Best Kirk Curnutt Podcasts (2024)

1
"The Love Boat" 59:16

1M ago59:16

59:16

Imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald in the afterlife, some thirty-six years after his premature passing, discovering to his dismay that the cheesiest TV producer ever has copped the title to a little-known short story of his and turned it into a landmark of cultural kitsch. That's the premise of this episode, in which we dissect the creepiest story Fitzger…

1
Episode 28: Falling off the Cliff with The Catcher in the Rye 1:24:48

1M ago1:24:48

1:24:48

The Great American Novel Podcast episode 28 considers JD Salinger’s landmark 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye. Your hosts discuss Salinger’s famous reclusiveness, the book’s continuing appeal, and its influence on both the genre of so-called “young adult literature” and post-breakdown lit. We examine the novel in its role of the creation of the…

1
Episode 27: Filtering the Static in Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE 1:14:34

3M ago1:14:34

1:14:34

Often hailed as the quintessential exemplum of Reagan-era postmodernism, Don DeLillo's eighth novel, White Noise (1985), is part academic satire, part media excoriation, and part exploration of the "simulacrum" or simulated feel of everyday life. With its absurdist asides on the iconicity of both Elvis and Hitler, the unrelenting stress of consumer…

1
"What a Handsome Pair!" 57:22

4M ago57:22

57:22

Published in the August 27, 1932, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, "What a Handsome Pair!" clearly reflects F. Scott Fitzgerald's dour view of marital relationships amid the relapse that took Zelda to the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore. The story of two couples, Stuart and Helen Oldhorne and Teddy and Betty Van Beck, "Pair!" insists that for men to …

1
Episode 26: Seekers of the Lonely Heart: Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 1:03:21

4M ago1:03:21

1:03:21

The 26th episode of the Great American Novel Podcast delves into Carson McCullers’ 1940 debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Published when the author was only 23, the novel tells the tale of a variety of misfits who don’t seem to belong in their small milltown in depression-era, 1930s Georgia. Tackling race, disability, sexuality, classism, s…

1
Episode 25: Surmising the Motives in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY 1:08:20

6M ago1:08:20

1:08:20

Published in 1881, The Portrait of a Lady was Henry James's seventh novel and marked his transition away from the novel of manners that only three years earlier had made his novella Daisy Miller a succès de scandale toward the more meticulous, inward study of individual perception, or what would come to be known as psychological realism. The story …

1
"The Sensible Thing" 49:26

7M ago49:26

49:26

Published on July 5, 1924 as F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby, this Liberty short story has always been seen as a key rehearsal for his magnum opus. In the story of George Rollins (or George O'Kelly in the version that appeared in 1926 in All the Sad Young Men) as he pursues the Tennessee belle Jonquil Cary we have yet another varia…

1
Episode 24: Speeding Down the Highway with PLAY IT AS IT LAYS by Joan Didion 1:16:10

9M ago1:16:10

1:16:10

Great American Novel Podcast 24 considers Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, which shut the door on the 60s and sped down the freeway into the 70s, eyes on the rearview mirror all the while. In a wide-ranging discussion which touches not only upon Didion and her screenwriter husband but also John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, the Manson cult, …

1
Episode 23: Hearing Voices in William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING 1:25:48

9M ago1:25:48

1:25:48

William Faulkner's fifth published novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), is a self-described tour de force that the author cranked out in roughly two months while working as the night manager at the University of Mississippi power plant in his hometown of Oxford. This dark tragicomedy about a family on a quest to bury its matriarch helped win the author hi…

1
The Ants at Princeton 50:28

10M ago50:28

50:28

Appearing in the June 1936 issue of Esquire, "The Ants at Princeton" is by any measure a singularly kooky entry in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short-story corpus. A fantasy about a human-sized ant who steps onto the field to save the game between heated rivals Princeton and Harvard (you can probably guess who FSF roots for), the text has always baffled s…

1
Episode 22: Rambling Along the REVOLUTIONARY ROAD 1:12:52

11M ago1:12:52

1:12:52

In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 22, we wrestle with the old Thoreau quote "The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation" as we delve into the soul-sapping mid-century suburbs in Richard Yates' 1961 novel Revolutionary Road. Join the hosts for a conversation that considers other suburban chroniclers such as Updike and Cheever and othe…

1
Her Last Case 55:25

12M ago55:25

55:25

Published in fall 1934 in the Saturday Evening Post, "Her Last Case" is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most important stories about the South. Indeed, it challenges consensus opinions about the writer's regard for the region that the Tarleton stories of the 1920s set. Far from a pastoral evocation of antebellum gentility, the story insists the South …

