Stay ConnectedTune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. A podcast from The American Scholar magazine. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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If when you read a work of fiction you are never alone, since you can hear the voice of the author, then when you read in translation, you're in sort of a threesome. The translator, as Cervantes is said to have said, is there at the edge of the frame, revealing the other side of the tapestry. Susan Bernofsky has been translating from German into English for decades, focusing on the writers Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Her latest book is a biography of Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small, and she is now translating Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a (very) brief excerpt of which we published earlier this year. Bernofsky directs the literary translation program at Columbia’s School of the Arts. She joins us on the podcast to talk about the joys and struggles of bringing another writer’s words into English.
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Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
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The first Gilded Age was a time of rampant corruption, the big business crooks of Tammany Hall, and lavish displays of wealth rivaled by abject poverty. It was also the period when America’s elite mastered the art of crafting the perfect cocktail. Though there were a few missteps along the way—including the Black Velvet, which included equal parts champagne and, disturbingly, porter—the era birthed the classic cocktails that we drink to this day. But what parties, what people, were around for the debut of the Manhattan? Or the martini, the daiquiri, the pisco sour? Cecelia Tichi, professor of American literature and culture at Vanderbilt University, tells all in her new book, The Gilded Age of Cocktails.
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Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Each week on our sister podcast, Read Me a Poem, Amanda Holmes reads suggestions from listeners around the world. Recently, a listener requested a longer work by the poet Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetry is not as widely known 40 years after her death as it should be. Holmes joins us this week to discuss why Rukeyser’s work speaks to her and then to read the long poem cycle “Letter to the Front,” written in 1944.
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Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Geoffrey Chaucer was born a wine-merchant’s son in 1340s London. He survived the plague, the Hundred Years’ War, the Great Rising, and an adolescence spent wearing tight pants in a rich woman’s house to become one of the most celebrated poets in English. In the first biography of Chaucer in a generation, historian Marion Turner makes the case that the man we think of as a great English poet was, in fact, a great European one. He was inspired by the literature of Italy, Spain, France, and elsewhere—but more importantly, he drew on his interactions with the people he encountered during his travels, and from the places he visited. For example, how did the frescoes of Florence give rise to the perspectives in The House of Fame? Did Chaucer’s visits to his daughter’s none-too-chaste nunnery influence the bawdy Nun’s Priest’s Tale? Marion Turner takes us back to the Middle Ages to find out. This episode originally aired in 2019.
Go beyond the episode:
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On the eve of World War II, a young housewife named Alma Fielding found herself in the grip of a poltergeist hell-bent on flinging china through the air, toppling over dressers, and leaving no egg uncracked in her London home. Her case caught the attention of the Hungarian ghost hunter Nandor Fodor, whose tests at the International Institute for Psychical Research led to ever-odder phenomena from Alma: a bird flew from her skirts, beetles crawled beneath her gloves, stolen jewelry materialized on her fingers. In The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Kate Summerscale tells the story of an investigation that combines the supernatural and subconscious, revealing the very real anxieties of a changing society.
Go beyond the episode:
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Did you notice when it suddenly became okay not to say goodbye at the end of a text message conversation? Have you responded to work emails solely using ?? Is ~ this ~ your favorite punctuation mark for conveying exactly just how much you just don’t care about something? Welcome, Internet Person—you’re using a different kind of English from the previous generation. But these conversational norms weren’t set on high, and how they evolved over the past decades of Internet usage tells us a lot about how language has always been created: collaboratively. Or, as Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch puts it, “Language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.” She joins us to analyze the language we use online and off—how it got this way, where it’s going, and why it’s a good thing that our words are changing so quickly. This episode originally aired in 2019.
Go beyond the episode:
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Off the southern tip of South America, the remote and rocky Falkland Islands are home to one of the oddest birds of prey in the world: the striated caracara, which looks like a falcon but acts more like parrot. Charles Darwin had to fend these birds off the hats, compasses, and valuables of the Beagle; the Falkland Islands government had a bounty on their “cheeky” beaks for much of the 20th century; and modern falconers have used their understanding of language to train them to do dog-like tricks. The other nine species of caracara that span the rest of South America are just as odd in their own ways. In his new book, A Most Remarkable Creature, Jonathan Meiburg follows their unusual evolutionary path across the continent and describes his encounters with these birds over the past 25 years. He joins us from his home in Texas to introduce us to some new feathered friends.
Go beyond the episode:
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
So many tropical storms and hurricanes hit Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles that native residents talk about them as if they’re family members: “Who broke that window—Rita? Gustav? It wasn’t Katrina or Ike.” Rising sea levels and increasingly volatile storms bring other, no less harmful consequences, too: groundwater salinization, disappearing wetlands, decimated wildlife and fishing. The choice for people and animals in these places is stark: retreat or die. In her book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, environmental reporter Elizabeth Rush tells the stories of the life-altering changes happening right now in our own back yards. This episode originally aired in 2018.
Go beyond the episode:
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Stagger Lee is “The Baddest Man in Town,” as poet and critic Eric McHenry writes in our Spring 2021 issue. The man behind the myth—“Stack” Lee Shelton—was a real person, who did many if not most of the things ascribed to him in song (except, perhaps, go down to hell and take over for the devil). The bar, the hat, the gun, all have become mainstays of African-American folklore in the 120 years since Lee made his debut in song. McHenry joins us on the podcast for a look into the life and legend of Stagger Lee, which he exhumed through newly digitized newspaper records and troves of archival recordings—including the conversation between an elderly St. Louis musician and a 1970s graduate student that plucked Lee from a rich oral history tradition and back into the written record.
Go beyond the episode:
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Wild, blossoming cherries are native to many diverse lands, from the British Isles and Norway to Morocco and Tunisia. But they’re most associated with Japan, where the sakura is the national flower. These days, though, you’ll find blossoming cherries everywhere, on practically every continent. For that, we must thank a lot of dedicated botanists, who braved world wars and long sea voyages—and endured repeated failures—to spread the sakura around the world. But there’s one naturalist in particular we can thank: Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram. Journalist Naoko Abe joins us on the podcast to share how this English eccentric saved some of Japan’s most iconic cherry blossoms—from the spectacular Great White Cherry to the pink Hokusai—from extinction. This episode originally aired in 2019.
Go beyond the episode:
Cherry varieties discussed:
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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