join us for a conversation about haunting decisions, amazing transformations, and Andrew's terrible stance on pineapple and pizza.
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Shhhhhh, everyone, come in closer. Closer! Because we're about to tell you all about The Secret, and we don't want anyone to overhear. Of course, if they hear us talking about all the parts of this book that are bogus, THAT would be fine.
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A boy and his wolf cross the border into Mexico and things go...rather poorly. That's the premise of Cormac McCarthy's 1994 novel The Crossing. It's a Southwestern Gothic coming-of-age story that also touches on the evil nature of man and the collapse of the mythic American West.
Talking points include the puppet comedy of Jeff Dunham, violence in McCarthy's West, and a call for proposals on "Neoliberal Discourse and/in McCarthy."
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Our first episode of the new year is actually from our live show at the Fall For The Book Festival in Fairfax, VA. Andrew read the original version of Beauty and the Beast, which bears some similarity to the better-known Disney version but kind of goes off the rails toward the end.
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It's a family affair for this week's episode, in which Craig, Andrew, Laura, and Suzannah gather 'round the fire to discuss Daphne Skinner's novelization of the hit 1994 Tim Allen film, The Santa Clause. Does Tim Allen murder Santa? How many Santas have there been? And did we all believe in Santa?
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Markus Zusak's breakthrough novel The Book Thief is the story of a young girl in 1940s Germany told by Death itself. It is equal parts heartening and heartbreaking in its depiction of people just trying to live, and it doesn't shy away from showing how "just trying to live" can create a slippery moral slope.
Talking points include Star Wars "spoilers," other books that Death should narrate, the power of literature, and Oscar-bait WW2 stories.
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On this week’s show, we ponder the meaning of life, the universe, and everything via Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a radio-play-turned-book that has been adapted to just about every audiovisual medium known to humankind. We also ponder how becoming millionaires would change our walking habits.
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Our "November" bonus episode, the final entry in "stuff we've read month," is Ray Bradbury's old high school lit class standby Fahrenheit 451. Needless to say, it's hitting us differently now than it did when we originally read it.
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Grab your tissues everyone! Wilson Rawls' first novel Where the Red Fern Grows is notorious for how sad it is, and the reputation is well-deserved. It's a story of a boy, his dogs, and "death in its saddest form." You do the math.
Also up for discussion this week are our own pet histories, the savagery of the trapping lifestyle, Andrew's new favorite dog magazine, and Providence.
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For this week’s show, we attempt to figure out what we can add to a conversation about one of the most-discussed books in all of modern literature! Join us for a chat about what JK Rowling’s first book does well, how useful we find the concept of “sorting” real-world people in different contexts, and the nature of fandom.
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Strap in and blast off to space with us Ender Wiggin, the pint-sized protagonist of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.
It's the story of an ultra-talented youth pushed to the limit as he fights to save humanity. The book's chockablock with laser tag, future school, and telepathic aliens! It's also written by an author who has put in substantial time and effort to oppose same-sex marriage, as well as espouse some other harmful views that seem to run counter to the lessons at the core of Ender's Game.
Join us for a discussion about tolerance, the limits thereof, and whether or not we can ever truly separate art from the artist.
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This week we put on our flapper outfits and dance back to the Roaring Twenties! F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby bears us ceaselessly back into the past, and we use the Jazz Age as a backdrop for a conversation about the American Dream and also the cartoon Rugrats.
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Travel through time and space with us to the planet Camazotz and beyond! Learn about love, dictatorships, and cosmic Christian centaurs with us and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.
Other topics include meeting your husband on Broadway, Grand Moff IT, and the worst government job ever: Tesseract Tester.
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Trick or Treat! We tricked you - it's a treat! Here's an all-new batch of spooky stories and educational hauntings.
The podcast is coming from inside the house! We have camping trip guidelines, the Highgate Chicken Ghost, Harry and the Woman in the Toilet, and tales about Haunted Ohio and Robert Johnson.
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This week's penultimate Spooktober entry is Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire, a first-person vampire story that has spawned nearly two dozen sequels, spin-offs, and connected stories. The actual interview gimmick doesn't add much, but that doesn't mean the book doesn't have interesting things to say about the nature of morality and immortality.
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This week, Natasha of the Unspoiled Book Club podcast joins us to hash out Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, a book about being a middlebrow fiction writer, small towns, and ghosts. So, you know, most Stephen King novels.
This week’s show brought to you by Squarespace and Hello Fresh.
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Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is out to get you. It is an antagonistic book that's larger on the inside than it appears on the outside. It's also a book about a book about a film about a house that may or may not be a portal to a hellish labyrinth. Confused yet? Join the club.
Join us for a discussion of metatexts, evil Zillow listings, and FOOTNOTES OH GOD THE FOOTNOTES.
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This week we take a double-dip into Edgar Allan Poe's spooky catalogue—Craig reads about the Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Andrew sips from the Cask of Amontillado. Both are sort of spooky in their way, but they're also deeply strange horror stories that raise questions like "what animal would be the most likely to kill you" and "what would someone have to do to you for you to wall them up in a cellar."
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This episode we dive back into the mailbag! We didn't read a book but we did read a bunch of great questions from you about how we make the show, how we program it, and what we eat while we're reading.
As always, thanks to our Patreon supporters for making these bonus episodes possible! Head to patreon.com/overduepod to join our movement.
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Are you ready to get SPOOKY??? It's the first week of our 2017 Spooktober spectacular, and we're here to talk about R.L. Stine's teen horror series 99 Fear Street. This entry, The First Horror, is the story of Cally and her family, who move into the most clearly haunted house that you could ever imagine. Needless to say...things go poorly for the Frasiers.
Additional talking points include haunted TV shows, economic mobility, and phantasmagorical realtors.
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Books read 1, alcohol units 4 (bad), chuckles 179 (excellent).
This week we tackle Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, a book that's carried a long way by its narrator's voice; we also talk about Livejournals we may or may not have had, feminism, neuroses, and how we know basically nothing about dating in the modern era.
This episode brought to you by Squarespace.
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How Weird do you like your fiction? Do you dig bogeymen who eat ghosts? Narrators who repeat themselves all the time? How about soul-crushing nihilism that implicates the reader in the demise of civilization? Well then Michael Cisco's The Traitor might be the book for you!
Other discussion topics include new iPhones, Magic Eye books, and the Thong Song.
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Sara Nović's Girl at War has all the confidence and impact of a firsthand account, despite the fact that it was written almost entirely from secondhand accounts. Detailing one girl's experience in the early 90s Croatian War of Independence and her life in America afterward, it's a compelling account of internal and external conflict from a character who has two homes and doesn't quite belong in either.
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This week, four conventionally-sized young women approach adulthood in Louisa May Alcott's seminal novel Little Women.
It's time to wonder who will marry Laurie, who will sell their novel, and who will frustrate us with their moral lessons. Also: what's the deal with the limes?!
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You might know George R. R. Martin from an obscure little HBO series called “Game of Thrones.” This week, we go back to his very first (and pre-ASOIAF) novel, the science fiction/romance story Dying of the Light.
This book showcases Martin’s gift for organic, engrossing world building, but the material is let down a bit by its characters and its protagonist in particular. All in all, a good first effort from the guy who would go on to write one of modern fantasy’s biggest juggernauts.
This week’s show brought to you by Squarespace.
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We’re enjoying a summertime break this week, so we hope YOU enjoy our Philly Podcast Festival show about Anne of Green Gables from last month!
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Ben Lerner's novel 10:04 is about a man named Ben trying to write a novel. Yes, it's meta. Yes, it can get navel-gazey. But there's an underlying humanity and economy that keeps the book afloat.
Discussion topics include gatekeeping, listening, dinosaurs, and superstorms.
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Ranking on multiple Saddest Books Ever lists, Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia is a classic young adult novel. A young boy makes a new friend, and their friendship blossoms despite the daily grind of middle school. Then someone dies.
Weep along with us as we swap sibling stories, chat about teacher feelings, and make at least *two* Will Smith references.
This episode is brought to you in part by Squarespace.
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Laura Esquivel's best-selling novel Like Water For Chocolate is a work of revolutionary magical realism. No really, it takes place during the Mexican Revolution and chronicles the life of a young woman whose strong emotions affect the world around her.
Join us for a chat about exploding showers, sexual food, and everyone's favorite birthday boy Waluigi.
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Live shows and a busy summer mean there’s nothing special about our 250th episode, except insofar as each and every one of our episodes is a special wonderful delight!
Alias Hook is a 2014 book that asks what Peter Pan and Neverland would seem like from the perspective of one Captain James Hook. The answer is: not great! But as with so many works of fiction that put us in the shoes of sometime antagonists, it adds interesting layers to Hook and to the Peter Pan-theon even if the straight action and romance sequences aren’t anything to write home about.
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Larry Shue's 1981 play The Nerd is about a gumption-less architect trying to extract a painful person from his life. Did we mention it's a comedy?
We cover the play's plot (including its final reveal), the allure of answering machines, anonymous favors, and the Nintendo Switch.
This week's show is brought to you in part by Blue Apron.
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What's hidden in your secret garden? Which weeds need weeding? Which flowers need water, sunlight, and a Pokemon trainer to bring them to life?
This week we talk about our own secret gardens, as well as the novel The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Other talking points include New Women, stolen identities, and The Secret.
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We’ve read fantasy adventure books and we’ve read sexy books, but have we read any books that are sexy fantasy adventures? After reading Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart, the first in what is currently a nine-book series about sexy angel warriors, we can now definitively say “yes.”
We have a chat about how Carey builds her world atop a real-world foundation, how the sexy stuff is intermixed with the political machinations, and how most of the characters are actually people who want things and not just sexy bodies.
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If you could wish for anything, what would it be? Dinosaurs to eat? Money to spend? A Nintendo to live in?
The kids in E. Nesbit's story Five Children and It are bad at wishing. Like, really bad. But that means we get to have fun at their expense and perhaps learn a little bit about the perils of cutting corners.
Also, if anyone finds out what Andrew would wish for if he met a genie, please tell us. The world needs to know.
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Andrew's out of the country so Craig's wife Laura joins the show to talk about Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March.
March imagines the "offstage" of Mr. March, the largely absent father figure of Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women. What happens to an idealistic pacifist when confronted with the horrors of the Civil War? Where exactly did school recess come from? And who knew that Alcott's father ran a failed vegan compound in 19th-century Massachusetts?
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This month, we read the first book in Akif Pirinçci’s “Felidae” series. It’s a “bestselling novel of cats and murder,” and it combines over-the-top violence that makes Watership Down look like a book that’s actually appropriate for children. It’s also just surreal enough to be a lot of fun.
That said, the book’s author, Akif Pirinçci, espouses some truly vile views about immigration and Muslims—he’s referred to Germany as a “Muslim garbage dump” and has made jokes about sending Muslims to concentration camps. We can’t stress enough how deeply we disagree with these viewpoints, and we spend a bit of time in the episode talking about whether and how to separate art from the artists that made it. There are no good answers, but know that we did purchase a used copy of this book, partly because it’s out of print but also because we don’t want to provide financial support to anyone who says these kinds of things.
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YOU. ARE. A. SHARK.
Or so the title of this Choose Your Own Adventure book by Edward Packward would have you believe!
Will we be a leader of animals or a follower? Will we dominate the ocean, land, or sky? Plenty of choices await us in this week's episode.
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao earned Junot Díaz a Pulitzer Prize in 2008, and it remains one of the most highly regarded novels of our young 21st century.
Oscar Wao is a Dominican lad who loves geekery almost as much as he loves women. The only trouble is: he just can't get any.
Tune in for a discussion of (toxic) masculinity, nerd alerts, and the Dominican Republic under the rule of El Jefe.
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We're at the tail end of Children's Book Week, so we thought it appropriate to discuss E.L. Konigsburg's Newberry Award-winning book From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
The story follows two kids who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, discover a love of Italian sculpture, and meet a kooky old lady who loves secrets.
