Virtual Memories Show 464: Nora Krug “I’ve been using illustration as a form of research, trying to figure out what kind of traces war and history leave on us, and how our thinking and feeling is impacted over the course of decades and centuries, based on the political experience we have as people and as…
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Virtual Memories Show 463: Sophia Glock “My dad taught me that nobody’s watching you; they’re all thinking about themselves. There’s a lot of freedom in that.” With her wonderful new YA graphic memoir PASSPORT (Little, Brown Young Readers), Sophia Glock recounts a key moment from her teenage years: the discovery that her parents were intelligence…
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Virtual Memories Show 462: Ed Sorel “My wife convinced me that when someone compliments your work, you say, ‘Thank you,’ and don’t explain to them why the drawing is actually lousy.” Legendary artist, illustrator, cartoonist, & author Ed Sorel joins the show to celebrate the publication of his memoir, Profusely Illustrated (Knopf). We get into…
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Virtual Memories Show 458: Robert Emmet Meagher “As I grew as a thinker, as a scholar, as a teacher, I took Camus with me, and my appreciation of him grew as I did.” With Albert Camus and the Human Crisis (Pegasus Books), professor Robert Emmet Meagher distills a half-century of reading and teaching Camus’ work…
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Virtual Memories Show 457: Dash Shaw “With all of the things that I do, the form and the content have to feel like they’re perfectly synced, that they’re each boosting each other up. It also has to be connected with how they’re made.” Cartoonist and animator Dash Shaw joins the show to celebrate his new…
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Virtual Memories Show 431: Louis Menand “Writing a book like this is like an advent calendar: each day you open a little window and there’s somebody in there. You hadn’t known about them before and you learn a fascinating story.” Pulitzer Prize-winning author and cultural critic Louis Menand joins the show to celebrate his phenomenal…
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Virtual Memories Show 415: Jerome Charyn “Any great work is a shove to the incomprehensible, but it’s JUST on our side instead of the other side. You have to take tremendous risks in order to find your language.” With his amazing new novel, Sergeant Salinger (Bellevue Literary Press), Jerome Charyn evokes and explores J.D. Salinger’s…
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Virtual Memories Show 402: Darryl Pinckney “The vote has to be rethought in our American hearts as a radical act, because so many people don’t want you to vote. We have to think about the vote as the center of American culture and American purpose, that cuts across lines of identity that people have drawn…
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Virtual Memories Show 395: Derf Backderf “There have been a lot of stories written about Kent State, but I was going to tell it through the eyes and the experiences of the four people we lost that day.” With Kent State: Four Dead In Ohio (Abrams ComicArts), Derf Backderf not only creates a graphic history…
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Virtual Memories Show: COVID-19 Bonus Mini-Episode “I’m not one to rely on outside aids, but this time I felt like that jungle rat William Burroughs mentions in Naked Lunch, just responding to a hopeless situation by dropping dead on the spot.” No conversation this time. Instead it’s me rambling on about the effects & fallout…
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Virtual Memories Show 348: Steven Heller “It’s a learning moment of how powerful symbols are and how powerful graphic design is.” The Nazi swastika is a symbol of evil, but what about the pre-Nazi version of that symbol? With the publication of The Swastika and Symbols of Hate: Extremist Iconography Today (Allworth Press), Steven Heller…
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Virtual Memories Show 307: Mort Gerberg “People submitting comics to the New Yorker could expect a 98% rejection rate. What kind of a sane person would go into that field?! You have to have some sort of personality aberration to do this!” On the eve of his exhibition at the New-York Historical Society (Feb. 15…
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