1
Defining Dignity through Service in Ernest J. Gaines' A LESSON BEFORE DYING 1:06:23

1y ago1:06:23

1:06:23

Only thirty years old this year, Ernest J. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying (1993) is a powerful testament to social justice and to the search for individual dignity in an oppressive legal system. Set in the late 1940s in a small Louisiana community, the book tells the story of two men, one a convicted murderer on death's row (Jefferson) and the other…

1
Episode 20: Cracking Through the Scrub with THE YEARLING 1:10:02

1+ y ago1:10:02

1:10:02

In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 20, your fearless (or is it feckless) hosts find themselves in the damp swamps and thick scrublands of north central Florida in the post-Reconstruction era as we struggle to survive with the settlers of the brush country in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Pulitzer Prize winning 1938 novel, The Yearling. We discuss …

1
Episode 19: Riding the Rocket with Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW 1:03:40

1+ y ago1:03:40

1:03:40

Season three kicks off with a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist whirl-a-gig Gravity's Rainbow. Originally published on February 28, 1973, this encyclopedic inquiry into the systematicity of existence, power, and technology was just this week described by Esquire as "one of the weirdest, richest, most frustrating, in…

1
Episode 18: We Want to Fly Away with Chopin's THE AWAKENING 52:21

1+ y ago52:21

52:21

In Great American Novel Podcast Episode 18, our final Season 2 episode, we plunge ourselves into New Orleans of the fin de siècle in Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening. Edna Pontellier wrestles with a life she never chose, beset by a bore of a husband, a flimsy excuse for a lover, and a patriarchal society which has tried to restrain her choice…

1
Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman 50:59

1+ y ago50:59

50:59

A contender for one of the strangest Fitzgerald titles ever, "Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman," published in April 1924, tells the story of a maverick young debutante, Diana Dickey, who returns from the Western front where she served as a canteen girl to spend the next five years wondering what to do with her life. Only when wounded aviator…

1
Ep 17: Pursuing the Picaro in Saul Bellow's THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH 1:03:25

1+ y ago1:03:25

1:03:25

Saul Bellow's 1953 breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March is perhaps, of all the great American novels we've discussed, the one whose cultural imprint has faded the most. Even among Bellow fans this freewheeling exploration of American identity tends to take a backseat to subsequent classics such as Herzog (1964) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975…

1
"Babylon Revisited" 1:05:23

1+ y ago1:05:23

1:05:23

In late 1930 as Zelda Fitzgerald remained hospitalized in a sanitarium trying to regain her sanity her husband cranked out a frenzied series of stories to pay for her treatment. Out of this whirlwind of effort came "Babylon Revisited," which appeared originally in the February 21, 1931, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and later anchored the four…

1
Episode 16: Classics of American Noir 1:20:29

1+ y ago1:20:29

1:20:29

The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts ar…

1
Searching for the Ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH 1:21:19

2y ago1:21:19

1:21:19

John's Steinbeck's 1939 tale of an "Oakie" family who crosses Route 66 seeking to escape the Dust Bowl only to discover California isn't the paradise it's been advertised as is one of the most iconic Great American Novels in our literary history. Its impact was profound and immediate: rarely has a novel been so viciously denounced simply for promot…

1
The Four Fists 46:35

2y ago46:35

46:35

As spring turned to summer in 1920 and This Side of Paradise was making a celebrity of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the periodical published by his very own publisher, Scribner's Magazine, featured an atypical story by him: "The Four Fists," whose premise is---no, seriously---that we would all be better off if in moments of moral impurity we took a knuckle…

1
Episode 14: Ride into the sun--Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN 1:40:30

2y ago1:40:30

1:40:30

The 14th episode is a ride into the evening redness in the west as your hosts consider one of the more notorious books on our short list: Cormac McCarthy’s epic subversive western, BLOOD MERIDIAN, or, The Evening Redness in the West. This 1985 tome of McCarthy’s has engaged constant discussion and speculation due to the high poetry of its language …

1
Homing in on the Prairie with Willa Cather's My Ántonia 1:04:49

2y ago1:04:49

1:04:49

Willa Cather's most famous novel was published only two months before the Armistice ended the bloodshed of the Great War, and in its powerfully imagistic portrait of Midwestern homesteading, it offered readers an emotional connection to the nation's founding myth of pioneer fortitude. Yet My Ántonia wasn't just a story about pilgrims' progress acro…

