Jack Hilton, Rochdale Caliban
Double episode about Jack Hilton, a working-class author, World War I veteran, unemployed movement organiser, and trade union activist from Rochdale, north-west England. {listen} Part 1: Jack Hilton’s early life…
The LGBTQ+ Literary Resistance
In November 2024, PEN America released its key findings from over ten thousand documented cases of book bans that occurred in the 2023–2024 school year: Thirty-nine percent of reported books…
Behind Closed Doors
The Sicilian writer Maria Messina's captivating and brutal stories of the women of her home island are presented in an English translation by Elise Magistro. Messina, who died in 1944,…
Defoe and the Distance to Utopia
In Defoe’s Captain Singleton, published a year later, the eponymous pirate comes back home with new notions of equality and communal property. Indeed, as Defoe teaches us, the highest ideals…
Queer Readings of Rebecca
video by trade movies podcast
Dismantling the Mother Shelf: Expanding Our Thinking About Women’s Stories of Parenthood
When it comes to the Mother Shelf, it’s tempting to shrug our collective shoulders and say, Well, that’s just how book marketing works. But the uncomfortable truth is that publishers,…
AI Threatens Literary Translation
The etymology of the word translation—“to carry across”—conjures an image of physical labor. It is deeply relational, requiring at least two bodies, those of an author and of the person…
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
BY Olga Tokarczuk. translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Danzy Senna’s absurdist novel of a sitcom about race
Mermaids (novel)
a 1986 coming-of-age novel by American writer Patty Dann