Episodes

  • 11. W, or The Memory of Childhood / Trust Exercise.

    11. W, or The Memory of Childhood / Trust Exercise.
    Sep 4 2020
    Michael struggles with an unconventional mashup of holocaust memoir and sports-based dystopia in Georges Perec’s W, or The Memory of Childhood, while Emily is captivated by the sexual politics of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, yet frustrated by its open-ended narrative.
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    54 mins
  • 10. The Innocents / French Exit.

    10. The Innocents / French Exit.
    Nov 28 2019
    Michael is captivated by the brutality and isolation of pre-modern Newfoundland in Michael Crummey's The Innocents, while Emily delights in the “tragedy of manners” and the woes of bored rich people fallen on hard times in Patrick deWitt’s French Exit.
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • 9. My Sister, the Serial Killer / Middlemarch.

    9. My Sister, the Serial Killer / Middlemarch.
    Oct 17 2019
    Michael posits that George Eliot’s Middlemarch (“the most Victorian of Victorian novels”) is the anti-Atlas Shrugged, while Emily considers just how much thicker blood is than water with Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer.
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    49 mins
  • 8. Carrying the Fire / City of Girls.

    8. Carrying the Fire / City of Girls.
    Aug 26 2019
    Michael joins his name-twin on the greatest adventure undertaken by humankind and finds him companionable, warm, and wise in Carrying the Fire, while Emily breaks down the walls of the “chick lit” ghetto to revel in City of Girls, a surprising story of feminine sexual liberation.
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    46 mins
  • 7. Blindness / Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club.

    7. Blindness / Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club.
    Jul 13 2019
    Emily strongly recommends an encounter with the disorienting bleakness and collapse of Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s Blindness, while Michael strongly recommends an encounter with the soul-wracking cruelty and violence of Megan Gail Coles’s Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club.
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • 6. Newfoundland Portfolio / Convenience Store Woman.

    6. Newfoundland Portfolio / Convenience Store Woman.
    May 31 2019
    Michael reads J.M. Sullivan's Newfoundland Portfolio, and Emily reads Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman.
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • 5. An Artist of the Floating World / The House of the Spirits.

    5. An Artist of the Floating World / The House of the Spirits.
    Apr 30 2019
    Michael picks at the banality of evil protrayed in Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, while Emily desperately wants to finish Isabel Allende's enchanting work of magical realism, The House of the Spirits, but is prevented from it by living on a windswept rock in the North Atlantic.
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • 4. Kid Gloves / The Thin Place.

    4. Kid Gloves / The Thin Place.
    Mar 30 2019
    Emily thinks the world would be a better place if everyone read Lucy Knisley's graphic novel account of her difficult pregnany, Kid Gloves, while Michael rhapsodizes about experiments in empathy and postmodern mysticism spurred on by Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place.
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    56 mins