When Jacke started the podcast in 2015, he decided to privilege books that were at least fifty years old. (Longtime listeners will know he's made a few exceptions, …

In film, TV and even real-life tragedy, Casablanca’s immortal dialogue and gestures of defiance have taken on an extraordinary afterlife.

It's the OG of experimental literature! (In English, anyway...) In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the wild and woolly Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. And i…

Charlotte Brontë wasn't born the eldest child, but she was thrust into a leadership role at the age of ten, as the Brontë children dealt with the tragic deaths of t…

The winners of this year’s National Book Awards have just been announced at a ritzy gala in downtown Manhattan. Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) won the …

In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, died after being beaten by police officers who arrested her for not adhering to the Islamic Republic’s d…

An unprecedented study that puts mixed-ancestry Native Americans back into the heart of Indigenous history Historical accounts tend to neglect mixed-ancestry...

The History of Literature's countdown of the greatest books of all time continues! Here's Jacke's list of books 19 to 11, with opening lines that craftily establish…

It's the 750th episode of the History of Literature, and what better way to celebrate than to talk some Hemingway with repeat guest Mark Cirino? In this episode, Ja…

Chinua Achebe's first novel Things Fall Apart (1959) ushered in a new era where African countries, which had recently achieved post-colonial independence, now achie…

Yale Library Book Talks Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, will speak about his new book "Storyteller: the Life of Robert Louis Stevenson." Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific. Samoan friends named Stevenson “Storyteller.” Reading, he said, “should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.” His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories “one of the forms of happiness,” and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist. In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods—playful, imaginative, at times tragic. Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. His many books include "Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius" (National Book Award finalist); "Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova"; "The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age"; and "Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World" (National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist).

When Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy, pondered the "dread of something after death, / the undiscovered country," he noted that such thoughts "puzzles the will." (Ea…

Although Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote with wildness and urgency, he patiently insisted on asking an essential question: What are we living for?

Gutenberg remains unknowable: an implied but not a felt presence. This is true for all but a small number of 15th-...