Left Shelf

Outline by Rachel Cusk tries to grasp personhood and identity in the midst of absence and loss through the (titular) outline of the narrator. The narrator tries to understand herself by understanding others. She listens to the stories about marriage and divorce, family, ambitions  or even writing itself. In this episode, we discuss the stylistic and philosophical aspects of the book, and whether or not we agree with it...

Thank You Ma’am by Langston Hughes (Communist? Communist!!) follows a young boy named Roger as he tries to steal a woman’s purse. The story follows a simple arc -- one event, two characters in three pages -- and yet is ripe with hope and optimism. In this episode, we explore Langston Hughe’s life and touch on the Harlem Renaissance, while also discussing themes of mutual aid and reciprocity...

True to its name, the short story The Case For and Against Love Potions by Imbolo Mbue both heeds caution and encouragement about using love potions...

Zadie Smith’s debut novel, one she wrote at the tender age of 19, is full of irony, witty sayings, and wild rollercoaster storylines. It is the epitome of social and personal chaos spanning several generations, families and cultures.  In this episode, we discuss immigrant psychology, radicalization (left or right), genetic manipulation (?) and the tides of history...

David Foster Wallace is singular at putting you straight into the minds of his characters, who are tragically sympathetic and simultaneously deplorable. The depressed person in “The Depressed Person” is no exception - her loneliness, self-obsession, agonies and fears are intricately described so that even in moments where one feels exhausted by her, one can also relate to her pain...

In this month's extra episode, we talk about the politics on Squid Game and its reception.

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What is freedom and captivity? Can these concepts be talked about without a proper material basis? In this episode, we use the book Journey to Karabakh by Aka Morchiladze as a basis to talk about Soviet and post-Soviet Georgia and how romanticization of suffering has changed public sensibilities and reshaped memories of the USSR. 

Read Journey to Karabakh (free): here

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David Foster Wallace's famous 2005 commencement speech "This is Water" gets a lot of hype. Thank God we're here to set the record straight: this speech is just pure darkness of post-modernism and embracing the consumerism of capitalism as sacred. 

The opening scene of Edwidge Danticat’s story is that of a detached man falling to certain death, all Without Inspection. The fall takes six and a half seconds, but it is enough time to think about his lifetime. In his freefall, Arnold thinks about his life in Haiti, his brutal journey to the US and Darlene and Paris, the two people he calls his family...

If you want someone to break your heart, Jesmyn Ward should be the one to do it. As someone intimately familiar with grief, her stories give voice to the forlorn, strength to the hopeless. In this episode, we talk about her short story Cattle Haul, which follows Reese, a trucker, as he drives a truck of cows across the country. In this episode we explore the complex relationship of Reese with his father, his past and himself...