Reading Writers

In this host-only bonus episode, Charlotte and Jo discuss some of their most memorable reads of 2025. Authors discussed include Arthur C. Clarke, Shon Faye, Sarah Schulman, Ai Yazawa, Marjane Satrapi, Ariana Reines, Kyung-Ran Jo, and more.Please consider supporting us on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a scandalous rejection of holiday spirit, Jo and Charlotte reflect on the dark, elegant pleasures of Gabrielle Wittkopf’s The Necrophiliac alongside contemporary novel conventions as deployed in Rebecca Novack’s Murder Bimbo. The hosts are then joined by dear friend Clio Chang, who outlines the timeless, charming, annoying allure of Cheryl Strayed’s hit memoir Wild (2012).Also discussed in this episode: Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service.  Clio Chang is a staff writer at Curbed who can do three pullups. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte delves into Ecclesiastes through the work of liberation theologist Elsa Támez (When the Horizons Close) before Jo shares some of Pierre Guyotat’s horny, rapturous literary memoir, Idiocy. Icon of many RW conversations past, the thoughtful Jackie Ess then joins to discuss Tolstoy’s crank-inflected final novel, Resurrection.Jackie Ess is the author of a novel called Darryl, and more recently of a long short-story length chapbook called Eugene. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest and book coverage requests! Questions and comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Outro music by Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free, and her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo and Charlotte discuss secret gardens, indoor kids, and Peter Pan’s baby teeth before they’re joined by culture-shaping Annelise Ogaard, who introduces listeners to the lavish, creepy world of Gabrielle Wittkop’s fiction.Annelise Ogaard is a writer, translator, filmmaker, vibesmith, area woman, and friend of the pod. She has translated a variety of Japanese manga, including Hauntress, (one of the NYPL's top ten graphic novels of the year💅), and is currently at work on the classic boxing series Fighting for Tomorrow.Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest and book coverage requests! Questions and comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Outro music by Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free, and her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute.  To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte overcomes her resistance to novels about sexual abuse in order to read Kate Elizabeth Russell’s excellent My Dark Vanessa, after which Jo introduces listeners to the freewheeling criminality of Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian. The ferociously intelligent Torrey Peters then joins for a conversation about plant consciousness and our relationship with the organic world. Other titles mentioned in this episode: Jamie Hood’s Trauma Plot, The Incest Diary by Anonymous, Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane, Melanie Challenger’s How To Be Animal, Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden, and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.The Rabindranath Tagore quote that Charlotte gets wrong at the end (I’m sorry! —CS) is:I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Her second book, Stag Dance, was a national bestseller. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest and book coverage requests! Questions and comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Outro music by Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free, and her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Jo discovers the seminal elegance of Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, while Charlotte considers how well she would fare if she traveled back in time to the era of Alexander the Great, as depicted in Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy. Then, the dazzling Lauren Michele Jackson joins to discuss the chaotic, thrilling, sexually vibrant, and deeply unwell narrator of Nettie Jones’ Fish Tales.Also mentioned in this episode: Percival Everett’s Glyph, Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic, Street Zen by David Schneider, and Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of White Negroes and the forthcoming essay collection, Back. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest and book coverage requests! Questions and comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Outro music by Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free, and her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Reading Writers is BACK, and in partnership with Bookforum Magazine!In this first episode of Season 3, hosts Jo and Charlotte delve into the (separate) letter collections of Vincent Van Gogh and D.H. Lawrence before they’re joined by superstar novelist Rumaan Alam to reflect on magazine eras of yore via Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries. Also mentioned: Cat Marnell’s How To Murder Your Life, Jean Godfrey June’s Free Gift With Purchase, Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite, Stet by Diana Athill, the diaries of Helen Garner, and the diaries of Andy Warhol.Rumaan Alam is the author of four novels, including, most recently, Entitlement.Please consider supporting our work on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest and book coverage requests! Questions and comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Outro music by Marty Sulkow and Joe Valle.Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free, and her social media handle is @charoshane.  Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In an incendiary season finale, the insightful and hilarious K. Austin Collins joins to discuss Dennis Cooper's controversial classic, The Sluts. Other topics of debate include the old internet, social media in fiction, and the world's ultimate unreliable narrators: service review writers. Thanks to all our listeners and guests for a wonderful second season! K. Austin Collins is a film critic. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Ringer, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of BLACK COP, forthcoming from Doubleday, and DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, about Frederick Wiseman’s 2001 documentary of the same name, forthcoming from Fireflies Press.  Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte comes in salty about Lorrie Moore’s annoying 9/11 novel A Gate at the Stairs, while Jo has been awed by Cockroaches, Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir of losing her family in the Rwandan genocide. Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte and Jo enthuse briefly but ardently about friend of the pod’s Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and Helen Humphreys’ Followed By The Lark before the powerhouse Shon Faye joins for a rollicking take on Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.Shon Faye is an advice columnist for Vogue dot com and the author of two books The Transgender Issue published by Verso in 2022 and the forthcoming Love in Exile a memoir to be published by FSG in May 2025.Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo discovers one of the most fascinating books of all time with Extraterrestrial Languages by Daniel Oberhaus, while Charlotte issues her verdict on whether Lional Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin lives up to its good reputation. Beloved critic Lovia Gyarkye then joins to assess the complex, beguiling mother-daughter dynamics at work in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine.Lovia Gyarkye is a critic at The Hollywood Reporter based in New York. Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In another host-only bonus episode, Jo reviews Paula Hawkins’ art mystery novel, The Blue Hour, and Charlotte rhapsodizes about Jacqueline Harpman’s bizarre science fiction masterpiece I Who Have Never Known Men.Other titles discussed: Karen Slaughter’s Will Trent series, Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.coTo support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo is refreshed by Trouble in the Cotswalds by Rebecca Tope but Charlotte quickly ruins their peace by connecting the sex in Heather Lewis’s violent novel Notice with Miranda July’s NBA-shortlisted All Fours. The effervescent Emma Robinson joins to share her love for Dianne Brill’s Boobs, Boys, and High Heels, which inspires further reflection on 90s era beauty books and instruction manuals.Other books mentioned in this episode: Steven Saylor’s Murder on the Appian Way, Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up, Shelia Heti’s Motherhood, Bobbi Brown’s Teenage Beauty, Amanda Brooks’ Internet Escort’s Handbook, and Sydney Barrow’s Mayflower Madam and Just Between Us Girls.Charlotte’s review of All Fours and Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up, both in Bookforum. Inspired at once by radical philosophers and tulips, Emma Cager Robinson is looking for beauty. As a mechanism for change and source of inspiration, Emma uses beauty as the driving force behind her activism. With a focus on Consciousness Raising and creating “Insurgents,” Emma uses media of all forms to shift the way we interrogate culture and the systems we interact with on a daily basis. A Texan at heart, she’s especially impassioned about spreading this energy through the South; as a means of completing ancestral business, and working in a long line of women committed to making the world suck less for their families and communities.Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo opens their mind to further basketball books after reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year, while Charlotte (11:30) revisits a YA novel from her youth, Bette Green’s Summer of My German Soldier. Glamorous Marlowe Granados then joins (24:30) to expound on great novels of mid-century women, namely Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone. Other books discussed in this episode: Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of EverythingMarlowe Granados is the author of Happy Hour, a novel the New Yorker called an "effervescent debut." In 2021, it was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel award and received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Review. It is considered a RAVE on Literary Hub’s BookMarks, a website that aggregates reviews from major publications. She writes a substack called "From the Desk of Marlowe Granados" and is currently at work on her second novel. After spending time in New York and London, she now lives in Toronto. Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte is haunted by the lack of violence in Swedish dystopias (Kallocain by Karin Boye and Amatka by Karin Tidbeck) while Jo (17:00) delves into the controlled and uncontrolled horror of medical history in Human Medical Experimentation, ed. Francis R. Frankenberg. Pissed Jeans’ thoughtful frontman Matt Korvette joins (27:00) to share his trenchant take on menace and neighborly predation in Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer. Other books discussed in this episode: Emmanuel Carrère's V13: Chronicle of a Trial, J.D. Daniels' The Correspondence, and Robert C O'Brien's Z for ZachariahMatt Korvette is a writer, critic, lyricist and performer, best known as the vocalist of Pissed Jeans. He resides in Philadelphia, PA.Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special bonus episode, Jo and Charlotte talk about J.M. Coetzee, starting with Disgrace and moving to white South African literature, the legacy of colonialism in fiction, animal rights and Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, as well as Athol Fugard’s plays, James Percy FitzPatrick’s Jock of the Bushveld, Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden, Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Tina Post’s Deadpan, Eyal Press’ Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, and much more.Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte and Jo discuss the mortifying ordeal of being (visually) perceived and other trials of embodiment as explored in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Judith Moore’s Fat Girl: A True Story. The REAL and spectacular Sarah Miller then joins to give her wholehearted endorsement to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles. Sarah Miller has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the Paris Review, covering topics ranging from climate change to American Imperialism to how ugly her unrenovated bathroom is. She works part time at a wine store in Grass Valley California and loves red and blue heelers. Her Substack is called The Real Sarah Miller. Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo proselytizes about the marvelous medicinal powers of M.W. Craven’s Washington Poe novels before Charlotte (10:30) classes up the episode with a recounting of the viral, ugly-cry-inducing Harry Potter fanfiction “Manacled” by SenLinYu. Then the accomplished Sarah Thankam Mathews (28:30) expounds on colonization, anger, Dumbo’s opps, and the “short little knife” that is Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migrations to the North. Also discussed in this episode: Othello, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, W. Somerset Maughm’s The Razor’s EdgeSarah Thankam Mathews is the author of All This Could Be Different, which was shortlisted for the Discover Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. All This Could Be Different was also a New York Times Editor's Choice and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vogue, Vulture, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Slate, and Buzzfeed. Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen.Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 2 comes out of the gate hot, with Charlotte learning about the Magna Carta through Sharon Kay Penman’s Here Be Dragons, and Jo (18:50) enraptured by the visions of Nat Turner, Black Prophet, by Anthony E. Kaye and Gregory P. Downs. Then the special and wonderful Anna Fitzpatrick joins (29:00) to discuss boats, scurvy, informal autism diagnoses, radicalizing dads through reading recommendations, and David Grann’s The Wager. Also discussed: Anna’s Good Girl, Dava Sobel’s Longitude, and Sarah Helm’s Ravensbrück.Anna Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Good Girl, a comedy about an aspiring slut with a panic disorder published by Flying Books. She is also the author of the children's book Margot and the Moon Landing.Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Reading Writers' first season draws to a close. To celebrate, Charlotte and Jo speak with the wise, bold, and original Merve Emre, who brings news of a secret Plautian aspect to Erich Segal's 1970 novel Love Story—the big book so bad it wrecked its author's career. Or was it?Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She writes semi-regularly in newsletter form, with additional work linked on charoshane.comJo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.comLearn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.comTo support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.