Grand Podcast Abyss

Grand Podcast Abyss
  • 4.8 (16)
  • Books
  • Updated Semiweekly

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

  1. 5d ago

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Gabriel García Márquez’s monumental novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. We discuss the novel’s artistic and historical significance, the nature and legacy of magical realism, and the author’s own life and controversial political involvements. Then we investigate the novel’s intensely intricate plot, its themes of time (circular or linear), the limits of politics, and the meaning of incest, its movement among wildly divergent genres (epic, tragedy, utopia, family saga, shaggy-dog joke), its significance as a microcosm of the Latin American and Caribbean experience as metaphors for the human condition, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

  2. Jul 31

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H.

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 30 minutes are free, is about Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. I begin first with my checkered personal experience with Lispector’s writing, then the three phases of her reputation among Anglophone readers, and finally her biography. Then I embark on an explication of the novel, which I interpret as no less than an attempt to create a new religion, a new ritual, and a new gospel in the middle of the 20th century, a fusion of heaven and hell, matter and spirit, good and evil, like none seen before, equal parts disturbing and profound. Several ongoing themes of The Invisible College gather to their shattering climax here. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H.

  3. Jul 24

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Anne Carson’s classic novel in verse Autobiography of Red. We discuss Carson’s evolving reputation from avant-garde to popular writer, her renegade classicists’ theorization of love, poetry, and the novel in her early treatise Eros the Bittersweet, and her narrative of a gay male artist’s romantic coming of age amid poetic language’s attempt to set being free in Autobiography of Red. Along the way, we query the political in Carson’s work, translator Emily Wilson’s recent critique of Carson, the meaning of cross-gendered gay romances written by straight authors, the potential of the verse novel as a genre, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

  4. Jul 17

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel and Geography III

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. First we consider Bishop as “poets’ poets’ poet” (John Ashbery) vs. “almost a novelist” (John Hollander) in her perfectionism, variety, humor, restraint, and outward-focus, and compare her to contemporaries like her friend Robert Lowell. Then we map her biography according to the places she lived: Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Key West, Brazil, and more. Then we survey her poems of Brazil, with their suspended identification between native and colonizer, and their potential for visionary initiation; her prose piece “In the Village” recalling her childhood in Nova Scotia caught between her mother’s formless scream and the blacksmith’s form-giving art; her poem “Sandpiper” and its tribute to or quarrel with William Blake; the multiple identifications inspired by her recounted childhood experience “In the Waiting Room”; her wry self-portraits as a retired “Crusoe in England” and object of colonial surveillance in “Twelve O’Clock News”; and finally the ultimate synthesis of formal constraint and formless passion in the villanelle “One Art.” Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel and Geography III

  5. Jul 10

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Susan Sontag's In America

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Susan Sontag’s In America. Most of the episode concerns the aesthetic, political, and personal peregrinations of Sontag’s “exemplary” 20th-century life: her changing beliefs about American culture and American power and her move from radicalism to liberalism; her concomitant abandonment of aesthetic extremism in favor of a more measured novelistic humanism; her thoughts about the conflict between the intellectual and the artist, the essay and the novelist; and more. Then we measure her final novel, In America, against these ideas and against her own high ambitions. Whether you’ve read In America or not, this episode should serve as a thorough and entertaining introduction to the one of the 20th century’s most important and influential authors. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall; I have also included, as a bonus, the slideshow for my earlier lecture on Sontag as mentioned in the episode:

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Susan Sontag's In America

  6. Jul 3

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Gore Vidal's Burr

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is about Gore Vidal’s revisionist historical novel of the American founding, Burr. Aesthetically, we consider Vidal as icon and iconoclastic literary dissident, his alienation from the Romantic aesthetics of the traditional American novel, the limits of historical fiction as a genre, and Burr’s status as a neo-18th-century novel. Politically, we discuss Vidal’s ambivalence about the United States as a polity, his debunking presentation of historical figures like Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson, and his ambiguous relation to questions of democracy, immigration, class, and the state. Finally and philosophically, we link Burr, for all that it is ostensibly a middlebrow historical novel, to the sexual antinomianism or queer nihilism of Vidal’s more vanguardist fictional efforts like The City and the Pillar and Myra Breckinridge. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Gore Vidal's Burr

  7. Jun 26

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Marcel Proust's Within a Budding Grove

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. (The Invisible College covered the first volume, Swann’s Way, in an episode last year.) We consider Proust’s complex reflections on art and artistic genius, his ambivalent portrayal of Jewish and queer characters as outsiders akin to the artist, his ironic survey of the meeting between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, his aesthete’s skepticism about both friendship and sexual desire as against art, his discomfiting tribute to the eros of adolescence, his gentle oscillation between demystifying and mythifying aesthetic modes, and much more. Please like, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Marcel Proust's Within a Budding Grove

  8. Jun 12

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Émile Zola's Nana

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Émile Zola’s Nana. We first discuss Zola’s life and influence on the French model of the activist writer-intellectual as well as his naturalism and scientific theory of the “experimental” novel. Then we test these ideas against his classic novel of an actress-courtesan’s rise in the corrupt society of Second Empire France, a novel aesthetically and politically divided between its naturalist commitment to showing the determinations of heredity and milieu, on the one hand, and, on the other, its conspicuous myth-making of the modern woman as world-devourer. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

    THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Émile Zola's Nana
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4.8
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About

literature & culture grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Grand Podcast Abyss
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    136
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Grand Hotel Abyss
  • Show Website
    Grand Podcast Abyss

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