7.3 What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH)

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Brandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone could get punched in the face.” Brandon, author of the novels Real Life and The Late Americans, joins Stephanie Insley Hershinow for a wide-ranging, engrossing, and often hilarious conversation about the stakes of the novel today. They discuss Brandon’s “Hot Freud Summer,” during which he read all of Sigmund Freud’s essential works, as an example of an intellectual journey that engages with what Brandon calls the PDFs of criticism: the histories of ideas that he wishes to track back to their origins. Along the way, Brandon reveals what he has taken away from the Romance genre (“everything”), his conviction that The House of Mirth is the prototypical social media novel, and how he tries to avoid writing characters that are just “three spritzes of a personality standing in a room.” Brandon, Stephanie, and Chris close things out with their answers to the signature question about the first books they loved, and the answers are…revealing.

Mentioned in this episode:

By Brandon Taylor:
Real Life
Filthy Animals
The Late Americans

Also mentioned:
The House of Mirth
The Liberal Imagination
Georg Lukács
Frederick Jameson
Germinal
Debbie Macomber
Julianne MacLean
Johanna Lindsey
Liz Carlyle, Beauty Like the Night
Beverly Jenkins
A is for Apple, W is for Witch
Guinness Book of World Records
Gremlins: The Novelization of the Film

Listen and Read:

Audio: What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH)

Transcript: 7.3 What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH)

11.2 Taking Apart a Metaphor: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette on the Literary Ecosystem – Novel Dialogue

Our second episode on “The Literary Ecosystem” features scholars of contemporary literary culture Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette in conversation with host Aarthi Vadde. Like the good close readers we all are, we begin by thinking about how the metaphor of the “literary ecosystem” works. Sarah values the way it brings relationships between cultural institutions to the foreground but prefers the base-superstructure model of Marxian critique. Dan, too, moves away from “naturalizing” metaphors although he sees the ecosystem’s potential for pithily naming the interplay of literary production, circulation, and reception.From here the conversation ranges widely as we consider the economic and social forces shaping contemporary literature – be they the conglomeration of publishing houses (see Dan’s Big Fiction) or the impact of platform capitalism upon authorial labor (see Sarah’s Content Machinesand Aarthi’s We the Platform).  We acknowledge the hollowing out of institutions meant to cultivate appreciation for literature and ponder the viability of platforms like Substack for reconstituting a literary sphere. Finally, what would a discussion of the literary ecosystem be without addressing the elephant in the room: AI. We bracket the author scandals to address the supporting players under threat: the translators, the audiobook narrators, the humans who bring books to readers across languages and formats. Come for the literary sociology; stay for the inside scoop on “prompting” a dark romance novel.MentionsMarx – base-superstructure modelBruno Latour – actor-network theorySophie Bishop – Influencer CreepAndrew de Waard –  Derivative MediaPierre Bourdieu – The Rules of Art Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
  1. 11.2 Taking Apart a Metaphor: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette on the Literary Ecosystem
  2. 11.1 Indie Presses and the Literary Ecosystem: Meg Reid and Will Evans
  3. 10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT)
  4. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
  5. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)
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Cover art: A IS FOR APPLE, W IS FOR WITCH. Illustrations copyright © 1996 by Capucine Mazille. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.