Virtual Memories Show 602: Dash Shaw “Someone told me that reading this book after COVID felt like being a crowd of people again, and that felt great.” Cartoonist and animator Dash Shaw returns to the show to celebrate his phenomenal new graphic novel, BLURRY (New York Review Comics). We talk about the decompressed mode he brought to this book, the…

Cartoonist and animator Dash Shaw returns to the show to celebrate his phenomenal new graphic novel, BLURRY (New York Review Comics). We talk about the decompressed mode he brought to this book, the turning points we encounter in the most mundane situations, his focus on the microscopic moments of doubt we have between two very similar things, and …

Virtual Memories Show 601: Jess Ruliffson “I started talking to some of my friends who were veterans with the idea of ‘what do you do when come home, after you’ve done your job but also been exposed to some weird stuff?'” Comics journalist Jess Ruliffson joins the show to talk about the origins of INVISIBLE WOUNDS (Fantagraphics), her collection of…

Comics journalist Jess Ruliffson joins the show to talk about the origins of INVISIBLE WOUNDS (Fantagraphics), her collection of stories from veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we wind up talking about guys' butts, among other things. We get into her focus on male vulnerability, the Tim Hetherington photos that led her to make Invisi…

Virtual Memories Show 600: Joe Coleman “I don’t step back that often when I’m in there, because I’m inside this tiny bit of the universe. For me, that’s what living things are: endless world within world within world within world.” For my 600th episode, the great artist Joe Coleman joins the show to celebrate his phenomenal new career-spanning retr…

For my 600th episode, the great artist Joe Coleman joins the show to celebrate his phenomenal new career-spanning retrospective book, A DOORWAY TO JOE: The Art of Joe Coleman (Fantagraphics). We talk about art, mortality, mythography, history, the corruption of the flesh, the nature of evil, his Odditorium & the power of relics, Dr. Mombooze-o's se…

Virtual Memories Show 599: Mirana Comstock “This is the first book in 70 years that can conjure up that era, and there will never ben another book that can, because everyone connected with that era is gone.” This one’s all about legacies: familial, literary, cultural & institutional! Mirana Comstock joins the show to celebrate the publication of Th…

This one's all about legacies: familial, literary, cultural & institutional! Mirana Comstock joins the show to celebrate the publication of The Algonquin Round Table: 25 Years with the Legends Who Lunch (Excelsior Editions/SUNY Press), by her grandfather, the late literary lion Konrad Bercovici. We get into how Mirana discovered this manuscript, wh…

Virtual Memories Show 598: Anita Kunz “It’s a whole different experience from making the paintings to see everything on a wall. That’s the only way to understand where you’ve been and where you’re going.” Artist & illustrator Anita Kunz returns to the show to talk about how art saved her life, as we catch up on her fantastic books, ORIGINAL SISTERS…

Artist & illustrator Anita Kunz returns to the show to talk about how art saved her life, as we catch up on her fantastic books, ORIGINAL SISTERS and STRIKING A POSE: A Handy Guide to the Male Nude (Pantheon and Fantagraphics, respectively). We talk about Anita's passion for figure drawing, how disconcerted some male viewers were by Striking A Pose…

Virtual Memories Show 597: Shalom Auslander “You are not born hating yourself; someone puts that in there. What would the world be like if they hadn’t?” With his amazing new book, FEH: A Memoir (Riverside Books), Shalom Auslander explores how the judgmental disgust of FEH infected his life, and what it meant to get sick & tired of the disgust and o…

With his amazing new book, FEH: A Memoir (Riverside Books), Shalom Auslander explores how the judgmental disgust of FEH infected his life, and what it meant to get sick & tired of the disgust and outrage FEH-stival and look for a way out. We talk about the sense of shame, disgust and self-loathing at the core of our common story, why every bookstor…