Other talking points include: exercising sucks, children can be miserly, and bus mistakes. Also please visit butteryeggs.org.
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NOTE: A short stretch of fairly explicit sex talk earns this one the "Explicit" tag, though as usual we avoid cussing. You've been warned!
This week, we illuminate everything about Jonathan Safran Foer's debut novel. It's not Andrew's cup of tea, exactly, but we try our best to dive into where it works, where we think it doesn't quite get there, and why Foer has a reputation for being "overrated" in some literary circles.
This week's show brought to you by Blue Apron.
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Welcome to our rad, bad, extra-jumbo bonus episode on Matt Christopher's Skateboard Tough! It's a jumbo episode because we spend at least 10 minutes reading the titles of every sport book for kids he wrote.
This episode attempts to answer the burning question in all of our hearts: what does Skateboard Tough even mean??? Included with your download: surprisingly serious conversation about childhood experiences and the importance of being seen, Matt Christopher's minor league woes, and activist journalism.
The song at the end is a snippet of Lupe Fiasco's Kick, Push, a song you should've heard by now.
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Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go explores the inner lives of teens as they learn, love, and discover their full potential as... something you need to read/listen to find out. This intimate novel flirts with disturbing science fiction elements, but our buddy Kaz keeps the tone eerily calm and comfortable.
Join us for a conversation about clone teens, clone butts, genre boundaries, and our first memories of death. If you haven't noticed, our podcast is weird.
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Craig returns this week for a talk about George Eliot (pen name for Mary Anne Evans) and her novel Silas Marner, which starts out as a bummer but gradually becomes an uplifting little story. We also talk about Craig’s vacation and the Baldwin brothers, among other things.
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Craig’s on his long-delayed honeymoon this week, so Andrew’s wife and other best friend Suzannah is filling in this week to tell you all about Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.
Did you know that Dumas has upwards of 40 mistresses? Did you know that this book was published in 18 pieces over the course of a couple of years, and that it’s over 1,000 pages long? Did you know that someone actually helped write parts of many of Dumas’ books and never got any official credit for it? Did you know that the Count himself is a Jigsaw-esque murderous vengeance machine? All this and more on this week’s Overdue!
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David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is most notable for its uniquely structured narrative, so it's only appropriate we made this the first book we cover while livestreaming for patrons!
Other topics include Tom Hanks' henna tattoos, Yoko Ono husbands, and our favorite Disney princes. That's right, princes.
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Well shiver me timbers, it's a live show! They say that dead men tell no tales, but Robert Louis Stevenson sure told a great tale in Treasure Island.
Things reach a fever pitch (literally) at our live show at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Topics include pirate radio, Jimbo and Mr. Hands, the game Desert Island, and our favorite entry in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.
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This week, we return to the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (“Gabo” to his friends) for the first time since our second-ever episode. This time around we get to dive deeper into “magical realism,” the sort of dreamy heightened reality that Marquez employs so successfully, and we also touch on the book’s relationship with Colombian history and our relationship with our own hometowns.
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It's time to travel to the magical land of Narnia! It's Craig's first time journeying through C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and it's EVERYONE's first time eating Turkish Delight!
Find out what the opposite of delight is, how a lion can be Jesus, and just what happens to Susan when she reaches the Narnia equivalent of the pearly gates.
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This week we bring you The World According to Garp according to Andrew - we breeze through John Irving’s best-known “middlebrow” novel, touching on its feminist leanings, its surprising progressivism as it regards the transgendered, and both the dark humor and the just-plain-darkness lurking around every corner.
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This week we're joined by social media maven (and friend of the show) Margaret H. Willison to talk about Christopher Pike's Last Act, an early entry from the author's prolific career writing YA thrillers.
We're here to solve the mystery of a murder in a high school drama club, but our conversation ranges far and wide. Talking points include Margaret's mispronunciations, Andrew's career as a stage performer, and Craig's new favorite book Skateboard Tough.
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"I am an invisible man," says the unnamed narrator at the beginning of Ralph Ellison's masterpiece Invisible Man. He then walks the reader through the painful journey that led to this realization, from the Jim Crow South to a less explicitly divided New York City.
When we aren't discussing the narrator's struggle to fight for racial justice through and within a Communist party analog, we spend time chatting about the Pigskin Classic, dragging Harold Bloom, and unpacking stereo equipment. This week's show is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Blue Apron and Penn State World Campus.
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Who has the conch? Somebody find the glasses! We're trapped on a podcast island with the amazing Gwen Glazer and Frank Collerius of the New York Public Library's show The Librarian Is In.
Actually, Gwen and Frank were kind enough to have us in their studio to chat about William Golding's novel The Lord of the Flies.
Possible television-related tangents include LOST, Kid Nation, and Kids Say the Darnedest Things!
This episode is brought to you in part by Squarespace and Penn State World Campus.
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What will you remember? What will you be remembered for? Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven asks these questions of most of its characters as they struggle to survive before and after an apocalyptic flu outbreak.
We also talk Mandel's work crunching data on novels, National Days, Corporate Speak, and what we won't miss when we lose the Internet. Don't forget to book tickets to our live show at bit.ly/libraryshow!
This week's show is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Blue Apron and Penn State World Campus.
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We the Hosts of Overdue, in Order to form a more perfect Podcast, establish Humor, insure earbud Tranquility, provide for uncommon offense, promote our listeners’ Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Goofs to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this podcast on the Constitution for the United States of America.
No really, we did it. A whole podcast on the Constitution, its origins, and the Bill of Rights. We talk about what the Framers didn’t say, what they didn’t predict, and what we wish people WOULDN’T do with the Constitution in years to come.
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This week, Andrew brings his oddly deep and specific knowledge of The Simpsons to bear on Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play. In a post-apocalyptic world in which Simpsons quotes were treated as currency, he would pretty much run the place.
This week's show brought to you by Penn State World Campus.
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Welcome to 2017! Our first book of the year is Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, a somewhat forgotten mid-century classic about an author shaping her world through fiction.
Because it's us, we HAD to spend time talking about the other Angels and Elizabeths Taylor in our lives. We also find time to cover cheaters and lies, Ferris Buellering, and Jerry the Internet Editor.
This week's show is brought to you in part by Penn State World Campus and Squarespace.
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Up in the sky, look! It's a bird...it's a plane...it's a podcast about Superman!
Lucas Brown (host of the podcast "The Math of You") joins us for a discussion of Grant Morrison's timeless Man of Steel collection All-Star Superman. We talk about origin story troubles, Superman's ever expanding powerset, and one of the most affecting Superman panels in recent memory.
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For our last regular show of 2016, we come to Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and get schooled on the relationship between the writer and reader and the nature of time itself.
We also touch on Christmas gifts from the future-past, good names for blogs, and more.
This week’s show is sponsored by Penn State World Campus, and you can check out our merch store between now and January 31 at overduepodcast.com/store.
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This week we learn all about the "quick, dirty, and over-the-top" erotic fiction of Alexa Riley - and since Stealing Christmas is holiday-themed, we get into the spirit of the season, too!
Join us for a frank and explicit discussion of mall barons, safe unsafeness, and sexy, sexy sexual intercourse.
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Show me Zadie Smith's WHITE TEETH! Join us for a discussion about her debut novel that tackles immigration, assimilation, and our collective struggle to control the lives we lead.
We'll also reference Lady Gaga, share some rules for fistfighting (and writing), and discover the sad clown Pa(g)liacci.
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S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders was written when the author was just 16, which is impressive not just because the book has an atypical amount of empathy and perspective for something written by a teenager, but because the author is especially close to her characters’ circumstances.
Also on tap for this week: sick raps, tales from the McDonald’s drive-thru, and a whole lot more.
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The History of Love is littered with catchphrases. Bazinga! Time to make the donuts! Not the Mama!
That is to say, our episode on The History of Love is littered with catchphrases. The 2005 novel by Nicole Krauss stars Leo and Alma, whose fates are intertwined by the success of a powerful book. The name of that book? The History of Love. It's a book-within-a-book. Get it?!
We also chat about pen pals, t-shirts, saccharine texts, and the need to be seen.
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Neil Gaiman started 2013's The Ocean at the End of the Lane as a novella for his wife, who "doesn't really like fantasy." This gives the book a different vibe from some of Gaiman's other work, though any book that features a tattered sentient bedsheet clears the "fantastical" bar for us.
This breezy book deals mostly in Bradbury-esque musings on the nature of childhood and adulthood, and we spend a lot of time on that as well as the Great Page Count Race of 2016 and our new t-shirt empire.
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No book for this month's bonus episode, gang, and we're also releasing it at the same time for both patrons and everyone else in the interest of being timely.
We were both deeply saddened by the results of last week's United States presidential election, and we've spent most of the last week dissecting our feelings about it and trying to figure out where we go from here. In this episode, we provide some context for our international listeners, attempt to commiserate with those who agree with us and reach out to those who don't, and lay out a path for getting more involved if that's something you want to do.
Thanks for listening, everyone. Your support means the world to us.
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What does pizza murder have to do with a linguistic virus that dates all the way back to Ancient Sumeria? Find out as we discuss Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
Other talking points include Stephenson's "Multiverse," anime, and "pooning." Thanks again to all of our listeners.
It's been a hard week, but you folks are amazing.
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Magic Bites, the first novel in a longrunning series by wife-and-husband writing team Ilona and Andrew Gordon (known collectively as Ilona Andrews) does throw out some interesting ideas. The relationship between magic and science is neat, and some of the action set pieces work well.
But in other places, unfortunately, it fell flat for Andrew—characterization is often two-dimensional, the magical near-future Atlanta often feels contradictory and hastily drawn, and the prose is just clunky enough to highlight the novel’s problems rather than mask them. We talk about all of this plus voting, how phones work, and the pitfalls of judging an entire body of work by the strength of the debut.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace.
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Listener beware, we're choosing the scares! In this, our final Spooktober entry of 2016, we bounce around the pages of R.L. Stine's Give Yourself Goosebumps #6: Beware of the Purple Peanut Butter.
It's time to get the heebies AND the jeebies as we discuss unhelpful childhood nicknames, clash with Bad News Barney and Drippy Dora, and try to survive the sickest Goosebumps reference ever included in a Goosebumps book.
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Hold on to your VHS tapes! It's time to talk about Koji Suzuki's Ring, the 1991 novel that inspired that movie everyone's heard of with the tape and the phone call and the seven days until your death.
He may not be Stephen King, and he may not like horror - but Suzuki does know how to turn a mystery about a murderous videotape into quite the page-turner. Additional talking points include MST3K cons, horror lessons, and evil viruses.
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It’s time to get *very* professional with the fourth book of Spooktober 2016!
Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris is widely regarded as The Werewolf Novel, but it isn’t all full moons and silver bullets. Set in and around in the Paris Commune of 1871, the novel tackles class, sex, and the human desire to control our own impulses.
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Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as "the greatest haunted-house story ever written." The house itself is vile. It's dark and impossible to navigate. It's dripping with blood. So why are four people trying to spend their summer there?!?
This week's paranormal activity is brought to you in part by the fine website wizards at Squarespace.
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This week is the start of Overdue’s third-annual Spooktober spookfest, a month full of scary (or at least somewhat spooky) books that will get you in the mood for Halloween!
Our first book is Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle, a book about a young girl transformed into an elderly woman, who gets wrapped up in a charming wizard's quest to avoid all responsibility whatsoever.
With our special guests Siri and the Christmas Creep, we touch upon the horrors and benefits of aging, the Billboard Magic Charts, Prince Justin, and WitchYelp.
This week's episode is brought to you in part by our good (totally not haunted) friends at Squarespace.
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Here it is: the big two-hundo! This week, Andrew tackles David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in a show that is nearly 2.5 hours long and yet somehow still not quite long enough to get to everything.
We break down the plot and the structure, such as they are, and we also dive deeper into the role of addiction and depression in the book and the book’s at-times antagonistic relationship with the reader. It’s a book worth reading, but perhaps more than anything we’ve yet done for the show, it resists being read.
