Severance Radio: A Nevada Reads Book Club Black Mountain Radio & Nevada Humanities

Severance Radio is an on-air book club dissecting Ling Ma’s satirical, dystopian novel Severance. The novel is a moving family story that explores loneliness, corporate monotony, and survival in the midst of a global health crisis.

For 14 weeks, Severance Radio will dissect a single book: Severance, the satirical, dystopian novel by Ling Ma. This book is a mixture of immigrant family story, corporate satire, and global health crisis. In this episode, producers Stephanie Gibson, Kathleen Kuo, and Sara Ortiz discuss how Severance Radio came to be, and how we relate to each other during a pandemic.

In this episode, two scholars of English literature, Katherine Fusco and Stephen Pasqualina, investigate one of the most unsettling signs of the apocalypse in popular culture: the rise of the undead.

In this episode, Severance Radio host Heidi Kyser interviews two public health experts, Jennifer Carson and Marya Shegog, as they examine who is most vulnerable in a pandemic.

In this episode, two scholars Tim Gauthier and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan delve into the Us/Them paradigm that reveals itself throughout the story. How do we decide who is human, and who is not? What are the dangers of Othering in times of crisis?

In this episode, a long-time Las Vegas community partner Dana Lee and experimental writer Vi Khi Nao discuss how a pandemic brings out familiar–and unsettling–ways of talking about race.