90 episodes
Good Scribes Only Daniel Breyer, Jeremy Streich
-
- Arts
Good Scribes Only is a podcast featuring a novelist + venture investor (Daniel Breyer) and a novelist + founder (Jeremy Streich), who share an enthusiasm for literature. From classics to sci-fi, moderns to ancient philosophy, your hosts will ramble and banter about it all—particularly the topics they have no business discussing.
Each episode dives into the craft of writing as well as questions of plot, character, theme, and philosophy in a work.
-
#88 🤨 Mad Men, Succession, Anti-heroes, and Complex Characters
About The Week's Book:
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.
About The Author:
Eowyn Ivey's first novel, The Snow Child, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and an international bestseller. To the Bright Edge of the World was a Library Journal Top Ten Book of the Year, a BookPage Best Book of the year, and a Washington Post Notable Book. Eowyn was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters.
About The Podcast:
About The Show:
Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 6, we’re traveling through 2010-2024, year by year, because Dan couldn't remember what the world was like before ChatGPT. -
#87 ⛄️ Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (2012)
About The Book:
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.
About The Author:
Eowyn Ivey's first novel, The Snow Child, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and an international bestseller. To the Bright Edge of the World was a Library Journal Top Ten Book of the Year, a BookPage Best Book of the year, and a Washington Post Notable Book. Eowyn was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters.
About The Podcast:
About The Show:
Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 6, we’re traveling through 2010-2024, year by year, because Dan couldn't remember what the world was like before ChatGPT.
Website
TikTok
Instagram
YouTube
Newsletter
Jeremy's Website
Dan's Website
Website
TikTok
Instagram
YouTube
Newsletter
Jeremy's Website
Dan's Website -
#86 🥱 Could Boredom Be the Spice of Life?!
About the Book:
The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.
About The Author:
David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live." Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness.
About The Show:
Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 6, we’re traveling through 2010-2024, year by year, because Dan couldn't remember what the world was like before ChatGPT. -
#85 🧾 The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (2011)
About the Book:
The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.
About The Author:
David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it." He wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live." Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness.
About The Show:
Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 6, we’re traveling through 2010-2024, year by year, because Dan couldn't remember what the world was like before ChatGPT. -
#84 🎬 American Fiction, Dark comedies, and Love on a Leash
Episode Summary
About the Book
Goodreads Summarizes A Visit from the Goon Squad as: a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.
About the Author:
Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize, and was named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine, and she recently completed a term as President of PEN America. Her new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in April, 2022, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022, as well as one of President Obama’s favorite reads of 2022
About the Show:
Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 6, we’re traveling through 2010-2024, year by year, because Dan couldn't remember what the world was like before ChatGPT. -
#83 👨🎤 A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
About the Book
Goodreads Summarizes A Visit from the Goon Squad as: a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.
About the Author:
Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize, and was named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine, and she recently completed a term as President of PEN America. Her new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in April, 2022, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022, as well as one of President Obama’s favorite reads of 2022
About the Show:
Good Scribes Only is a podcast for curious minds to explore, challenge, and think differently through books. In Season 6, we’re traveling through 2010-2024, year by year, because Dan couldn't remember what the world was like before ChatGPT.