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Hello from our hiatus! As promised, some intermittent content for you.
Author, cartoonist, and all-around funny guy Zach Weinersmith dropped by to talk about the life, times and works of Edwardian Farce Machine P.G. Wodehouse! Check out the episode for our thoughts on comedy writing through the ages, whether books are doomed, and a bonus reference to the infamous lockdown “Imagine” video.
I’ve been a longtime admirer of Zach’s work, and it was a real treat to nerd out with him! If you’ve never checked out his comic, I highly recommend it: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Since we recorded, I’ve been trying to think of any contemporary authors who are writing this kind of breezy, compulsively readable, impeccably plotted comedic fiction. If you can think of any, let me know!
Our next hiatus episode (hiatusode?), in October, will be a page-to-screen chat about Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the 2022 movie adaptation, in honor of spooky season!
Fun fact: our very first ever test episode/pilot was about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and I did an insane amount of research but had TERRIBLE mics and the resulting audio was unusable. So it’s remained as a sort of mascot story of the show that we have never actually covered. Will I remember ANY of the research I did before when we’re recording the upcoming episode? Tune in and find out, because I definitely don’t have the time to be that thorough again!
What I’ve Read & Loved Lately
The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due! Perfect for ghost story season. I found it to have an undercurrent of hope and earnestness that I found refreshing. Horror as a genre tends to have more hope than we give it credit for, though, I think. Similarly—
Grey Dog, by Elliot Gish, was a gripping, queer, incredibly tense period horror novel, complete with what I interpreted as a bit of a surprise Carmilla homage! Fans of any of our many lady-centric horror episodes (Carmilla, Kerfol, Luella Miller, The White Maniac, A Modern Circe, The Refugee, to name a few) will enjoy it.
On the nonfiction front, I just finished Little Bosses Everywhere, by Bridget Read. Highly recommend if you’re curious about pyramid schemes/MLMs/want to know how they tie in with the Evangelical right and the current political moment. I learned a lot, and Read is a dab hand at spinning an engaging narrative without sacrificing journalistic integrity.
I won’t name names, but I also abandoned a novel 2/3 of the way through because it was sold to me as queer literary horror for adults and turned out to be poorly executed YA with extra swearing. It was also apparently written by an extremely young person, as novels go. Nowhere near the top of the list of its faults, but something I will never forget: the thirty-year-old character who stops to reflect that they’ve aged “pretty well,” except for needing to use reading glasses. Because they’re so incredibly old, you see. At the age of thirty.
As always, if you can—this week, this month, this pay period—consider supporting a living author, because they could really, really, use the love <3
XOXO