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Tag: experimental fiction

PODCAST, Ep. 114 – Nontraditional Narratives and Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto

It’s our very first guest of 2019! This episode, the Jennys welcome the fabulous Charlotte Geater to the podcast to chat about experimental, epistolary, and other unconventional narrative formats. Then we review Gina Apostol’s strange and wonderful new novel Insurrecto, which at least one of us already feels confident is going to be one of our best books of 2019. You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go!

Episode 114

Here are the time signatures if you want to skip around.

1:21 – What we’re reading
5:18 – What we’re anticipating
8:37 – Nontraditional narrative formats
35:01 – Insurrecto, by Gina Apostol
50:09 – What we’re reading next time

What we talked about:

Evvie Drake Starts Over, Linda Holmes
Sylvia Townsend Warner letters
A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars, Nicholas Rankin
This Is What It Feels Like, Rebecca Barrow
A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
Josh Ritter’s new album, Fever Breaks
Three Identical Strangers (movie)
The Jolly Postman, Janet and Allan Ahlberg
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg
Bad Kitty, Michelle Jaffe
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
The Spellman Files, Lisa Lutz
The Unfortunates, B. S. Johnson
Tripticks, Ann Quin
HHhH, Laurent Binet
Ulysses, James Joyce
White Is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi
Censoring an Iranian Love Story, Shahriar Mandanipour
Mr. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi
interview with Sofia Samatar in Big Echo
Pilgrimage, Dorothy Richardson
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
The Lodger, Louisa Treger
S, Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (this edition is the one I am indignant about)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick
The Marvels, Brian Selznick
Dennis Severs’ House
Insurrecto, Gina Apostol

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Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript is available below the jump.

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Review: Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra

I didn’t do this on purpose, although I would have if I’d thought of it: The book I read immediately after the election turned out to be a work of experimental fiction that explores how life and education in a dictatorship narrows the range of thoughts that it is possible to think. Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a spoof on the Academic Aptitude Exam, required for all college-bound Chilean students, which Zambra took in 1993, when Chile was in transition to democracy following years of dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. In an interview with The…

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Review: House of Leaves, Mark L. Danielewski

Hello to experimental fiction.  One of my roommates in college loved this book, and kept telling me to read it, and I went on the internets and found this interview with Mark Danielewski where he said something about how older readers would probably not like his book because they’ve been taught to have certain expectations of what books look like, and he doesn’t conform to those expectations because he thinks books can be so much more.  And it’s not that I disagree with him on any particular point, but his tone aggravated me, and the book looked all crazy and…

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