1
Crazy Sunday 58:27

2y ago58:27

58:27

In late 1931 F. Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Hollywood for a second attempt to crack the lucrative movie market. While there he attended a party at the home of MGM studio chieftain Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, at which he performed a bit of drunken doggerel and embarrassed himself. Never one not to avail himself of autobiographical …

1
Episode 12: Hitting the Road with LOLITA 1:28:51

2y ago1:28:51

1:28:51

The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts ar…

1
The Everyday Ecstasy of Marilynne Robinsone's GILEAD 1:24:57

2+ y ago1:24:57

1:24:57

Our eleventh episode explores the most recent novel on our list of celebrated Great American Novels, Marilynne Robinson's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of Christian humanism, GILEAD. Set in a fictional small Iowa town in 1956, this deceptively lowkey narrative about a dying minister, John Ames, and the sudden reappearance of the town's pr…

1
The Fiend 44:50

2+ y ago44:50

44:50

Of all the commercial genres F. Scott Fitzgerald attempted in his stories (romance, moral tales, even fantasy and supernatural fiction), he was probably least adept at crime writing. That may seem odd considering The Great Gatsby's influence on the gangster tales and film noir and given the fact the crime fiction was racing toward its hardboiled pe…

1
Episode 10: Finding the Lost Generation in Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES 1:31:50

2+ y ago1:31:50

1:31:50

The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts ar…

1
Episode 9: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1:22:01

2+ y ago1:22:01

1:22:01

In this installment we look at another of the most iconic of GANs, Mark Twain's 1885 "bad boy" novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Written over an eight-year period, what began as a sequel to the mischievous "bad boy" book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) steepened into a caustic interrogation of racism in the United States. Twain's depiction…

1
Porcelain and Pink 1:01:15

2+ y ago1:01:15

1:01:15

Just when you thought your stocking couldn't get any more stuffed this Christmas, we're slipping underneath your holly jolly to drop our second episode of season two. "Porcelain and Pink" appeared in the January 1920 issue of The Smart Set, one month before F. Scott Fitzgerald debuted in the Saturday Evening Post and two before the publication of T…

1
Episode 8: Beloved and Ghosts of the Past, the Present, and Possibly the Future 1:13:46

2+ y ago1:13:46

1:13:46

The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts ar…

1
He Thinks He's Wonderful 54:42

2+ y ago54:42

54:42

We kick off season 2 of Master the 40 with our first foray into the series of "juveniles" Fitzgerald wrote for the Saturday Evening Post between 1928 and 1931. Actually, he wrote two coming-of-age series for the magazine, one about a boy (Basil Duke Lee) and one about a girl (Josephine Perry). The latter tend to be darker and sadder, while the form…

1
Episode 7–All that Jazz: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby 1:35:33

3y ago1:35:33

1:35:33

In our seventh episode we explore a Great American Novel that's so ubiquitous it's almost hard to believe there was a time when the media wasn't full of contrast, random references to The Great Gatsby. The story of a mysterious millionaire who turns up on Long Island, throwing lavish parties and spinning fables as transparently invented as they are…

1
Episode 6: Watching the Horizon in THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD 1:08:40

3y ago1:08:40

1:08:40

The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts ar…

1
Episode 5: Blending Black and White in ABSALOM, ABSALOM! 1:22:40

3y ago1:22:40

1:22:40

William Faulkner's dizzyingly complex, Lost Cause-dismantling 1936 novel about the rise and fall of a Southern plantation owner who "outraged the land" amid the Civil War is perhaps the most formidable Great American Novel one can tackle: it has the distinction of making Moby-Dick look accessible! But Absalom, Absalom! is not only a tour-de-force o…

1
Episode 4: Returning to THE AGE OF INNOCENCE 1:07:37

3y ago1:07:37

1:07:37

The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts ar…

1
One Trip Abroad 59:24

3y ago59:24

59:24

For our tenth episode we explore a short story we think falls just outside of the Top 10: October 11, 1930's "One Trip Abroad," which totally blows anything else in that issue of the Saturday Evening Post out of the water. Many critics considered it Fitzgerald's second greatest story about expatriation after "Babylon Revisited," which was written r…

1
Episode 3: Seeing Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN Clearly 1:24:20

3y ago1:24:20

1:24:20

On the eve of its seventieth birthday, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) occupies a unique place in the American canon. On the one hand, it was instantly heralded as a Great American Novel---indeed, as Lawrence Buell notes in his study of GANs, it was the first novel by an African American to be universally admitted to the pantheon of important …

