Episodes
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In which the Spiders tackle Omensetter's Luck, a set of prose poem loosely organized by the subjectivity of a mad preacher, which somehow briefly acquired a reputation as one of the most significant novels of the mid 20th century, and is now mostly lost to history.
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Missing episodes?
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In this episode, the Spider hosts discuss the shortcomings of Sayaka Murata's Earthlings.
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The Spiders encounter Mary Shelley's The Last Man, in which grief is transfigured into a radically inventive and astonishingly bleak post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel whose impact and legacy are undone by a complete lack of editing.
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In this episode, the hosts of Book Spider, along with special guest Eddie Kim, discuss the recently released horror novel Gusano, written by founding spider himself, Patrick Barney.
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In which the Spiders consider Acceptance, the third book in Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, and a step down from the focused mood and mystery of the first two installments -- though not without its virtues.
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A discussion of Jeff Vandermeer's Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. The spiders find that it strikes an uncommonly good balance between that which is understood readily and that which can't be understood at all.
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A discussion of Jeff Vandermeer's novel Annihilation, in which the Spiders can't help comparing it to Alex Garner's film adaptation, in particular the ways in which one character's arc turns her outward while the other's turns her inward.
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In which we finish the Underworld Triptych.
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In this episode, we navigate the challenging and beautiful middle sections of DeLillo's Underworld. Before that, though, we listen to an excerpt from cohost Patrick Barney's new novel, Gusano.
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The first in a three-parter in which we tackle DeLillo's meganovel, Underworld. In this episode we discuss just about the first third of the novel. And: We crack ourselves up imagining a Werner Herzog baseball documentary.
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In this episode, the Spiders try to analyze Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun, a harrowing novel of the decades-long occupation of Palestine by Israel. However, the challenge is overwhelming, as it appears that violence may not be interpretable.
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In this episode, the spiders discuss Julia, by Sandra Newman, which is a retelling of 1984, by George Orwell. Julia tells the classic dystopian tale from the perspective of the original's main female character, and in so doing, retcons the original in both positive and negative ways.
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The Spiders pick over Otessa Moshfegh's novel Eileen, a novel whose protagonist's gaze might have its own spidery quality.
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In which the Spider tries to unravel the tangled web of Miquel de Palol's The Garden of Seven Twilights, the Catalan language's addition to the canon of postmodern meganovelistic bricks like Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow.
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In this episode we discuss Lexi Freiman's new book, The Book of Ayn. We talk about objectivism, the relationship between humor and ideology, the difficulties of interrogating meaning through the perspectives of unreliable narrators, and the perpetual rightness of Patrick Barney.
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