Virtual Memories Show #150: Molly Crabapple “I always like smart, rebellious young people who feel like the world has done them bad.” Artist Molly Crabapple joins the show to talk about writing her new memoir, Drawing Blood (Harper), making illustrated journalism from Syria, Guantanamo and Abu Dhabi, translating Nizar Qabbani, growing into her parents’ legacy…
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Virtual Memories Show #130: Elizabeth Samet – The Cult of Experience and the Tyranny of Relevance “How do you learn things? How do you acquire the patience to admit when you don’t know things? I think those are really important things for an Army officer to know.” Elizabeth D. Samet has been a professor of…
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Virtual Memories Show LIVE: Timur Vermes, Gavriel Rosenfeld and Liesl Schillinger – Table Talk “[Reading Mein Kampf] I expected to find something totally crazy and full of poison, so disgusting you couldn’t stand reading it. And what I found was something you could bear: sometimes pragmatic, sometimes logical. I was expecting a “wrong Hitler”, as…
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Virtual Memories Show: Thane Rosenbaum – Magic City “I’m starting to think that the essays, the fiction, the long non-fiction are all coming from the same place, tapping the same resources, the same human experience, the same fears: all the things that built me, built me to write all of those things, not just one…
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Virtual Memories Show: Michael Meyer – Palimpsest “When you look at the history of northeast China, it’s all successive regimes that have tried to import their version of civilization into this area, and they’ve all failed.” When he was a kid in Minnesota, Michael Meyer papered his walls with National Geographic maps. A Peace Corps…
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Virtual Memories Show: Clive James – Remainder “I should have led a more balanced life, but that’s easy to say at the end of things. When you’re caught up in what you’re doing, it’s very hard to be reasonable. And art isn’t really made out being reasonable.” Clive James was diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema several years…
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Virtual Memories Show: Anthea Bell – From Asterix to Zweig “There were a lot of books in the school library, and they weren’t in English, and I was mad keen to get at them.” Renowned literary translator Anthea Bell joins the show to talk about getting her start in foreign languages, the schisms in the…
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Season 4 Episode 32 Jonathan Rose – The War Poet “Churchill was one of the last members of the Aesthetic Movement, except he applied his aestheticism to war.” Professor Jonathan Rose joins the show to talk about his new book, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale University Press). It’s a fascinating work about the books…
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Season 4 Episode 26 David Baerwald – Fail Better “Artistically, LA’s a disaster. It’s full of amazing stories. But as a city, it’s not a city. Nobody but bus-drivers see the whole place.” Singer-songwriter, musician, inventor, dad, reader, and writer David Baerwald joins the show to talk about the ups and downs of his career…
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Season 4 episode 9 Semper Fido “We move through a human-centric world as if that is reality, but we’re surrounded by other species, and their species is centric to their world. I’m interested in how that works, not in humanizing other animals.” In honor of K-9 Veterans Day, our guests are Sheila Keenan and Nathan…
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