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...

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,...

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...

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)...

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...

Good science fiction uses fantastical characters, locations, and technology to comment intelligently on problems that we face in the real world, but the best science fiction can also do...

Billed as “The Greatest War Novel of All Time” on many a book jacket, All Quiet on the Western Front chronicles one soldier’s harrowing experience in World War I....

How would you and your family react if you awoke one morning changed into a huge bug? In our kafkaesque discussion of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Craig and Andrew talk...

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...