Virtual Memories Show 596: Maurice Vellekoop “For me, sex and love was too complicated and scary, so I would draw it rather than experience it.” Artist & illustrator Maurice Vellekoop joins the show to celebrate his amazing new graphic memoir, I’M SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER (Pantheon). We talk about the midlife crisis that led to the memoir …

Artist & illustrator Maurice Vellekoop joins the show to celebrate his amazing new graphic memoir, I'M SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER (Pantheon). We talk about the midlife crisis that led to the memoir (and the subsequent crisis that almost made him give up), the joy and pain of putting his life on the page, his process of self-discovery as a ga…

Virtual Memories Show 595: Laura Beers “I came to Orwell interested in him as a political historian and how he can help us understand our modern politics.” Historian, professor & author Laura Beers joins the show as we celebrate her important new book, ORWELL’S GHOSTS: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (Norton). We talk about her cou…

Historian, professor & author Laura Beers joins the show as we celebrate her important new book, ORWELL'S GHOSTS: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (Norton). We talk about her course on Orwell and the making of the early twentieth century, how the post-Jan. 6 misuse of "Orwellian" inspired her to write this book, and her own path int…

Virtual Memories Show 594: Robert Pranzatelli “This book is about the balance between art and life and trying to capture that vitality in both.” Author, publicist and partially involved narrator Robert Pranzatelli joins the show to celebrate his amazing new book, PILOBOLUS: A Story of Dance and Life (University Press of Florida). We talk about the …

Author, publicist and partially involved narrator Robert Pranzatelli joins the show to celebrate his amazing new book, PILOBOLUS: A Story of Dance and Life (University Press of Florida). We talk about the origins of the legendary Pilobolus dance company, his transformational first experience seeing them in 1997, the workshops he took with them and …

Virtual Memories Show 593: Bob Fingerman “My artistic goal before I die is to have one complete book to look as loose as the way I draw background characters. Then I’ll feel like I’ve achieved Feiffer-hood.” With That’s Some Business You’re In (Zoop), cartoonist-humorist-author Bob Fingerman has created a career retrospective to celebrate (lament?)…

With That's Some Business You're In (Zoop), cartoonist-humorist-author Bob Fingerman has created a career retrospective to celebrate (lament?) his 40th year in comics. We got together in LA to talk about that milestone, what it meant to him to bring together decades of his comics, art, and illustration into a single volume, the challenges of writin…

Author & illustrator Swan Huntley joins the show to celebrate her two new books, I WANT YOU MORE (Zibby Books), and YOU'RE GROUNDED: An Anti-Self-Help Book to Calm You the F*ck Down (Tarcherperigee). We talk about how ghostwriting a memoir for a Real Housewife of New York led her to write I Want You More, a thriller novel about fame, identity, and …

Legendary cartoonist & artist Stan Mack pioneered documentary comics and bought New York's multitudes to life with Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies (RLF) in the Village Voice, and now he joins the show to celebrate the publication of STAN MACK'S REAL LIFE FUNNIES: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995 (Fantagr…

With his amazing new book, Deaths of Artists (Blast Books), archivist Jim Moske explores art, mortality, media, fame and our secret lives. We talk about his chance discovery in the Met Museum's archives of century-old scrapbooks filled with artists' obituaries, his attraction to the obits' tabloid poetry, and how he fell down the rabbit-hole of fig…

With his amazing new book, THE WORK OF ART: How Something Comes From Nothing (Penguin Press), hall-of-fame magazine editor Adam Moss explores the artistic process by interviewing more than 40 creators about the evolution of a piece of their art. We talk about the archeology of early drafts and sketches, why he took up painting and how its vexations…

With WINGING IT: Improv's Power & Peril in the Age of Trump (Spring Publications), author, professor & philanthropist Randy Fertel explores the role of improvisation & spontaneity in the arts, sciences & culture. We talk about what drew him to the conflict between reason and intuition, the importance of "Yes, And" in more than just a comedic contex…