1
Episode 2: Diving with MOBY DICK 1:19:55

3y ago1:19:55

1:19:55

The Great American Novel podcast is an ongoing discussion about the novels we hold up as significant achievements in our American literary culture. Additionally, we sometimes suggest novels who should break into the sometimes problematical canon and at other times we’ll suggest books which can be dropped from such lofty consideration. Your hosts ar…

1
John Jackson's Arcady 49:05

3y ago49:05

49:05

Some critics have dismissed this story of a man who escapes his worldly woes by fleeing his office to return to his small-town, rundown origins as "pure trash," but we uncover some historical reasons it should be of interest. First, "John Jackson's Arcady" was the last short story Fitzgerald wrote in April 1924 before departing for the Riviera to w…

1
Definitions and Debates: What Exactly is a GAN? 43:21

3+ y ago43:21

43:21

Ever since J. W. DeForest popularized the phrase "Great American Novel" in 1868 commentators have debated the limits of all three of its components. Does "great" necessarily mean a big "doorstop" book or is concision a worthy goal? Whose version America are we talking? And why the novel not a poem, play, or short story? In our inaugural episode we …

1
The Lost Decade 55:42

3+ y ago55:42

55:42

Our eighth episode focuses on the shortest short story Fitzgerald ever published, "The Lost Decade," which clocks in at only 1,100 words, making it Depression-era kin to today's flash fiction. Appearing in Esquire in December 1939 (exactly one year before the author's death), "Decade" is a haunting masterpiece of intimation and mood: eminence grise…

1
At Your Age 52:56

3+ y ago52:56

52:56

Our first episode of 2021 examines a story that has been completely ignored both by fans and scholars: August 17, 1929's "At Your Age." The lack of interest is curious for a couple of reasons. For starters, this tale of a fifty-year-old bachelor, Tom Squires, confronting age-inappropriate behavior as he chases after a debutante thirty years his jun…

1
Pat Hobby and Orson Welles 56:45

3+ y ago56:45

56:45

Hot on the heels of David Fincher's Mank, a hotly disputed retelling of the origins of Citizen Kane, we explore F. Scott Fitzgerald's own take on the rise of Orson Welles. In the final year of his life, without income from Hollywood studios or loans from his longtime agent, Harold Ober, Fitzgerald supported himself by cranking out seventeen short s…

1
The Rich Boy: Special Nov 15 Bonus Episode 57:48

3+ y ago57:48

57:48

For reasons you have to tune in to discover, November 15 is an important day for at least three Fitzgerald diehards. So to celebrate we're offering a special bonus episode featuring our first ever special guest: James L. W. West III, the mastermind behind the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. From 1995 to 2019, Jim singlehanded…

1
Gretchen's Forty Winks 53:38

3+ y ago53:38

53:38

In this episode we nibble on a Fitzgerald comedy so light it could be meringue. Granted, the storyline of a harried husband who slips his wife a Mickey Finn of a sleeping potion so he can finish an important advertising campaign is probably today more of a wake-up call than the high-concept rib-tickler audiences in 1924 read it as. We explore how "…

1
May Day 1:08:41

4y ago1:08:41

1:08:41

Most fans agree that "May Day" is among Fitzgerald's all-time greatest stories: certainly Top 10, arguably Top 5, quite possibly No. 2 behind only "Babylon Revisited." Some might even argue that this ambitious "novelette," first published in The Smart Set in July 1920 when its author was all of twenty-three, tops that most-anthologized, most-ubiqui…

1
I Got Shoes 1:10:25

4y ago1:10:25

1:10:25

Our second episode looks at one of the most obscure of Fitzgerald's 178 stories, "I Got Shoes." Published in 1933, this eighth-to-last of the author's 60+ contributions to The Saturday Evening Post tells the story of a proud actress, Nell Margery, who schools both her adventurer boyfriend and a daffy gossip columnist on the meaning of professionali…

1
The Lees of Happiness 1:07:32

4y ago1:07:32

1:07:32

As F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel, This Side of Paradise, becomes a Jazz Age rage in 1920, the Chicago Tribune invites the twenty-three-year-old writer to contribute an original short story to its Blue Ribbon Fiction Sunday section. The result is "The Lees of Happiness," published that December on the heels of his first story collection, Flapper…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Kirk Curnutt Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Quick Reference Guide