The Lost Shelf

Welcome to The Lost Shelf! the podcast where we invite writers to rescue a neglected work of genius from obscurity.

In Episode Five, Art O'Connor and Lauren Oyler get lost in Péter Nádas' magisterial "A Book of Memories". They discuss historical bodies, sex, the epistemology of touch, sex, and what memory does to the remembering subject. And sex. They consider Nadas' novel in relation to the work Federici, Musil, Mann, Elaine Scarry, and Proust, among others.

A note on the readings: Lauren and Art make several references to a passage Lauren read at the beginning of the conversation. We've cut the reading itself having been warned that nobody watches videos that open with one. (Your feedback is welcome!) Later in the episode, they read a different passage to give a taste of the novel's distinctive style. Many thanks to the wonderful Lauren Oyler, Emmet White, Justin Young, and the whole team at The Whistleblower.

Title song: 'Harry Clarke' by Clara Tracey - https://open.spotify.com/album/3laGIMZUEhM0sYvICIgDge
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to The Lost Shelf - the podcast where we invite writers to rescue neglected works of genius from obscurity!

In Episode 4, Art O'Connor and Niamh Campbell discuss Marie Calloway's short story "Adrien Brody". In a rich and wide-ranging conversation, they explore sexual politics, ironic exhibitionism, tradwifery, George Eliot vs Jane Austen, millennial self-destruction, and the importance of a system of manners.

Errata: Several failures of nomenclature occur in this episode. First, Art and Niamh hallucinate that Adrien Brody's name is misspelled in the story's title. It is not! To compound this error, they then mistakenly attribute to Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent, the opinions of Louise Perry, Daily Mail journalist. Our apologies!

Thanks so much to Niamh Campbell, Emmet White, and the whole team at The Whistleblower.

And a special thanks to the great Colleen Green for giving us permission to use her song "I Wanna Be Degraded" as our title music. We're huge fans of her work.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to The Lost Shelf! - the podcast where we invite authors to rescue a neglected work of literature from obscurity.

In Episode 3, Art O'Connor and Megan Nolan discuss Davis Grubb's 1953 thriller "The Night of the Hunter". Their conversation explores the novel's Gothic sensibility, historical conceptions of childhood, and Charles Laughton's celebrated film adaptation. They also consider the work of Leslie Fiedler, the nature of innocence, and the materialist strain in the American imagination.

Erratum: James Agee's "A Death in the Family" is set in Knoxville on the Tennessee River, not the Ohio River. Thanks to the wonderful Megan Nolan, Emmet White, and the whole team at The Whistleblower.

Title song: 'Harry Clarke' by Clara Tracey - https://open.spotify.com/album/3laGIMZUEhM0sYvICIgDge
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to The Lost Shelf - the series where we invite authors to rescue their favourite neglected works of literature from obscurity.

In Episode Two, Art O'Connor and Camilla Grudova discuss "Zoo, or Letters Not About Love" by Viktor Shklovksy. Their wide-ranging conversation touches on Shklovsky's lovesickness and homesickness, his theoretical background in Formalism, as well as some of the finer points of literary composition. They also consider the challenges of literary translation, the critic-as-novelist, and the state of contemporary literary fiction.

Erratum: Art misquotes "Ulysses" by adding a spurious "f", thereby banjaxing a reference to Fritz Senn. The correct quotation is "Going forth he met Butterly" (not "Butterfly"). Among the many translational ingenuities this tricky line inspired is Wollschläger's "Und er ging hinaus und weinte Buttermilch" (and he went out and wept buttermilk) - but no sign of any Schmetterlinge.

After analysing four competing translations of the sentence, Senn concluded: "It is open to everyone to add further remedial touches, which is one way of attesting a basic intranslatability." (Joyce's Dislocutions (1984), p. 36)

Thanks to Camilla Grudova, Emmet White, Liam Mulvaney, and the whole team at The Whistleblower.

Title song: 'Harry Clarke' by Clara Tracey
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to The Lost Shelf - the podcast where we invite authors to rescue their favourite neglected works of literature from obscurity.

Episode One: Rob Doyle and Art O'Connor discuss "Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism", a work of profound spiritual and metaphysical inquiry. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the conversation touches on questions of faith, love, magic, the rich symbolic architecture of the religious imagination, and the growing sense that secular modernity has exhausted itself.

Thanks to Rob Doyle, Emmet White, and the whole team at The Whistleblower.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.