For more than 40 years, the breathtaking pictures of photographer James Hamilton have chronicled New York City and America (and a couple of war zones), and now the amazing new documentary UNCROPPED (Greenwich Entertainment) by director D.W. Young has launched a rediscovery of James Hamilton's work, life & times. D.W. rejoins the show to talk about …

Author-playwright-screenwriter-poet Jen Silverman returns to the show to celebrate their amazing new novel, THERE'S GOING TO BE TROUBLE (Random House). We get into how Jen accidentally stumbled into the 2018 Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris and triggered this new book, the ways we're shaped by our parents' failures and secrets, the many routes of ra…

With Reading Shakespeare Reading Me (Fordham), professor Leonard Barkan blends memoir and deep reading of Shakespeare's greatest plays to explore his lifelong relationship with literature and the way(s) we use art to construct our identities. We get into what it means to read, hear, perform, direct, teach Shakespeare, why it took him a lifetime to …

After a ~10-year gap, Emily Raboteau rejoins the show to celebrate her amazing new essay collection, LESSONS FOR SURVIVAL: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse" (Holt). We talk about her sparkbird and the Audubon Mural Project in Washington Heights that center the book, her transformation into a climate activist, the joy of the flaneuse, her scavenger…

Photographer and writer Kyle Cassidy and actor and model Trillian Stars join us for a Bonus Episode to talk about their new Kickstarter, THIS IS ONLY EARTH, MY DEAR – POEMS & PHOTOS (closing May 4, 2024)! We get into their inspiration to make a book combining the poems of Pre-Raphaelite muse/model/artist Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal with photos of Tril…

At long last, artist Leela Corman joins the show as we celebrate her breathtaking new graphic novel, VICTORY PARADE (Schocken Books)! We talk about how the book brings together the women welders of WWII-era Brooklyn Navy Yards, professional wrestling, and her lifelong obsession with the Shoah, how discovering her watercolor style was like the porta…

How did an eBay search lead to the discovery of a lost classic of comics? How can art help us build a better America? Artist and teacher Keith Mayerson joins the show to talk about co-editing the amazing new book, Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics, Vol. 1 (Fantagraphics) and his multi-decade "wordless novel" in paintings, My American…

Classicist Edith Hall joins the show to talk about her fantastic, important new book, FACING DOWN THE FURIES: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me (Yale University Press). We talk about the taboo of talking about suicide, how that taboo can lead to transgenerational damage, how that compares to the family curses in Greek tragedies, and what the Trag…

LEAN INTO DEAN! Cartoonist, playwright, schmoozer, etc. Dean Haspiel returns for a Bonus Episode to talk about his new Kickstarter, THE RED HOOK X DEAN HASPIEL (closing March 28, 2024)! We get into why he's making the plunge into Meta-Mem-Noir and bringing Dean Haspiel as a character into his New Brooklyn comics universe, what it's like to be part …

With his brand new collection, THE WEREWOLF AT DUSK and Other Stories (Liveright), David Small brings us a trio of stories about the beast within (that is, within the heart, within the psyche, and within the body politic). We talk about the on-and-off 40-year history of this collection, the themes of transformation and aging that suffuse these stor…

With RADIANT: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (Harper), Brad Gooch brings us the biography of Keith Haring, an artist who transformed public art & the art world in the 1980s and whose work has become part of global culture in the three decades since his untimely death from AIDS. We get into Brad's common threads with Haring, the parallels between…

No conversation this week, except for our host, Gil Roth, in conversation with some virtual memories of his own! On the occasion of going to the movies for the first time since 2018, to see Wim Wenders’ amazing new film Perfect Days, he reflects on a cusp-of-pandemic trip to Japan. This one’s got Keith Haring & Koji Yakusho, a misplaced fortune, Th…

With his fantastic debut novel, PLASTIC (Pantheon), Scott Guild brings us a dystopian future of eco-terrorism, meta-reality, and . . . a world populated by plastic figurines who break out in song? We talk about the 10-year process of writing the book, how he found the stylistic elements that made it work, and why making the lead characters plastic …

