Proving politics is downstream of culture. Tune in to hear leftist takes on books and short stories on topics like gender, humanism and the alt right.
http://www.leftshelf.com
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 1 day 22 hours 2 minutes
episode 20: Episode 20: Fantasy Roundtable (w/ Man Carrying Thing)
Let’s admit it: we’ve all seen Lord of the Rings at least five times and held Game of Thrones watch parties. Why? Because fantasy is just that damned good of a genre, allowing for magic and the fantastical to ignite our imaginations and take us off into another world. In this week’s episode, while swooning over fantasy, we also discuss the political elements that make up traditional high fantasy stories, tear apart the tropes and talk about ways in which this genre could become even better...
episode 21: Episode 21: The Cartographer Wasps and Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu (w/ Works in Theory)
With very delicate brushstrokes, E. Lily Yu creates a complicated world of map-making wasps and anarchist bees in a world filled with power struggles within societies and nature. In this episode, we sit down with the hosts of Works in Theory podcast to dissect the intricacies of the characters in this short story - the humans, wasps and bees - how they related to each other, and what we can learn from their successes and failures...
episode 22: Episode 22: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted.
Strange and comforting, eerie and delightful - in her latest fantasy novel Susanna Clarke makes it possible to hold both contradictory feelings about the house at the same time. In this week’s episode, we go a little bit more philosophical and talk about the ontology of the house and the dimensions of its existence...
episode 23: Episode 23: Cattle Haul by Jesmyn Ward
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...
episode 24: Episode 24: Without Inspection by Edwidge Danticat
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...
episode 25: Episode 25: Soviet and Post-Soviet Georgia (and Journey to Karabakh by Aka Morchiladze)
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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