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It's my life...and it's now or never. I ain't gonna live forever! OR AM I? Natalie Babbitt's beloved children's novel Tuck Everlasting tackles the tough questions. What would happen if I could live forever? What will I do with the time I'm allotted on this mortal coil? Would it be creepy for a teenager to tell a ten-year old to drink immortality water in seven years so that he can be her forever husband?
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What if magic were real? What if your favorite fantasy world was a place you could actually go? Would you be happy? Could you be happy?
These are the questions posed by Lev Grossman's The Magicians, an en*gross*ing urban fantasy novel that's spawned two sequels and a SyFy original series.
Other questions we pose ask about the following: the Fall of Flirting, One-Star Amazon Reviews, Jurassic Park Trespasser, and sexy foxes (we're sorry).
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Something a little different this week: Andrew read a non-fiction book about the personal computer era, something he was reading about mostly because he was also watching AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire. There’s an interesting story at the heart of it, but delivered through the dry and often sterilized viewpoint of its one-time CEO it often seems lifeless.
This episode is sponsored by Squarespace.
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With The Beggar's Opera, John Gay attempted to skewer 18th-century British government, the rich, and Italian operas. Did his satire succeed? Maybe you'll find out on this rather free-wheeling episode.
Off-topic topics include: the firm of Borowitz, Onion and Yankovic; the Ginger Ale Dimension; 99 Degrees; and "Celebration by Kool & the Gang" a new musical by Kool & the Gang.
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Shrink your bodies and expand your minds with this week's Choose Your Own Adventure book: Prisoner of the Ant People by R.A. Montgomery.
This week's choices include tossing out the rules, annoying robots and nicely-shaped Martians, and starting almost as many stories as we finish.
Come join us in Zondo Quest Group II!
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What happens when you take some Ray Bradbury, add some undead, stir in a pinch of Doctor Who, sprinkle with dark humor, and bake in the eternal flames of Hell? You get Jonathan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, the first in a series of books about a guy who's trying to do what he thinks is the "right" thing in all the wrong ways.
We also talk about some of your First Smooch stories, what we'd want if we sold our souls to the devil, and what it might sound like if Marc Maron got Jesus on WTF.
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"Bond. James Bond." "Shaken, not stirred." "It's no good crying over spilt milk."
This week we find out which one of these classic James Bond catchphrases does NOT appear in Ian Fleming's debut novel Casino Royale.
We also discuss test tube Olympians, Cold War capers, and the Communist leanings of your favorite Smurfs. Wake up sheeple!
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Andrew's other podcast pals Margaret and Kathryn give Craig a break this month, and we all talk about Norton Juster's classic The Phantom Tollbooth. Kathryn wasn't totally on board since she never read the book as a kid, but there are plenty of puns and an ample supply of wordplay to keep the gang invested.
If you like the Appointment Television crew, you can find out more at atvpodcast.com!
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Daniel José Older's novel Shadowshaper is the story of Sierra Santiago, a young woman with the power to infuse art with spirits and save her community from destruction. Set in Older's modern, magical Brooklyn, Shadowshaper shows us the supernatural power of heritage while also tackling subjects like gentrification, cultural tourism, and young love. Of course, we find time to riff on nighttime salsa, bone mots, and Harold and the Purple Crayon. Enjoy!
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This week, we use Tana French’s outstanding sequel The Likeness as an opportunity to comment on everything from the semi-serialized nature of crime stories to tips for going undercover to Pokémon Go.
We read French’s first novel, In The Woods, for the show a couple of years back, and while you don’t need to have read that book to enjoy this one, we will spoil minor elements of both books in our discussion this week. You’ve been warned!
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Sometimes an author’s prose is so distracting in so many ways that it totally derails their stories—such is the case with Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember. Sparks always tells but rarely shows. He gives us one- or two-word descriptions that are meant to serve as “characterization,” but those characters don’t always act the way Sparks tells us they act. And people talk to each other not like human beings, but like aliens in human skin-suits.
This week, Unfriendly Black Hotties co-hosts Christina and Kamille help us break down Sparks’ writing and the man himself, and we try to figure out the stuff in Sparks’ work that makes his books bestsellers. (Note the Explicit tag this week, for some light swearing and Sexual Discussions.)
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Scott O'Dell began writing Island of the Blue Dolphins because of "anger, anger at the hunters who [...] slaughter everything that creeps or walks or flies." The Newberry Award-winning story that resulted is a compelling account of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island and a powerful story of perseverance.
In between dishing on animal companions, we find time to talk about email etiquette, dog-focused action sequences, and why Overdue is the #1 Podcast for Teens.
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You asked, we answered! For this month's bonus show we didn't read a specific book, but instead went through some listener-submitted questions about the show and about us and gave semi-thoughtful answers.
Join us to hear a dramatic reading of our first real chat about the show, some not-too-great names we tried out before we settled on Overdue, and a whole lot more.
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Joanne Harris’ The Gospel of Loki is part straightforward myth written for a modern audience and part fanfiction, and we don’t mean that in any sort of pejorative sense.
Harris sees the Norse pantheon as inherently modern, and it’s hard to disagree - it’s full of prideful, flawed sex maniacs who are so insecure that’s it’s almost funny, at least when their spats aren’t breaking and remaking the world. Join us for all of this plus some thoughts on Chuckie Finster’s Greatest Hits.
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"In Soviet Hungary...nanny hires you!"
Time to talk about The Door, a lesser known but very powerful book by celebrated Hungarian author Magda Szabo. It's set in the 1960s and 70s, so we read up a little on the Eastern Bloc to make sure we knew what we're talking about. Instead we just make Yakov Smirnoff jokes.
Other topics include old guitar ladies, "groupie states," and Craig's love language.
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This week Andrew completes the Brontë trilogy with Charlotte Brontë's seminal novel Jane Eyre.
Is it a romance? Is it spooky? Do we like Mr. Rochester or does he well and truly stink? We'll attempt to answer these questions and more in between revisiting #MomSwears, solving some Scooby Doo mysteries, and traveling through Internet tubes.
This week's episode is brought to you in part by Kinyo Poetry and Squarespace.
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What if God walked away from it all? And left behind a Gomorrah-like stew of sex and bloodshed out of which emerged a superpowered preacher, seeking revenge on the almighty? That's the set up for Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's graphic novel Preacher.
This week, Craig tackles the first two volumes of the series and explains what's preventing him from pressing onward in the story. We also touch on how best to subvert the comic code, American Movie Classic, and how far is far too far when depicting taboo behavior.
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It's alternate universes, murderous plots, and ghostwritten novels all the way down this week—1Q84 is Andrew's first Haruki Murakami novel, and there's a lot of good stuff here even if the book could stand to shed a couple hundred pages.
Come for the book talk, stick around for references to Highlights For Children, the Tostitos Bowl, and the usual nonsense.
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Get in touch with your inner wolf-dog and answer The Call of the Wild by Jack London!
We apologize that our Murakami episode will take another week, but we didn't want to leave you in the literary lurch. So we take a trip on the Yukon trail with one heck of a dog named Buck.
It's time to talk instinct, dog names, oyster pirates, and Calvin & Hobbes and John Locke from LOST.
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There are dinosaurs! Lots of dinosaurs! And they rule Jurassic Park!
Michael Crichton's techno-thriller classic Jurassic Park kicked off a generation's dinomania. But it's also a chilling tale of science run amok. A story about what happens when advancement for advancement's sake breaks the rules of nature.
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It's wall-to-wall horse talk this week, starting with a blow-by-blow analysis of the Kentucky Derby and moving on to Anna Sewell's classic Black Beauty.
Andrew wasn't expecting this tale to be told by a horse in the first-person perspective, but that's what Black Beauty is. As a warning against the dangers of horse abuse and drinking alcohol, it's actually quite effective.
This week's show is brought to you by kinyopoetry.com and "Lonely and Horny," a video series by Headgum co-creators Jake and Amir.
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News at 11! The Dark is Rising! We repeat: the Dark IS Rising!
The second (and titular) entry in Susan Cooper's award-winning The Dark Is Rising sequence turns out to have been a perfect book for Children's Book Week. It's a young adult fantasy novel about a boy named Will Stanton who embarks on an epic quest to fight against the Dark with the powers of the Light.
It leads us to ask, why do kids gravitate towards stories with black-and-white morals? And why do people keep entrusting the fate of the universe to tweens?
Of course, we also find time to talk terrible movie adaptations, time tourists, Old Old things, and the trials of having holiday-adjacent birthdays.
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We're dipping back in the Victor Hugo well this week with his other best-known book The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Did you know that the book and the Disney movie don't end the same way?
Also on tap: road trips, games of tag, revisiting the poverty question from last week, and talking about Hugo's views on architecture vs. the printing press.
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Do you hear the podcast sing?/Singing the song of Hugo's book?/It is a book about some people who are sad and live in France!
It took us a while to finish Victor Hugo's classic novel Les Misérables, but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth it! Join us this week for a discussion of the book's inception and its lasting appeal.
Other talking points include zoo cuisine, D&D alignments and soul-crushing poverty. Uplifting, huh?
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Adam Ross’ Mr. Peanut is a novel about marriage and murder with a warped sense of time and reality, but it’s also a book where the whole is a bit less than the sum of its parts. Individual threads have interesting things to say about marriage and interpersonal relationships, but these threads don’t quite form into a cohesive whole.
We also chat a bit about our own marriages (including Craig’s, which is hot-off-the-presses), Timbits, and how we feel when authors tell readers how clever their work is instead of just showing us.
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For March's bonus show, friend of the show Eric Van Tassell swings by to chat about Chuck Wendig's novel Star Wars: Aftermath. Eric's staggering knowledge of all things Star Wars helps us talk about the colossal job handed to Wendig - namely, to write a compelling novel designed to generate excitement about all things Star Wars while also ignoring thirty years of "Expanded Universe" fiction. Naturally, the episode veers in and out of a discussion about the challenges inherent to writing companion fiction, such as balancing the expectations of a rabid fanbase. Also, Andrew attempts to sum up 7 Star Wars movies in just over 90 seconds. Buckle up!
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This week's episode is something a little different: Andrew and Craig were off writing the Two Bossy Dames newsletter last week, so Margaret H. Willison and Sophie Brookover are taking over the show this week!
The Dames read V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic, which is apparently MUCH more about incest than the books we normally read! But they handle it ably, answering questions like: is this supposed to be titillating? IS it titillating? Why is our culture so bad at exposing young women and girls to sex in a healthy, non-creepy way? And more!
You can subscribe to Two Bossy Dames and view an archive of past letters (including the one we did!) at twobossydames.substack.com
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Aphra Behn's The Rover debuted in 1677 to great acclaim. King Charles II loved it, and audience demand led to Behn writing the sequel: The Rover II.
This week, we talk about why a play about the sexual adventures of British exiles in Naples might have done so well at the 17th-century box office. We then talk about what might make it a little problematic for a modern audience.
This week's episode is brought to you in part by Squarespace. Build it, bazinga!
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It's time to choose our adventure and celebrate the arrival of Spring with a trip to the Big Apple in Ellen Kushner's Statue of Liberty Adventure.
This week's choices include quantum pants, Coffee Boy, and Dick Van Dyke's Worst Charlie Bit My Finger Impression (TM).
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are uniformly terrible. Any identification with actual persons, places, buildings, and products is purposeful because otherwise we wouldn't know what voices to use.
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Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds is about the power of words, the power of nature, the power of women, and the power of silence. It's not always fun to read, but it's always got something to say. That's not always the case for Andrew and Craig at parties, though.
This week's episode is sponsored by SquareSpace.
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You've seen the movie(s). You've seen the play/musical. But have you read the novel of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan? It's chockablock with mommy wives, nanny dogs, and more adventures than you can shake a pretend stick at.
Join us as we poke fun at and point out problematic elements of a classic children's story, revel in the power of the imagination, and catalog the myriad inspirations for Peter Pan.
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For February's bonus show, friend of the show and co-Two Bossy Dame Sophie Brookover (@sophiebiblio) joins us to talk about Speedboat, Renata Adler's first novel.
