Ep. 67: Don't forget the reader ft. Adam Voith

Ed Park's 'Personal Days' is a surreal and darkly comic novel set in a mysterious, ever-shifting office environment. The story follows several employees as they navigate their bizarre workplace, dealing with strange tasks, ambiguous superiors, and a growing sense of unease. The novel explores themes of identity, corporate culture, and the absurdity of modern work life. Park employs a fragmented and experimental narrative style, incorporating memos, emails, and other office documents to create a disorienting and unsettling reading experience. Through its unconventional structure and darkly humorous tone, 'Personal Days' offers a unique commentary on the alienation and anxieties of the contemporary workplace.

No information available about the book.

No information available about the book.

This is a short story collection, where the author speaks at the end of each piece in an amazing way, where he always talking about readers and reading. His writing captures something interesting about America. His stories just are. He has never written a character that is a writer.

The novel centers on two main characters: Lena Grove, a pregnant white woman searching for the father of her child, and Joe Christmas, a man of mixed ethnicity struggling with his identity. The story is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County and explores the Southern gothic and modernist literary genres. It delves into themes of alienation, Christian allegory, and the persistent obsession with blood and race in the South. The narrative is characterized by its non-linear structure, using flashbacks and a fluid transition between past and present to highlight the burden of history on the present and the splintering of personal identity.

Published in 1925, 'Mrs. Dalloway' by Virginia Woolf explores the lives of its characters over a single day in post-World War I London. The novel centers around Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class housewife, as she prepares to host a party. Her day is punctuated by a visit from Peter Walsh, an old suitor, and her reflections on her past choices. The narrative also follows Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran struggling with shell shock and mental illness, whose story parallels and contrasts with Clarissa's. The novel delves into themes of time, identity, social class, and the psychological impacts of war. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style provides a deep insight into the characters' inner lives, highlighting the complexities of human experience and the societal norms of the time.

Ulysses is a groundbreaking and complex modernist novel that chronicles the experiences of three Dubliners over a single day. The novel is loosely based on Homer's epic poem 'The Odyssey', with Leopold Bloom paralleling Odysseus, Stephen Dedalus paralleling Telemachus, and Molly Bloom paralleling Penelope. It explores themes such as antisemitism, human sexuality, British rule in Ireland, Catholicism, and Irish nationalism. The novel is known for its innovative use of language and narrative techniques, including stream-of-consciousness and multiple literary styles. It captures the essence of early 20th-century Dublin, providing a detailed snapshot of the city's social, political, and cultural landscape.

Barbarians at the Gate is a detailed and engaging narrative about the takeover of RJR Nabisco in 1988. Written by investigative journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, the book provides an unprecedented look at the financial operations and social history of the time. It centers around F. Ross Johnson's plan to buy out RJR Nabisco, which led to a bidding war involving prominent figures like Henry Kravis and Ted Forstmann. The book includes a new afterword that updates the story twenty years after the deal, tracing the subsequent success and failure of those involved and the impact of the story on the world.