Best Joy Of Serious Literature Podcasts (2025)

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Episode 10 | The Literature of Celebrity | Frank Sinatra has a Cold and Other Essays by Gay Talese 29:30

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6+ y ago29:30

29:30

When we think about literature, the last thing that comes to mind is the celebrity interview. Yet in the hands of the journalist Gay Talese, the lives of the famous are laid bear with all the insight, rhetorical verve, beauty, and tragedy of the best of short stories. Join our wayward host as he examines the writing of Gay Talese, contemplates the …

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Episode 9 | The Old Bureaucrat and the Goose | Freeing a Migrant Goose by Bai Juyi 21:05

7+ y ago21:05

21:05

Once upon a time, more than a thousand years ago, there lived a poet in China named Bai Juyi (sometimes called Po Chu-I). Unlike most poets, however, Bai wasn’t just a poet: he was also a politician, a scholar-bureaucrat tasked with helping to guide China through a moment of immense social, military, and economic crisis. Did he succeed in this ende…

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Episode 8 | The Genius of Decadence | The Wings by Yi Sang 27:17

7+ y ago27:17

27:17

Some writers ask the easy questions, others ask hard questions, but only one has ever asked the question: “Have you ever seen a stuffed genius?” This question—with all its despondency, moroseness, and arrogance evoke the world of Yi Sang, the weirdo titan of the Korean avant-garde. Trained as an architect, dead at 27, occasionally a pimp, obsessed …

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Episode 7 | One Single Haiku by Richard Wright | Haiku #31 by Richard Wright 27:13

8y ago27:13

27:13

Have you ever read a poem and then, without even realizing it, discover that it has implanted itself in your mind forever? For the last twelve years, there has hardly been a month where I haven’t thought at least twice about a single haiku written by Richard Wright in the last months before his death. Somber and yet joyous, imprisoning and yet libe…

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Episode 6 | The Wages of Ugliness | The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima 41:04

8y ago41:04

41:04

On November 25th, 1970, the leading East Asian contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature tried to overthrow the Japanese government in a dramatic coup d'état. Failing at this, he then committed suicide via a combination of disembowelment and beheading. For more than fifty years, Yukio Mishima's life and death have defined Japanese literature. But…

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Episode 5 | What Makes a Genius Writer a Genius? | Report on the Thing by Clarice Lispector 18:44

8y ago18:44

18:44

What makes the "genius writer" actually a genius? What does it even mean to be a "genius"? How does genius manifest itself on the page? When I think of these questions, a writer comes to mind: the Brazilian novelist, housewife, and national hero Clarice Lispector. Never was a writer more audacious, never was a writer more mindbogglingly strange. To…

Joy Of Serious Literature Podcasts

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The Joy of Serious Literature

Bryant Alan Davis

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Episode 10 | The Literature of Celebrity | Frank Sinatra has a Cold and Other Essays by Gay Talese 29:30

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Episode 9 | The Old Bureaucrat and the Goose | Freeing a Migrant Goose by Bai Juyi 21:05

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Episode 8 | The Genius of Decadence | The Wings by Yi Sang 27:17

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Episode 7 | One Single Haiku by Richard Wright | Haiku #31 by Richard Wright 27:13

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Episode 6 | The Wages of Ugliness | The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima 41:04

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Episode 5 | What Makes a Genius Writer a Genius? | Report on the Thing by Clarice Lispector 18:44