This is one of those episodes where the author threatens to overshadow the book itself - Adler is an outsize figure with a long career, and she's never been shy about telling people exactly what she thinks. And that's true even though her prose is EXTREMELY on point.
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Disgruntled, Asali Solomon’s debut novel, is simultaneously ambitious and accessible. It’s a coming-of-age novel that grapples with questions of race, identity, and family, all heavy topics. But it’s always clear and direct and it’s often funny, and Solomon has a gift for making complicated feelings easy to understand.
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We are doomed to remember a podcast about a book about a boy with a wrecked voice. John Irving's seminal bildungsroman A Prayer for Owen Meany weaves together themes of American disillusionment and religious destiny into a fable about little Owen, who changed the world of everyone that knew him.
Join us as we find excuses to talk about Seinfeld, prayers for war robots, and strange dads.
This week's episode is brought to you in part by Squarespace.
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Stephen King's It deserves most of the praise it gets - it's an incredibly long, incredibly detailed book that tells two long intertwined stories and a bunch of short ones besides, and in one section it made Andrew physically uncomfortable. Mission accomplished, Stephen!
But it's not all good; the book is longer than it probably needs to be and it lingers on certain aspects of pre-teen sexuality just a BIT more than seems advisable.
Anyway, come on down and enjoy this week's episode! We all float down here.
And you'll float, too.
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Special guest Jake Hurwitz (of Jake and Amir, If I Were You, and Headgum fame) joins us this week to talk about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, one of the very earliest examples of the modern novel. Along the way, we discuss the ins and outs of being stuck on a desert island, the many ways in which this years-old story is pretty racist, and just how long the REAL title of the book is.
This week's show is sponsored by Squarespace.
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For January's bonus episode, we put together a sci-fi double feature: The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin and The Forbidden Words of Margaret A. by L. Timmel Duchamp. Both are short stories of speculative fiction, and both are incredibly clever bummers.
When not despairing at the states of humanity and journalism, we lighten the mood with some horrifying mouth noises, David Brooks articles, and Andrew's campaign for Sexiest Man Alive.
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Widely regarded as one of the best, and most important books, of the last half-century, Toni Morrison's Beloved is an unflinching examination of how the past can enslave just as painfully as a yoke or a whip can - and how our inability to wrestle with the past begets wrongdoing for generations to come.
Listen in as we discuss full-contact sports, the myth of the well-meaning slave-owner, hauntings, and Craig's quest to find #achairformyandrew.
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This week's book manages to combine eerily accurate biology with a Margaret Atwood-esque dystopia, a potent mixture that you need to read to believe.
We also dive deep into our mailbag, discuss the recent blizzard, and put some basketball jokes in the place you would LEAST expect.
This week's episode is brought to you in part by Squarespace.
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In A Canticle for Leibowitz, the 1959 post-apocalyptic classic by Walter M. Miller, Jr., a secluded order of monks have dedicated themselves to preserving knowledge that predates an apocalyptic event several centuries prior. But what to do when people come asking for it? Is mankind doomed to repeat its mistakes forever?
This week we're doomed to chat about cyclical history, the first rule of improv, space monks and desert priests, and Casey Kasem's Roaring 20s.
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Good Omens was written by a sort of science fiction supergroup, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It's one of those books where it's as fun to chew on the turns of phrase as it is to find out what happens, which is pretty amazing since it's literally about the end of the world.
Join us for a chat about humanity's innate goodness and evilness, a moratorium on Serial jokes, and some sleepy giggles.
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Odd's fish! It's time to reveal the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the hero of Baroness Emma Orczy's 1908 novel. (No seriously, we're going to tell you who he or she is.)
Other spoilers during our Reign of Terror include what finally tipped the public against Robespierre, some truly terrible accents, and secret identities stretching from Batman to Zorro.
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This month, first-ever patron guest host Asma walks us through Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, a story about upper-class people of marriageable age in 19th century New York City.
It's not the harshest criticism that Wharton ever wrote about the upper crust (that would be The House of Mirth, published earlier), but the book still isn't overly kind to these people and their rigid hierarchies.
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What exactly IS a Cormoran Strike? Did J.K. Rowling's publisher leak her pen name to make big big bucks? To answer these questions and more, we invited on friend of the show Margaret H. Willison to talk The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling.)
Other mysteries solved include the origins of Godbucks, the power of Reddit detectives, and how much Andrew likes Bones.
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Welcome to the wild world of movie novelizations! This week, we read Todd Strasser's (mostly) faithful novelization of the hit 1990 family comedy Home Alone.
Join us for an occasionally musical discussion of Krampus, taking ideas from the page to the screen and back again, the realities of being hit in the head with an iron, and the Wet Bandits' branding issues.
This week's home defense tutorial is brought to you by the fine folks at Squarespace.
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This week we're going around the world -- in 80 days, no less! Well, actually, Andrew read Jules Verne's classic globetrotting adventure Around the World in Eighty Days, but we still TALK about a lot of places even if we don't go there.
Other travel tips include cultural broad strokes. fast food pranks, and scientific romance.
This week's transcontinental journey is brought to you by the good folks at Squarespace.
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Our belated bonus episode for November tackles Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a seminal work of Nigerian literature and a look at the bad things that can happen when cultures clash.
Join us for a treatise on present wrapping, discussions of colonialism and yams, and a tiny, disturbing sneak peek into our next 50 Shades of Grey talk.
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Flannery O'Connor was a master of the Southern Gothic short story. Her characters are vivid, her turns of phrase equal parts memorable and chilling. These stories make you laugh, make you cringe, and sometimes make you wish you could forget how they end.
This week we chat about two or three collected O'Connor stories, including the renowned A Good Man is Hard to Find. Other topics include desktop deodorant, the science of smooching, the good old days, and the ultimate fate of the baby from Nevermind.
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Every once in awhile you read a character study about a character who is uniquely unpleasant to study—such is the case with John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, a thoroughly delightful book about the thoroughly repulsive Ignatius J. Reilly.
Join us for a discussion of baby birthdays, Seinfeld, dialect, jelly donuts, and solo hobbies.
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Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine depicts Ancient Greece as truthfully as possible. It is historical fiction filled with war, political intrigue, pederasty and explicit homosexual love - the likes of which were rather scandalous when she published it in the 1950s.
Her book also spawned an episode complete with discussions of Mr(s). Doubtfire, Alexander the Fine, unread text messages, and mummy libraries.
This week's episode is brought you to by the Greek god of web design, Squarespace.
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To close out Spooktober, we thought it only appropriate that we gather around the digital campfire and swap some spooooooky stories. Tales told include the Legend of Bloody Mary, an email forward about spiders, The Hook, and a rather disturbing story about Soviet sleep science gone horribly wrong (no really this one's actually sort of graphic and gross).
We forgot the s'mores, but we didn't forget to talk about pleasing terrors, picking up mummies, haunted sandwiches, and Oklahoma ghost stories.
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This week we go back to the Brontë well to read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the only novel she published before her untimely death at the age of 30.
Wuthering Heights is about romance, vengeance, catching cold, inheriting property, and the perils of attempting to marry above or below your station - all the hallmarks of a good 19th century novel, in other words. We also talk about Thanksgiving, spelling bees, and Muppet Babies - all the hallmarks of an Overdue episode, in other words.
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Though not conventionally spooky, Daphne du Maurier's classic novel Rebecca is a perfect fit for Spooktober. It takes place at a big creepy (but beautiful) house. There's an evil maid. And the late wife of Maxim de Winter haunts every action, every line of dialogue. Rebecca's also a powerful exploration and indictment of how women can have their identity defined for them.
Join us for a chat about terrible husbands, Halloween costumes, plagiarism, old people, and Ace Ventura.
This episode is brought to you in part by Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron.
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Spooktober rolls on this week with Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror, a “true story” from the mid 1970s about a family that buys a haunted house and then gets chased out of it. Its spookiness rating is… pretty low.
We talk a bit about the real-life history of 112 Ocean Avenue, pig monsters, falling off of bikes, spaghetti, and ending chapters with exclamation points.
This week’s show is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Squarespace.
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Spooktober rolls along with another Choose Your Own Adventure: Louise Munro Foley's Ghost Train. We make some dubious choices in this week's episode: spending a summer in Canada, fighting corporate greed, discussing cat literature, and getting to the bottom of who's sabotaging the orchards!
This week's adventure is brought to you by Blue Apron.
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This week is the start of Overdue’s second-annual Spooktober spookfest, a month full of scary books that will get you in the mood for Halloween!
Our first book, brought to us by special guest host Kathryn VanArendonk, is about James and Deborah Howe’s Bunnicula. Kathryn could never finish this one as a kid, but she braved it as an adult so she could tell you about all the weird stuff that happens in it. A cat reads books. A bunny sucks the juice out of vegetables. And oh yeah, it was written by a dog.
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Andy Weir's The Martian is about a man who gets trapped on Mars. It's about all of the actually plausible-sounding science he uses to get himself out of one scrape after another. It's about the efforts of people back on Earth to get him home. It's about (we suppose) triumph in the face of adversity, and the innate goodness of humanity.
In this case, what hurts the book the most is what it isn't: it isn't a particularly interesting character study, since the wisecracking astronaut Mark Watney seems to sail over every obstacle the red planet throws at him without much physical or psychological damage. It isn't a treatise on solitude (Watney rarely seems particularly affected by his loneliness in any lasting way) or on the darker side of human nature (there are no adversaries aside from Mars itself). What's here is a breezy read that's got some entertainment value, but it doesn't have quite the impact it could have had, which is a shame.
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It is time to ascend Mount Doom and end our time in Middle-Earth with Tolkien's The Return of the King. Many goodbyes are said; scores are settled; and brains are filled with dense volumes of poetry and lore.
Other talking points include birthday songs and copyright law, King Charlie Brown, the breaking of oaths, and High Fantasy football.
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This week we continue the Lord of the Rings saga with The Two Towers, a book that moves beyond Fellowship’s table-setting and dives right into the action. We spend time talking about why this book is more satisfying than the first as a standalone volume, and why the first book serves better as the first book of three than as its own story.
We also spend quite a bit of this episode talking about the mixed listener reaction to the Fellowship episode, about the way Tolkien treats “mythical” creatures within his own mythical world, and a little about just why Sam Gamgee is the best.
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Join us for the second installment in our four-part journey down to Mordor with J.R.R. Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings series. Craig's sister Jillian remains in the fellowship for a Family Size episode on The Fellowship of the Ring.
Talking points include elven paradises, stranger danger, bath time songs, and the difference between dipping and bouncing.
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There's a reason why words like "Orwellian" and "thoughtcrime" have stuck in the public consciousness for more than 65 years, and that reason is George Orwell's 1984.
A denser, more complex read than Orwell's also-famous Animal Farm, 1984 is a story about systemic government oppression and the dark side of humanity. We lighten up the proceedings a bit with talk about not one but TWO Hank Williams Jr. songs, the wonders of modern technology, and criticism of criticism of criticism.
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Robert Penn Warren's 1947 Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the King's Men has been called "uneven as a corduroy road," "sloppy," and "one of American literature's definitive political novels." That all seems accurate when you consider that it's a 600-page melange of detective work, City Hall intrigue, and philosophizing about the fallibility of man.
Join us this week for a discussion of headgums and selling out, movie-burping, New Criticism, meat axes, Huey Long, and the bummer that is American politics.
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Not all mystery novels are about stolen jewels, secret passageways, and shifty butlers. Sometimes, they're just about a man in a hospital bed who becomes obsessed with Richard III. Joining us this week is special guest Lauren Spohrer of the true crime podcast Criminal, who takes us through Josephine Tey's renowned mystery The Daughter of Time.
Other talking points include how winners write history, the dos and don'ts of detective work, the Society of Richard III, and a Very Private Person.
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One of Edith Wharton's few stories set outside the realm of the American upper class, Ethan Frome is a story about a Massachusetts farmer trying to live out his heart-dreams.
