Unburied Books

The Patreon gets festive this December by discussing a classic Christmas short story from a Kassia favorite, William Dean Howells. We wrap up the episode with a few Marianne Moore holiday poems as she was the translator of this month's NYRB Rock Crystal. Have Christmas every day by becoming a subscriber.

Dylan and Kassia gather around the hearth to discuss Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal, a Christmassy novella translated from German by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore. In this story, two children get lost in a snowstorm on Holy Eve. We shovel away the layers of winter snow to uncover the deeper meaning of their predicament. Support our show here.

In this clip, Kassia and Dylan how Victor Hugo's Guernsey compares to the Guernsey of Ebenezer le Page and the use of essayistic digressions in novels. Become a subscriber for further yapping on Guernsey via Victor Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea.

In this episode, Matt Tannenbaum, proprietor of Lenox, Massachusetts' The Bookstore and focus of the documentary Hello, Bookstore, joins us to discuss The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G. B. Edwards. At 80, Guernseyman Ebenezer reflects on the joys, sorrows, and annoyances of his life as he searches for an heir to his modest fortune, some of which is buried in the backyard. We talk about the novel's direct, singular style, the overlapping of Edwards' character with Le Page's, and Tannenbaum's decades of reading and loving the book. Find out more about The Bookstore. Become a subscriber for further yapping on Guernsey via Victor Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea.

We paired last month's NYRB Classic, The Golovlyov Family, with another Russian classic on the Patreon, The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, and compare these tales about the dying Russian aristocracy and the freedom of serfs. Listen to the full epsiode here.