What is the meaning of Cleveland? Cartoonist Aaron Lange joins the show to talk about AIN'T IT FUN: Peter Laughner & Proto-Punk In The Secret City (Stone Church Press), his breathtaking new graphic novel that weaves together obscure records, urban legends and psychographic history. We talk about Aaron's fascination with Cleveland's punk scene, why …

With Marcus Aurelius: The Stoic Emperor (Yale University Press), author & therapist Donald J. Robertson brings us the life and philosophy of the last of the Five Good Emperors. We talk about how knowing the life and travails of Marcus Aurelius helps one understand how to lead a Stoic life, how the Antonine Plague compares with our life in Pandemia,…

With her incredible new book, THE FURIES: Women, Vengeance, & Justice (Harper), journalist Elizabeth Flock explores the lives of three women who responded to violence with violence, and how they run up against the social institutions that seem designed to grind them down. We get into how the book grew from her interest in female vigilantes and her …

Hey! Anything good on TV? No? Then listen to legendary film critic David Thomson as we discuss his amazing new book, REMOTELY: Travels in the Binge of TV (Yale University Press)! David & I get into how TV has changed and how it's changed us, the communal experience of going to the movies vs. sitting on the sofa, the ways his relationship with his w…

With his graphic novel, BLOOD OF THE VIRGIN (Pantheon), Sammy Harkham tells a story of personal and professional disintegration, against the backdrop of exploitation movies and the Iraqi Jewish diaspora in '70s L.A. We get into the obsessions and family lore that drove him to make the book, why it took him 14 years to complete it, what it means to …

The great cartoonist and humorist Ed Subitzky gets his long-delayed due with the new collection, POOR HELPLESS COMICS! (New York Review Comics). We talk about Ed's amazing career at National Lampoon, how he developed his "can't draw' style after taking a cartooning class with RO Blechman & Charles Slackman A DOZEN TIMES, how the Rapidograph became …

Did you make a 2024 resolution to put down your phone? This week's guest might make you rethink that! Chris Silverman has been making gorgeous, weird, haunting artwork daily for more than 2 years, using only his iPhone's Notes app and his fingertips. We get into how #notesArt began, how it's evolved, what his drawing process is like, what it's been…

Our host, Gil Roth, closes out 2023 with the story of a week of transformations! This one's got a Yom Kippur fast gone trippy, and a bathroom-door-induced concussion, a lightning-bolt realization about grief and mourning, a secret mission at a comics festival in Ohio, the Book of Life & the books of the dying, a pharma conference, crying eyes and d…

Seventeen of this year's Virtual Memories Show guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2023 and the books they hope to get to in 2024! Guests include Ho Che Anderson, Josh Bayer, Howard Fishman, Priscilla Gilman, Bill Griffith, Dean Haspiel, Sara Lippmann, Patrick McDonnell, James McMullan, Lisa Morton, Jonathan Papernick, Andrew Porte…

For the last guest-episode of 2023, art critic Jarrett Earnest joins me to celebrate his beautiful new book, VALID UNTIL SUNSET (Matte Editions), which brings together his Polaroids and a second-person narrative to create a bewitching trip through memory, art, grief, friendship, and more. We talk about how the sudden death of his father paralyzed a…

With his new book, ZERO AT THE BONE: Fifty Entries Against Despair (FSG), Christian Wiman fuses essay, poem, memoir and anthology in a singular work that explores how the act of writing a poem is a gesture of faith. We talk about the varieties of despair and joy, the question of whether the world is chaos or has order, and whether the relationship …

With the 60th anniversary of the assassinations of JFK & Lee Harvey Oswald, Danny Fingeroth brings us the new biography, JACK RUBY: The Many Faces of Oswald's Assassin (Chicago Review Press). Danny & I talk about what drew him to tell Ruby's story, how many JFK conspiracy rabbit-holes he had to avoid, the challenges of separating Ruby's life from m…