Join us for a discussion of his totally-not-okay heart dreams, Andrew's cat Newman, ghosts, makeup, Seinfeld, and pickle dishes.
(That list makes it sound like we didn't talk about the book, but we totally did. We promise.)
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We go out in the wilderness for this month's bonus episode, living off the land and making friends with animals and playing homemade flutes with our new bestest buddy Bando.
We also talk about our secrets, the ways an adult should respond when presented with a 12-year-old who appears to be homeless, and a whole lot more.
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Coming-of-age novels are a dime a dozen, but Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is one of the best known. It's such a significant work that we invited our pal Margaret H. Willison back to help us through it—she is, obviously, an expert on all things Margaret.
This week we talk about our changing bodies, running for no reason, and some truly horrifying bra shopping experiences. Enjoy!
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Margaret Edson's rewarding play Wit (sometimes spelled W;t) is not light, boulevard comedy fare. Inspired by Edson's time in a Washington, D.C. research hospital, the play tackles death from a number of angles including cancer treatments and 17th-century poetry. But what makes it such an enduring entry into the modern canon is how Edson handles these subjects with surprising humor and, well, wit. (Sorry.)
Discussion points include legacy, favorite teachers from our childhood, and what we lose as we fight to stay alive.
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Most people familiar with C.S. Lewis' work will have come to him via the Chronicles of Narnia, a series of fantasy books that's defined for better or worse by its heavy-handed Biblical allegory.
Till We Have Faces, Lewis' last novel, certainly deals with some of the same themes. But it's also a retelling of the classic Cupid and Psyche myth that originally appeared in Apuleius' The Golden Ass in the late 2nd century.
Join us as we talk about the myth retold, Lewis' Christian roots, and what happens when Heaven and Hell host the Olympics.
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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a modernist classic. Rich in lyrical prose and unrelenting streams of conciousness, Lighthouse set a standard for peering into characters' heads and hearts and relaying the contents back to the reader. It also closely mirrors portions of Woolf's life - particularly her summers in St. Ives and the devastating loss of her mother at a young age. Discussion points this week include bag shoes, second helpings of soup, and the difficulties of conveying via podcast this book's lasting appeal.
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YOU: An intrepid spaceboy, graduating at the top of your class at Space Academy.
YOUR MISSION: Find and destroy the evil space vampire at any cost!
Our fourth Choose Your Own Adventure outing takes us into deep space and beyond—join us as we hijack advanced spacecraft, evade arrest, and drift through the vast inky void of space. Will we catch that nefarious SPACE VAMPIRE? There's only one way to find out!
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Harlan Ellison is a man whose reputation precedes him. His long and storied career as a sci-fi and speculative fiction writer is peppered with curmudgeonly diatribes and public incidents, many as interesting as the best of the thousand or so stories he churned out across books, television and film.
His classic story A Boy and His Dog takes quite a dim view of a post-WW3 apocalypse, so buckle up for another week spent discussing the depth's of humanity's depravity. In an attempt to lighten the mood, we also talk about dog literacy and allow Andrew's cat Newman to make a cameo.
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What would you do for a better life? Where would you go? Who would you leave behind? And what does "better" mean, anyway?
Reyna Grande poses these questions with great poise and power in her debut novel, Across a Hundred Mountains. This week, we talk border crossings, panda bears, Chicana feminism, and the ingenuity of Days of Our Lives.
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Cormac McCarthy is a writer in the vein of Hemingway or Faulkner, a person whose prose you can spot from a mile away. That can be a good or a bad thing, as we discuss in our show on his 1985 book Blood Meridian.Join us for a discussion of scalping, war, and the special Internet that only Cormac McCarthy knows about.
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What better way to discuss Diana Gabaldon's genre-straddling, time-traveling historical fiction novel Outlander than by confining ourselves to the same room? Live (not really) from Craig's kitchen, we're happy to bring you an episode chockablock with bad Scottish accents, interdimensional romance, and plenty of Highland sex tips.
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Hey, jabronis! This week we finally read our first Brontë book, thanks to one of our Patreon supporters!
Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is considered to be "one of the first sustained feminist books," and though many of the sensibilities of early-to-mid-19th-century England are present here, we see the typical marriage and courtship rituals through a darker lens.
Contemporary readers were scandalized by the things this book depicted, including but not limited to (1) a woman leaving a man and (2) a man being a loutish alcoholic and cheating on his wife. Join us for a discussion of all that plus some tips on safe high-fiving.
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Craig tackles Jorge Luis Borges this week, and what results is a pile of conversations about fake novels and encyclopedias, WIkipedia hoaxes, the way that reviews work, and thoughts on which fast food franchises make the best (and worst) road trips.
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This is our first monthly bonus episode, brought to you by our supporters on Patreon! If you want these shows one week earlier than everyone else, visit patreon.com/overduepod for details.
It's Children's Book Week again, and just like last year we're using it as an excuse to read things that Lil' Craig and Lil' Andrew never got around to reading. Craig reads Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater, a story of a negligent husband and father who lets penguins into his house. Andrew read The Borrowers, the tale of teeny tiny people who swipe things they don't think you'll miss when you aren't looking. Kids' books can take you to some weird places.
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Why do we let the messy implications of our beliefs keep us from shouting them the rooftops?
Why is it difficult for a movement like feminism to be both strong and inclusive?
Why don't chickens feature more prominently in the Nativity?
Friend of the show Katherine Fritz joins us this week to answer these questions and discuss Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist. This 2014 bestseller features selected essays from throughout Gay's career, which includes pieces on The Help, the Internet outrage cycle, and the need for more diverse voices.
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At this point we've read a lot of novels, but we haven't tried to write our own just yet. Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman's 2008 anti-guidebook How Not To Write A Novel has shown us a lot of the stuff we should try to avoid if we ever decide to put pen to paper.
We also devote a substantial chunk of this week's episode to listener mail from our Looking for Alaska episode, specifically responses to our questions about why people read young adult fiction well into regular adulthood.
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Garth Nix may sound like the name of a country music superstar, but he's actually just the humble, award-winning author behind several fantasy series. This week's book, Sabriel, debuted in 1995 as the first entry in Nix's Old Kingdom series, and the novel remains notable for its lead character, its unique take on magic, and the small (for a fantasy novel) cast of characters.
Special guest Giaco Furino returns to the show this week, sharing with Andrew and Craig his thoughts on the Redundancy of Michael Crichton, magical vo-tech school, and talking bananas.
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John Green's Looking for Alaska is another young adult coming-of-age novel in a long tradition of young adult coming-of-age novels. A young man goes away to school and becomes close with a small group of friends. They smoke, they drink, they have sexual experiences, they lose, they mourn.
It's nothing that hasn't been done, but Green's light tone and deeper thematic questions make Alaska worth reading whether you're still a young adult or not. Join us for more thoughts on this book, as well as the great Central Air Conditioning vs. Dishwasher debate of 2015.
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Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is not for the faint of heart. The story is based on the grisly murder of Sylvia Likens by her de facto guardian in the 1960s. What preceded her death is too reprehensible to print here, but Ketchum dives headlong into the awful, determined to suss out the causes (and bounds) of human evil.
Suffice to say, this makes for a difficult discussion on-air, and we spend nearly half the show trying not to talk about the rougher aspects of the book. So please join us for a discussion of phishing, safewords from the future, childhood games, and the parts of The Girl Next Door that made Craig feel terrible.
Caveat lictor: This episode contains explicit language and discussion of graphic material.
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One of the reasons we read is because books can give us perspective—good ones can fully transport us to times and places where we've never been and, in some cases, could never go. That's the case with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, stories she wrote about her childhood on the American frontier.
These books aren't without their problems (there are fairly significant questions about authorship and racism is sort of everywhere), but they're worth reading because of how completely they immerse you in the lives of their protagonists. Join us and special guest Margaret H. Willison as we talk about one of the best-known titles in the series.
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Ernest Hemingway is celebrated for the economy of his prose.
This week we read A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.
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Rejected a world record 121 times before finally finding a publisher and going on to sell millions of copies, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the most widely read philosophy texts of the 20th-century.
Robert Pirsig's semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional account of a motorcycle road trip with his son covers a lot of ground. America's psyche in the fifties and sixties; our fascination with and fear of modern technology; the age-old quest to unify the world around us: Pirsig crams it all onto one motorcycle ridden by one man. It should then be no surprise that we get a little lost in this one. So please bear with us as we fail to ask for directions and are forced to stop and check the fuel gauge/pistons/tappets/[insert motorcycle part here] more than a few times along the way.
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We're back to sci-fi this week, but we take a break from the politics-heavy universe of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow instead uses science fiction to discuss anthropology, colonialism, and theology. There's some genuinely funny and warm stuff in this book, but there's a shadow hanging over the proceedings from the outset: eight people set out to explore the first known alien planet inhabited by sentient life, but only one comes back, and he's much worse for the wear.
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John Ford's 1620s revenge drama 'Tis Pity She's A Whore has everything: friars, murder, bawdy jokes, bawdy suitors, incest -- incest?! What's that doing there?, you might say. And such has been the reaction from nigh on four centuries of critics and audiences confused by how romantically (and tragically) Ford depicted a brother and sister's love.
Never ones to stay wholly on topic, we also discuss March holidays, snow melancholy, and hitting up celebrities for college tuition.
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Celebrated science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a lot in the 20th century: short stories, screenplays, books on pop science, books on hard science, essays on Shakespeare, essays on history and physics -- name a medium, he dabbled in it.
But among all of Asimov's bibliography, the Foundation stands apart. This trilogy (later a quintet and then a septet) examined hard sci-fi issues like societal evolution and the collapse of civilizations on a galactic scale. And it all began with the stories Asimov originally collected as Foundation.
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Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the most widely-read books in American literature. It's so entrenched in the modern canon that it's hard to believe Hurston fell into obscurity later in her career.
But thanks to writer Alice Walker, Hurston's work was revived in the 1970s, and with good reason. Their Eyes is a fascinating portrait of a black woman's life at the dawn of the 20th century.
Also discussed this week: spectacular entrances, the bees and the trees, and plans for dying authors.
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Our odometer has rolled over, but the show's the same: this week we take you through the alternate history presented by Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.
The basic question: what would happen if the Axis powers had won World War II? The sub-questions: what is real? Is it our reality, or the reality in this book, or the reality in the book in this book? We tackle those questions, our caffeine deficiencies, and more!
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100 episodes! That means we've read and talked about 100 books, which isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things but it sure feels like a lot for our little podcast.
For our last milestone episode, we read EL James' Fifty Shades of Grey. Now that we've done another 50 shows (and since the major motion picture is in theaters now), we've gone back to the sexy, sexy well to read Fifty Shades Darker.
Our frustrations with the original book are joined by some new complaints, and just like last time you can find some nearly-compelling threads amid the wreckage if you try hard enough. We also talk a little about the actual BDSM community, and how poorly Christian Grey would fit in among real-life practitioners. One of our listeners provided us with some links, which we've included below for added reading.
Added reading:
"Feminists can be kinky too" from Femmeuary: https://femmeuary.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/feminists-can-be-kinky-too/
"The two mantras of BDSM" from The Kink Factory: http://thekinkyfactory.com/bdsm-for-beginners/ssc-rack/
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Luigi Pirandello's most notable contribution to the Western canon is a play about six characters come to life, intruding on a theater rehearsal in search of - get this - an author.
Please join us as we grapple with the metaphysical implications of Six Characters in Search of An Author, recycle Seinfeld jokes, compose a musical extempore, and take a lesson from Craig's acting class.
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Set in the early years of Bruce Wayne's Batmanhood, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Batman: The Long Halloween chronicles a murderous year in Gotham City. The mysterious Holiday killer is instigating and exacerbating an all-out mob war, and the criminals controlling Batman's town unleash a rogue's gallery of costumed "freaks" in response.
This week we talk about the best ways to dive into a superhero's back catalog, the relationship between Greek myths and comic books, failed elevator pitches with Mr. Bob Podcast, and Daddy's dictaphone.
Caveat lictor: The Long Halloween's legacy includes a major reveal of the Holiday killer's identity, which factors heavily into the latter part of our discussion.
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It's not October anymore, but we've gone back to the spooky story well this week to read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Unlike The Martian Chronicles, the Bradbury book we read back in Episode 28, Wicked is a single coherent story, and it's about what happens when a mysterious and vaguely menacing carnival rolls into town.
Join us for a discussion of aging, father-son relationships, Boy Meets World, and why Andrew has sworn off making fun of people who tweet about sports.
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At last, we've caught our White Whale!
Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, a Leviathan of the American literary canon, chronicles the journey of the Pequod, a whaling ship helmed by the fanatical Captain Ahab. Narrated by Ishmael (of the infamous "Call me" opening line), Moby-Dick straddles the lines between fact and fiction, adventure and essay -- all the while never abandoning the hunt of ol' Moby.
Join us this week as we discuss the particulars of the American Limerick Renaissance, childhood mishaps, commissions (of the ship and sub variety), "shipping", and the wonders of spermaceti.
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Donna Tartt, a recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Goldfinch, broke onto the literary scene over twenty years ago with her debut novel The Secret History.
Set at a small Vermont college not unlike Tartt's alma mater, The Secret History explores how a singular tragedy forever defines the lives of six Classics students. Tune in as we discuss Bacchanalian rites, persona curation in the age of social media, dramatic irony in "whydunits", and 2015: The Year of the Fishman.
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Usually books try to make you root for the protagonist. Even if he or she is flawed in some crucial way, most stories try to make you feel something for the person whose mind you're inhabiting. That is not the case in Vladmir Nabokov's Lolita.
This week we share with you an uncomfortable discussion about how it feels to read a book told from the perspective of an unrepentant pedophile—how do you feel about him? How do we feel about him? How does he feel about him? The difficult subject matter is just one of the things that has earned Lolita its place in the literary canon.
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What're the holidays without children's stories? Every year, families gather around their yule rocks and Festivus poles to hear their favorite tales of holidays past -- which means it's rare that anyone discovers a new seasonal story.
Enter L. Frank Baum's A Kidnapped Santa Claus and Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel and Trina Schart Hyman. One's a fairy tale about saving Christmas from a bunch of Daemons, the other's about saving Hanukkah from a bunch of Goblins. So...similarities.
Save the holidays with us as we discuss Banta Claus, trolling goblins, and hilarious Hershel of Ostropol.
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Truman Capote's Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood chronicles the mass murder of a family in rural Kansas by two runaway parolees. Inspired by a 300-word newspaper article, it basically created the "true crime" genre, making it the grandpappy to the zeitgeist-conquering podcast Serial. Often times chilling, moving, and morbidly fascinating, In Cold Blood dances back and forth over the line between being a compelling narrative and being exploitative. It seems worth asking what it means to "enjoy" a story like this. And what role does the author play in its telling?
Also covered on this episode: Pop-pops, teens, Quebec separatism, and child-proof locks. $10.09
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We hope you like awesome horses and sobbing cowboys, because this week special guest host Casey Johnston is walking us through Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.
It's a kind-of-subversive western that blends cowboy archetypes with some Grapes of Wrath-ish wandering. We also talk about the freelancing life, and what happens when you read books because you saw them in your dad's car.
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For the second week in a row, we've decided to read a book about a dystopian society—Animal Farm was about the oppressed overthrowing and then becoming the oppressors, but The Handmaid's Tale is about an already oppressed group getting even more oppressed.
Margaret Atwood has a lot to say about women and feminism in this book, and we've got a lot of things to say about pie and things to misunderstand about Canada. Also on the docket: sexy John Adams, the LongPen, and analogies about Lost.
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Old Man Stalin Had A Farm...E-I-E-I-O....What happens when you mix the Russian Revolution with a bunch of farm animals and (more than a dash) of dystopian bummers? George Orwell's Animal Farm! Come listen to us learn the joys of rewriting history, selling your friends for whisky money, and holding whips in your trotters.
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Have you read Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, or seen the major motion picture currently in theaters? Because if not, you probably should turn back: we're in full-on spoiler mode this week, and this story hinges on its twists.
Also on the show this week: Christmas Creep, the writing process, and our brand-new Tickle Me Mario doll.
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Michael Chabon is no stranger to genre fiction. He has a Lovecraftesque alter ego. He's written essays decrying navel-gazing trends in the short story world. His Pulitzer Prize-winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tackled its larger themes through the lens of two comic book writers.
So it should come as no surprise that in the early 2000s, Chabon took a stab at young adult fantasy with Summerland, a sprawling tale that mixes American folklore, Norse myth, and baseball.
Listen on as Craig attempts to convey his enthusiasm for the book, Andrew attempts to name baseball heroes, and both of us attempt to (mis)pronounce Michael Chabon's name.
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Haruki Murakami is a giant of contemporary literature, particularly in his native Japan. However, his books are often rife with references to Western culture - in fact, one of his breakout novels was named after the Beatles song Norwegian Wood. His first-person style marries the fantastic with the private, the epic with the intimate, and his latest novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... is no exception.
At least that's what our friend Chris says. Andrew's out this week, so we invited Chris on the show, and he brought with him Murakami's most recent novel. We don't normally cover books this new, but Murakami's been on our list for a while so we decided to tackle it anyway. Little did we know that asking Chris to talk about Murakami meant learning a lot more about the Wu-Tang Clan than we ever expected on Overdue.
Caveat Lictor: Chris reveals a substantial spoiler around the 37 minute mark. Nothing you won't discover a third of the way through the novel, but we thought you might want to know.
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Spooktober comes to a close with yet another Choose Your Own Adventure story: Edward Packard's You Are A Monster. If you missed our previous CYA episode, do check it out. We cover the series' inception, as well as discuss its legacy a bit. This week it's all choices, all the time...or so we hoped.
Caveat lictor: the audio quality's not up to our usual standard this week. Technical difficulties (boo!) and Andrew's wedding (hooray!) meant that we had to publish the show as is lest we leave you all in the lurch.
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Spooktober rolls on with this week's story, an Anne Rice novel that's about spooky mummies and the women who love them. For real, though, people in this book have sex with reanimated immortal sexy mummies.
And that's not all! The downright Austenian cast of characters has many more adventures in between the mummy sex, and despite being a bit overlong the book at least spins a fairly compelling yarn.
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If you've ever heard of a Cthulu, read about the Necronomicon, or been creeped out by sleepy towns in New England, you likely have H.P. Lovecraft to thank.
At the Mountains of Madness (1935), a tale of an Antarctic expedition gone wrong, fits squarely into two literary genres Lovecraft helped to define: cosmicism and weird fiction. Man is rendered insignificant by the ancient forces of the cosmos, and supernatural beings that are neither ghosts nor aliens abound.
Suffice to say, things might get a little spooky this week!
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Our spooky October (Spooktober?) continues this week with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, a book about broken trust and creepy new neighbors and Satan babies and a bunch of other stuff. It's a laugh a minute! This book (and the successful film based on it) serves as a predecessor to just about every horror film where a happy young family moves into a new house only to discover that it's haunted, or where a woman marries a new guy only to find that he's actually a crazy killer, or where kids start acting all devilish and creepy. So thanks for that, Ira.
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Washington Irving - aka Jonathan Oldstyle, Abner Knickerbocker or Geoffrey Crayon - is widely regarded as the First American writer. Born just after the Revolutionary War, he broke ground as a satirist in the early 1800s before moving to England (ironically enough) and gaining international recognition as a teller of tales.
You may have heard of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The Headless Horseman, Ichabod Crane, Tarry Town, pumpkins: these likely ring a bell. But did you know that Ichabod loved eating? Or that the mothers of Tarry Town loved Ichabod's ghost stories? And how many ghosts do you think there are in this American myth? Tune in to find out!
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The stuff in these show notes is just as important as the stuff that isn't in these show notes. At least, that would be the case if they were written by Harold Pinter. Andrew wasn't quite on board with Pinter's classic The Homecoming, but he was coming around a little bit by the end.
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We're trying something a little different this week on Overdue. To hear more, turn to page 44. To go back, turn to page 56.
OK, this episode listing doesn't actually have branching paths based on page numbers, but this week's episode does! We both decided to navigate through Edward Packard's The Mystery of Chimney Rock on-air this week, and in doing so we encountered some scary cats, old ladies with metal claw-hands, and fat-faced groundskeepers. Will we make it out alive, or will we fall prey to the curse of Chimney Rock??
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Safecracker, prankster, bongo drummer, painter, teacher. Richard Feynman was many things in addition to being a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and he seemed to enjoy the incongruities of his varied interests.
His collection of anecdotes Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! chronicles some of these pursuits, while also shedding light on Feynman's years at Los Alamos working on the atomic bomb in the company of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr and others.
Join us this week to find out how a man goes from illuminating the behavior of subatomic particles to spending his free time in California banging on the bongo and sketching nude models.
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This week's story, This Is How You Lose Her, is a loosely connected collection of short stories that blurs the line between protagonist and author. Junot Díaz's upbringing and personal history are clearly related to that of Yunior, the character the book spends the most time with. But how much of Díaz is in Yunior, and how does that affect the way we feel about them both?
Also on the docket: back-to-school, some talk about how your gender may affect how you come at this book, and lots of other diversions. Enjoy!
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"I'm a hairy ape, get me? And I'll bust youse in de jaw if you don't lay off kiddin' me."
When Eugene O'Neill wants to get his point across, he leaves nothing to chance. In his 1922 work of expressionist theatre, The Hairy Ape, the four-time Pulitzer Prize winner spells out exactly how you're supposed to feel about the dehumanizing effects of Capitalism and industry. Men resemble gorillas, crowd after crowd spurn individuals, and a chilling ending leaves us wondering where any of us belong.
Join us as we talk about O'Neill's family life, butcher some key facts about his life, and take a trip to the monkey house.
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There's a fair chance that you're familiar with Piper Kerman's Orange Is The New Black through the award-winning Netflix drama. This week we wanted to go to the source material and read the original memoir, not just to compare and contrast the book and the show but so we could separate fact from fiction and learn more about what's really going on in women's prisons.
Like the show, the book is sometimes funny, often sad, and occasionally bleak. Kerman's stance against mandatory minimum sentencing—an aspect of the justice system that makes even first-time drug offenders do hard time—and the waste inherent to America's massive prison system is often more eye-opening than the heightened drama presented on the show. Even though Piper has an extensive support network and a "normal" life waiting for her when her sentence is not, many of these women do not.
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Things get a little hot and heavy on this week's episode dedicated to Philip Roth's 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint. We do, however, start off with some reactions to our Pride and Prejudice episode before diving headlong into the mishmash of sex, psychoanalysis, and American Jewish life that is Portnoy and his titular complaint.
Caveat Lector: This book necessitated discussing some rather graphic subject matter, so we decided to slap the "Explicit" tag on the episode. Not only did this mean talking about a few choice scenes in detail, it also means we're a bit freer with language than we are on a regular basis. Don't say we didn't warn you!
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This week, we take another run at Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice is, in Andrew's words, "a book where a bunch of people eventually get married to each other.
"It's also more than that, of course—it gives us an opportunity to talk about class, wealth, social standing, love, the institution of marriage, Milton Bradley jingles, and one Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy (Fitzy to his friends).
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Go Tell It on the Mountain, the first novel by revered American author and essayist James Baldwin tackles a whole host of serious issues ranging from slavery to the Great Migration, religion to racism, and Southern oppression to broken Northern promises.
Naturally, we break up our earnest discussion of these weighty subjects with frequent admissions of our own perpetual ignorance, as well as a few tangents on Very Important Topics such as Orange is the New Black, erotic wrestling, Wilson from Home Improvement, and the age old question: Kirk or Picard?
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This week's book, Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring, is historical fiction that purports to tell the story of the painting of the same name. If that's not a good elevator pitch for a book, we haven't heard one.
Join us for a discussion of art and artists, historically accurate historical fiction, and what happens when you take the sex scenes out of romance novels. We also kick the show off with a discussion of Amazon's new Kindle Unlimited and its possibly negative effects on self-published authors—this CNet article describes the issue in more detail.
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Bernhard Schlink's The Reader was published just five years after the reunification of Germany, and the ways in which it explores the country's troubled history were quite verboten while the wall still stood.
A young man falls in love with an older woman, a woman with a number of secrets, and their tempestuous relationship becomes an allegory for Germany's relationship with itself - with its history, its people, and its uncertain future.
Join as we admit our lack of German book-learnin', discuss the ethical quandaries that arose after the Holocaust, and ask the toughest relationship questions Schlink has to offer.
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Robin Sloan's debut novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, tackles the literary world's imminent digital future with an adventure tale that Andrew describes as "like a Dan Brown book but good."
Through the eyes of a recently unemployed college graduate, Sloan shows us a world where Googlers and ancient cryptographers race to discover a centuries-old secret. It's a world where data visualization is sexy, search engines are evil all-powerful, and Aldus Manutius is on the tip of everyone's tongue.
Join us for a show brimming with puns, Andrew's misgivings about Google, and more nerdy sleuthing than you can shake a ruler at.
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Tina Fey is a prolific, talented, outspoken comedian with a track record to rival the best in the business. She’s also a keen observer of the human condition, and her 2011 memoir/essay collection Bossypants covers with wit and humor a wide range of topics including the ins and outs of television comedy writing, motherhood, and becoming a woman in the late 20th century.
Just as her infamous 2008 portrayal of Sarah Palin sparked many a cable news conversation (some productive, some frustrating), Bossypants spurred a smorgasbord of conversations (some productive, some frustrating) between us. So listen this week as we talk about sitcoms, remember terrible jobs, mull over gentrification, and continue to wrestle with that thorny thing called Privilege.
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Agatha Christie is the owner of numerous superlatives: best-selling novelist, influential mystery writer, criminally successful playwright. Also, did we mention she's a dame?
Her novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written in the 1930s, endures not only for its fanciful cast of characters (including the lovable detective Hercule Poirot) but also for its subversion of the murder mystery genre. In short: read this one.
We spoil the heck out of this one's ending. Discussion of the book requires it. You've been warned!
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More than a year after reading Middlesex for Episode 12, this week we return to Jeffrey Eugenides' oeuvre to check out 2011's The Marriage Plot.
It's a more focused, less-sprawling book than Middlesex, but as in his previous book Eugenides spends a lot of time here talking about growing up with a difficult condition. Intentional or not, there's also some subtle sexism here that we try to walk ourselves through—it's complicated by both authorial intent and the time the book is set (the early 1980s), but it's still a talk worth having in light of recent events.
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Dorothy Parker was a prolific Jazz Age writer who rose to prominence during her days as a member of the Algonquin Round Table - a group of writers, critics and actors who liked to spend lunch cracking wise and practically joking. A celebrated poet, Parker also churned out dozens of short stories, earning herself an O. Henry Short Story Prize for "Big Blonde" which we discuss on today's show. We also cover her biting portrait of newlyweds "Here We Are," the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter, and how babies are not to be trusted with anything.
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William Shakespeare's reputation is basically secure at this point. He was hugely influential, his works are widely studied, and although he's over 400 years old he remains a part of the liberal arts canon to this day. That doesn't necessarily mean that his works are easy to parse. This week, we stumble a bit through the epic tragedy King Lear, a play that has all the hallmarks of a Shakespearian tragedy—death, madness, people running around in disguise—but a big cast of characters that isn't easy to keep track of if you're a Shakespeare newbie.
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Lois Lowry's The Giver imagines a world without color, without hills, without difference and most importantly without memory. Winner of the 1994 Newberry Award, The Giver shares thematic DNA with classic "Kid Who Is More Special Than Anyone Else Ever" literature like The Hunger Games, Ender's Game, and Harry Potter.
So naturally we take a big old swing at Quidditch. Other targets of our (perhaps misplaced ire) include Nebraska, bachelor weekends, and dreams.
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In honor of Children's Book Week, we each decided to read a Dr. Seuss book for this episode—that's right, Andrew had somehow managed to avoid the Lorax, and Craig knew nothing about the Places He'll Go. Seuss himself is a fascinating guy, a prolific and long-lived artist who put a lot of good into the world but was by no means perfect. In some ways he's a product of his time, even if his work is timeless.
Also on tap: old Subway ads, a couple of The Wire references because Craig is finally watching The Wire, and a discussion of the latest rash of Hop on Pop-inspired violence.
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What if superheroes were real? Would we still revere them so much? Or would they be too frightening for us to handle, too unstable for us to control?
What if they didn't want to save us?
These are the questions that kick off Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a classic revered by comic fans for its deconstruction of superhero imagery, its compelling Cold War conspiracies, and its engrossing art and characters. Join us this week as we debate "comic" vs. "graphical novel," gripe about origin stories, and outright spoil the end of Watchmen.** No seriously, we talk about the end of this one explicitly from roughly 50:00 to 1:01:30. As always, caveat lector.
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Mark Twain is an incredibly prolific, incredibly distinctive author. This week's read is just a short story and it's one of Twain's first major successes, but it manages to convey why he remains vital over 100 years after his death. It's great for a few laughs, too.
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Justin Cronin got his start publishing quiet but moving "literary" fiction. In 2010, he blew up North America (in a manner of speaking) with his post-apocalyptic don't-call-them-vampires "genre" novel The Passage.
We can't hope to cover every plot point or character in Cronin's 766-page genre epic, but we try to at least touch on a few reasons for its mainstream appeal: rich characters, an unrelenting plot, and lots of sweet jargon.
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Tell the Wolves I'm Home, author Carol Rifka Brunt's first novel, is multi-faceted: it's about different kinds of love. It's about siblinghood, and growing up. It's about the early stages of the AIDS epidemic in the US. There's a lot going on here, to which we add the requisite discussion about pizza-making, podcasting, and how actors remember all those lines.
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Molière's The Misanthrope is a three-and-a-half centuries old play about something as old as time: dishing on your people behind their back. It's also full of great zingers about man's duplicitous nature, all written by a guy who loved theater so much he ended up nearly dying onstage in his final performance.
Join us as Richard Wilbur's delightful translation makes us laugh out loud, as we butcher French, Italian, and any other language we can get our hands on, and as Andrew shares his disconcertingly assured plans for Craig's eventual demise.
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A true classic, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those books we should have read years ago. For the two of you who aren't familiar, it's a story about a lot of things: the trial of an innocent black man; growing up in small-town Alabama during the Depression; and growing up. It's made all the more interesting by Lee herself, who to date has never written another novel.
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Why do we keep trying to solve murders in small towns? What is it like for an American author to set a story in a sleepy Irish suburb? Will our amnesiac protagonists ever regain this memory? What's the best way to interrogate a suspect?
We try to solve these mysteries and more on this week's episode as we discuss Tana French's award-winning crime novel In the Woods.
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We double-dip a bit in this week's show, reading two short stories and proving that you don't have to have a ton of time to read something thought-provoking. The theme is "female authors writing about controversial-at-the-time ideas," and the stories are The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.
One is about a misdiagnosed "hysterical" woman slowly going insane through lack of mental stimulation, one is about a seemingly innocuous small town that is slavishly devoted to its own traditions. Both remain subversive and retain their impact even today.
Oh yeah and we also talk about which grocery store animal mascot would win in a fight.
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It's almost baseball season! And what better way to celebrate America's (former) pastime than to document the annual occurrence of Craig forcing Andrew to tolerate his love of baseball?
Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers is an in-depth, statistics-focused look at today's game from the folks at Baseball Prospectus. It's full of trivia, charts and, thankfully, humorous anecdotes that illuminate the tension between the old-school and stat-wonky approaches to the sport.
Join us as Andrew trolls everything from anti-vaccers to the World Series, and as I try to rise above it all by playing our new favorite game: "Jazz Singer or Baseball Man."
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What if you got to/had to live the same 25 years of your life over and over again? Would you try to recreate the life you had lost? Would you game the system and make a whole bunch of money? Would you try to change the course of human history, with sometimes-disastrous results?
Those are the questions raised by Ken Grimwood's sci-fi classic Replay, which Andrew read for the show this week. Tangentially related is a conversation about Andrew and Craig's own time traveling, done thanks to the magic of Daylight Saving Time.
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Strap yourselves in and pick a good safe word, because Andrew and Craig both read Fifty Shades of Grey for this, our landmark 50th episode! Boy are they sorry!
A warning up front in case you're not familiar: this is a book that is mostly about a BDSM relationship. Our show this week has swearing and pretty graphic descriptions of sex, so keep that in mind while listening.
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What's a granfalloon, you ask? Or a karass? A stuppa? A wampeter? These are all terms from the Bokonon religion, created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle - a hilarious but depressing satire of scientific and cultural responsibility in the atomic age.
Topics for this week's discussion include Donuts versus Bagels, grading your own work the Vonnegut way, the incredible intimacy of feet, and pissants. That's right. Pissants.
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Craig and Andrew take a trip to Transylvania this week, facilitated by Bram Stoker's Dracula. Join us for a talk about the evolution of the vampire, the Olympics, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff too.
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'Ello 'ello! What's all this then?!
A discussion of George Bernard Shaw, turn-of-the-century dialects, My Fair Lady and gender politics, ya say?
Conversations about whether or not stories should end romantically or with women declaring their independence, ya say?
Well, 'Guv, I'm all ears. Cheerio!
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We return to the Dead White Male canon this week with Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the gripping tale of an old man who goes out fishing in the sea. The title is maybe a little more literal than some other books we've read.
Join us for a discussion of man's place in the circle of life and of Craig's many misfortunes. Just don't come expecting us to talk about the story's religious undertones.
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What does it mean to be a woman? We don't know the answer to that question, and it's doubtful we ever will. But reading Kate Chopin's revolutionary novel The Awakening is as close as we'll ever come to understanding the obstacles facing a woman in late 19th-century New Orleans.
Censored in its day for its matter-of-fact portrait of a woman stuck in a stifling marriage, The Awakening remains relevant through its insightful exploration of the pursuit of independence. It's also a perfect opportunity to practice mispronouncing French.
Join us for a discussion of watery metaphors, rakes and mademoiselles, and more than a few late-game television tangents.
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Have you ever revisited a classic from your childhood only to find a whole pile of weird subtext you've never noticed before? Andrew's never read Mary Poppins, but all he noticed in this children's tale of whimsy and wonder was the bizarre-and-possibly-damaging stuff. Also on tap: chatting about gambling, babysitters, and more.
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Nothing screams New Year's like a guy sitting in his study, missing his beloved, wishing an obnoxious, repetitive bird would just leave him the heck alone. Therefore it's only natural that Craig read a classic tale of bird vs. man antagonism.
The Raven is arguably Edgar Allan Poe's most famous work, so it's fitting we use it as a springboard to talk about all sorts of Poe-related topics such as New Year's resolutions, Poe's Philosophy of Composition, pentameters and octometers, and James Earl Jones' luxurious voice.
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'Tis the season to do seasonally-themed episodes, and so Andrew read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the short story that has been so widely adapted that you know it front-to-back even if you've never come within ten miles of the book itself.
Also on the docket: our holiday plans, a brief aside that compares A Christmas Carol to Bill Murray vehicle Groundhog Day, and our unhealthy relationships with caffeine.
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What do you do when your meth-cooking father goes missing in the Missouri Ozarks? Ask your relatives? Go to the cops? Dig for evidence yourself?
These are the options facing Ree Dolly, protagonist of Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel Winter's Bone. Woodrell's described his Ozark-based work as "country noir" - a term we spend a minute or two attempting to define before launching into our discussion of the novel that was later adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Jennifer Lawrence.
Bear with us as this episode gets started. We clearly needed to talk about Christmas trees, rowdy neighbors, and nine-volt batteries before discussing family and violence in rural America.
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Sometimes an author's personality (or legend, even) grows to the point that it's just as interesting as the work they produced. This is certainly true in the case of JD Salinger—the stories that sprang up around the reclusive author threaten to overshadow many of the stories he actually wrote. It doesn't help that he stopped publishing new work 45 years before his death in 2010.
Having already read Catcher in the Rye, Andrew this week moved on to Franny and Zooey, a pair of related stories about Salinger's fictitious Glass family. Join us for a discussion of the relationship between artists and art, pizza, and the first big snow of the winter.
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In 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "killed" Sherlock Holmes. Eight years later, the popular detective returned in The Hound of the Baskervilles, much to the delight of Doyle's mother.
Why was Doyle unable to abandon his creation? Why have the zany detective and his Everyman sidekick Watson endured for over a century? Maybe we'll answer those questions. At the very least, we'll talk about how nerds have kept the crime-fighting duo alive for new generations to enjoy in print and onscreen.
In this week's episode, we'll also discuss the adventures of Sir Arthur "Iggy" Conan Doyle, Professor Challenge, nerd rage, and (last but not least) hellhounds.
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No plot, no characters, no setting. Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable sounds like it's about nothing, but it's more than just the Seinfeld of novels - or so Craig tries to convince Andrew. Beckett, a Nobel Laureate, is likely best known for Waiting for Godot, a play in which "nothing happens, twice." It stormed the theatre scene in Paris, London, and New York in the 1950s, inspiring a generation of theatregoers and angering countless more. Listen this week to find out which play angered Andrew the most. Join us also for a discussion of Twitter followers, movie previews, and cricketing.
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Another Hunger Games movie is right around the corner, but you just can't wait. You need to read a heartwarming tale about tweens and teens who are all dropped down on an island by a repressive government and forced to kill each other, and you need to do it now.
That's why special guest Suzannah Rosenberg joins Andrew and Craig this week for a discussion of Koushun Takami's Battle Royale. Join us for a discussion of romance, violence, birthdays, and cat whispering.
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Hell is sheeple, hot cocoa, interventions, mannequins, French pronunciations, and gin.
Also, hell is other people. Or so wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his famous existentialist drama No Exit.
Join us this week as we travel to Hell to figure out what, exactly, the hell Sartre meant when he penned that infamous quote.
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Did you know that Stephen King's The Stand isn't a taut legal thriller? It's just one of the many things that Andrew and Craig learned about the book this week!
Special guest Giaco Furino walks Andrew and Craig through the apocalyptic (and then post-apocalyptic), Lord of the Rings-inspired, vaguely supernatural "complete and uncut edition" of the book, which the author himself describes as "boss."
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Rock and roll, PowerPoint slides, African dictators: all succumb to the inexorable march of time in Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Join us as we discuss the most recently published book we've read yet. Also: passive aggressive behavior, stories in the second person, and Craig admits to an unhealthy appreciation for Bryan Adams.
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The relationship between interior evil and its effect of one's external appearance isn't new to the show, but it's explored pretty explicitly in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. A much darker affair than The Importance of Being Earnest, this book is the closest examination of morality in Victorian England that we've read since Jekyll and Hyde.
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What's there to enjoy about a 2400-year-old tragedy? Is it the ekkyklemas? The god-chariots? Or is it the protagonist so wounded by her husband's actions that she's driven to commit atrocities only Breaking Bad's willing to put on TV?
What if there's nothing to enjoy? Maybe that's why Euripides received third prize out of three when he submitted Medea to the annual Athenian theater festival in 431 BCE. Join us this week as we debate the tragedy's merits, bumble our Greek vocabulary, and make the obligatory Tyler Perry joke.
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Andrew wanted something short and funny for his selection this week, and he got it in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. It's up for debate whether Wilde actually meant to say anything with this farcical comedy, but if there's one thing to take away from it it's "stop taking everything so seriously all the time."
We tried to wrap this one up early and then accidentally got into a sort-of-personal talk about the nature of marriage. Enjoy!
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Ray Bradbury once described his first novel, The Martian Chronicles, as a collection of short stories "pretending to be a novel." In fact, many of the Martian stories were published individually, and it wasn't until 1950 that Bradbury stitched them all together.
This patchwork storytelling made it hard for us to get a bead on Chronicles . Craig liked it, but we found it hard to discuss why without the benefit of a central character or singular narrative. That said, you can still join us for a lively talk about colonialism, space travel, Fearing the Bomb, and twerking (for some reason).
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It's rare that we read a book and just out-and-out dislike it, but that's what happened when Andrew read Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity! Eggers' tale of two young men who travel around the world and give away $32,000 may have resonated with reviewers, but Andrew had trouble getting into it.
What follows is a discussion less about the book's plotting and themes, and more about Andrew's reaction to the book and just what he didn't enjoy about it (and why). Apologies for the audio quality on this one; it was recorded in Andrew's now-former apartment, and echoes abound though we have tried our best to minimize them.
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Craig's never read Jane Austen. Yes, it's unbelievable. Yes, it's sort of shameful. But making up for that kind of thing is what this show's all about!
Join us for a lively discussion about Jane Austen's last novel - a charming tale of love and marriage as well as a subversive satire of the system that encompasses both. (We also talk about historical fiction, bad days, and cool pizza.)
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Intelligence is a wonderful thing, but as this week's book shows us it isn't the only thing. In Daniel Keyes' classic, developmentally disabled man Charlie Gordon is transformed into a genius basically overnight, but his emotional growth can't quite keep pace with his intellectual growth. It doesn't help matters that his transformation ultimately proves to be temporary.
It's a deeply moving story, but it's not uplifting. Everyone just try to be happy, OK?
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This week's show is all about revisiting past shows - the book Craig read, John Gardner's Grendel, is a modern prequel and/or retelling of the Beowulf myth. The book deals with monsters and the nature of good and evil, much like Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde. The book is all about the roles we play and the ways we try to impose order on chaos, much like Breakfast of Champions.
Anyway, this one's apparently for those of you who have been listening to us since the early days. Thanks for that.
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In the book's preface, Vonnegut called Breakfast of Champions an attempt to "clear his head of all the junk in there." He wasn't kidding. Breakfast is a melange of narrative, sketches, and character sketches - and Andrew totally dug it.
This week we discuss current events (specifically royal babies), Vonnegut's voice, and the benefits of self-insertion.
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What is Antony and Cleopatra ? Tragedy? Romance? History? Comedy ? The conventional wisdom is to pick tragedy, but this messy entry in the later chapters of Shakespeare's canon dances between the Bard's genres like a "high-coloured" Lepidus.
This week we struggle with Shakespeare's portrayal of the titular heroine, get lost in the play's globe-trotting plot, and - for good measure - debate the finer points of Sister, Sister.
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One note for this one: while every episode has a general spoiler warning attached to it, we spoil Yann Martel's Life of Pi in a pretty big way in this show, so if you have the movie next in your Netflix queue or something you may want to hold off.
That said, if you don't care about spoilers, join us for a lively discussion of the current heat wave, swearing, religion, and tigers in boats!
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Craig and Andrew team up with their evil selves this week to read Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Well, not really. But in honor of our 20th episode, we did both read the book this week, mixing up our usual format a bit.
What follows is a discussion on the duality of man, abridged books, and that thing that happens when stories like this gloss over scientific explanations so as to avoid boring the audience.
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We're back from our hiatus, and to kick the rust off we're diving right into a thorny discussion about race, sexuality, and poverty with Alice Walker's The Color Purple.
Also, we have a brief discussion of the movie version of World War Z , our overdue book from a few weeks back.
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"You know Frankenstein's the name of the doctor, not the monster - right?"
Despite decades of metal bolts and flat green foreheads muddying the waters, Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein has endured. So much so that it almost seems old hat to correct people for thinking that lumbering monstrosities in big heavy boots are called Frankensteins.
Turns out there's still plenty to learn from Shelley's Modern Prometheus. On this week's episode, we discuss the finer points of creature creation, bum out over Nature vs. Nurture, and answer some of your questions.
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Max Brooks' World War Z, soon to be a not-awesome-looking motion picture, takes an interesting approach to the zombie apocalypse story: it's told through interviews with multiple survivors of a global conflict, rather than viewing an outbreak through the eyes of a handful of people.
Brooks also uses the story to comment on American materialism and apathy, deep-seated conflicts between countries, and the psychological impact of war. Even if you don't like zombie fiction, this one's worth a try.
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Whether or not you've read The Elements of Style, the writing rules and techniques you learned in grade school likely came from Strunk and White’s “little book.”
Craig had never read the book, and he thought chatting up Andrew – who gets paid to put words on the Internet – about S&W’s various axioms might prove entertaining.
Join us as we (dis)agree on a few key rules, chat incessantly about segues/segways, and tie ourselves in linguistic knots.
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When you talk about a witch-hunt, you aren't normally referring to sane, procedural, and fair trials. You're talking about a fear-driven investigation driven by suspicions rather than facts, where personal agendas can be more influential than alibis and evidence.
That's the thrust of Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible, which Andrew read this week. We also talk about how the events of the play reflect the then-current Red Scare, and how witch-hunt mentality continues to persist even today.
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Ernest J. Gaines' Pulitzer-nominated novel A Lesson Before Dying takes place in 1940s Jim Crow Louisiana, where a black schoolteacher is asked to visit a young man on death row.
Similar to last week's episode, the discuss leans toward the serious - racism, cultural divisions, and one's duty to his community - but our fervent desire to remain politically correct should help lighten the mood.
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Breaking a three-show "books from circa 1900" streak, Andrew tackles Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex, a tale of love, incest, time-jumping, emigration, and hermaphroditism.
Like the book itself, this show tackles some fairly heavy topics while still keeping things light and conversational. Join us for a discussion of duality, transformation, and just why "normal" isn't really a thing.
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H. G. Wells' classic "scientific romance" The War of the Worlds is perhaps the earliest known example of Martian invasion fiction.
Of course, it's more than just early science fiction. Wells uses the invaders to put Humanity in its place, zapping them with a heat ray of humility right at the height of European colonialism.
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You've probably seen the movie, but have you read the book? L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz certainly follows the same basic pattern as the (much later) Judy Garland film, but there are lots of differences.
Did you know how the Tin Man came to be? Oh man. Just you wait.
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What makes a good ghost story? If you said creepy children, gothic architecture, and unreliable narrators, then Henry James has you covered The Turn of the Screw.
This week Andrew mangles words, Craig gets lost in James' Victorian prose, and the two solve the mystery surrounding the ghosts of Bly.
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What book could possible be more overdue for a read than Beowulf, one of the oldest extant works of Anglo-Saxon literature?
Join us as we revel in Beowulf's heroic deeds, discuss the finer points of oral tradition, and wonder just who infused this Old English tale with a triple-shot of Christianity.
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Here on Overdue, it's definitely not going to be multi-layered critiques of religion and missives on love and cholera every week. Take this book as a case in point—Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has long been a favorite punching bag of Andrew's, but in the interest of trying new things and keeping an open mind, he's giving this decade-old potboiler a try.
His reactions are many and complicated. Join us for a conversation about why pop-lit is, well, popular, whether it's OK to judge a book by its cover, and some of Dan Brown's less successful sentences.
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When first performed on Broadway in 1964, Edward Albee's Tiny Alice frustrated and discomfited audiences with its metaphysical critiques on faith and religion. It is no less opaque today (at least for Craig), and reading rather than seeing it performed certainly makes things more difficult.
The play's density aside, we do manage to discuss cantankerous authors, symbols within symbols, and staging the supernatural.
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Florentino Ariza, the ostensible protagonist of Gabriel García Márquez' Love in the Time of Cholera, has had 622 distinct sexual partners in the 51 years, nine months, and four days that he has waited for Fermina Daza, his true love. We talk about each and every one of them in this week's episode.
Well, no, not really. But we do have a long and sort of disjointed conversation about cholera, geography, aging, and the nature of love, which befits the disjointed nature of the story itself.
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En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.