67 episodes

Hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols choose one book for each year of the twentieth century (Nella Larsen's Passing, 1936, Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, 1966; Mohandas Gandhi's Indian Home Rule, 1909) and talk about it in its historical and literary context. Join the hosts and their special guests to find out what the 20th century was all about.

Lit Century Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols

    • Arts
    • 4.6 • 28 Ratings

Hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols choose one book for each year of the twentieth century (Nella Larsen's Passing, 1936, Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, 1966; Mohandas Gandhi's Indian Home Rule, 1909) and talk about it in its historical and literary context. Join the hosts and their special guests to find out what the 20th century was all about.

    The Bell

    The Bell

    Na Zhong and Catherine Nichols discuss Iris Murdoch's 1958 novel The Bell. They discuss Murdoch's characters and the unique ethical quandaries of the book, as well as Murdoch's love of swimming and the size of the bell itself.


    A native of Chengdu, China, Na Zhong is a fiction writer who now calls
    New York her home. Her work has been recognized by organizations such as
    MacDowell and the Center for Fiction. Additionally, she serves as a
    columnist at China Books Review and is the co-founder of Accent Society.
    She has finished her first novel.
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    • 1 hr 5 min
    The Swimmer and The Waltz

    The Swimmer and The Waltz

    Host Catherine Nichols and author Christine Coulson (One Woman Show, 2023) discuss The Swimmer by John Cheever and The Waltz by Dorothy Parker. Their conversation covers the humor and surrealism of both stories, the precise artistry of both authors' prose, as well as the social context of Cheever's suburbia, Parker's freedom and the constraints that both stories show in mid-20th century America.

    Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and left the Museum as Senior Writer in 2019. Her debut novel, Metropolitan Stories, was a national bestseller and is followed by One Woman Show.
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    • 1 hr 26 min
    My Soul in Exile

    My Soul in Exile

    In this episode, host Catherine Nichols and writer Sally Foreman discuss Zabel Yesayan's enigmatic 1922 novel My Soul in Exile. Yesayan wrote the book after reporting on the genocide of her own Armenian people, shortly before before becoming a Communist. The book is counterintuitively joyful, as Yesayan describes a life in the arts both as a form of exile and a form of homecoming.
    Sally Foreman is an English writer and researcher living in Jerusalem.
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    • 1 hr 3 min
    The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

    The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

    Elisa Gabbert and Michael Joseph Walsh join Catherine Nichols to discuss Rainer Maria Rilke's 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. They talk about the ways the book echoes the life and mind of its author--and how it doesn't, as well as the details of the text: the eeriness of hands and masks, the differences between childhood and adult consciousness, and the appeal of encountering horrors on purpose. Since the book has been translated from the German many times, they compare several translations.
    Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times. Her next collection of nonfiction, Any Person Is the Only Self, will be out in 2023 from FSG.
    Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet and translator. He is the author of Innocence (CSU Poetry Center, 2022) and co-editor of APARTMENT Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Guernica, FOLDER, Fence, jubilat, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver.
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    • 1 hr 11 min
    Songs for Drella

    Songs for Drella

    Writer and musician Leeore Schnairsohn and host Catherine Nichols discuss Songs for Drella, the album Lou Reed and John Cale released in 1990 about their friend, mentor and manager Andy Warhol. They talk about the intimacy of artists' imitation of their friends voices, the paradox of Warhol's art, and where the album fits in both Reed's and Cale's career.

    Leeore Schnairsohn’s fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Painted Bride Quarterly, the Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Review, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, with a dissertation on Osip Mandelstam, and teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. A link to Leeore's conversation on Songs for Drella from his Camper Can Calethoven podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-5478ir3ac
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    • 1 hr 11 min
    The Death of the Heart

    The Death of the Heart

    Author Lucy Ferriss and host Catherine Nichols discuss Elizabeth Bowen's 1938 novel The Death of the Heart. They discuss the unique narrator—16-year-old Portia, almost unimaginably innocent and stubborn about refusing to learn the hard lessons of life—and whether her demands are reasonable within the world of the book, or the actual world.

    Lucy Ferriss is the author of eleven books, including her latest collection, Foreign Climes: Stories, which received the Brighthorse Books Prize; and the 2022 re-release of her novel, The Misconceiver. Other recent work includes the 2015 novel A Sister to Honor, as well as essays and short fiction in American Scholar, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Forthcoming in 2023 is a book of essays from Wandering Aengus Press, Meditations on a New Century, as well as Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, a monograph in Ig Publishing’s Bookmarked series. She is Writer in Residence Emerita at Trinity College.
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    • 1 hr 4 min

Customer Reviews

4.6 out of 5
28 Ratings

28 Ratings

Annawan42 ,

Lit Century

I love to read and often have trouble finding a friend to discuss them with. Lit Century gives me insight I don’t have and makes reading for me so rich.
Thank you - pls keep this up!

Edgar the picky ,

Interesting but……

Good content, but bad sound

allthegardens ,

Seriously so good

Informed, thoughtful, accessible, articulate, and stimulating!!! That’s how I would describe the episode on “What is it like to be a bat?”, and I’m definitely going to be listening to the rest of the episodes. I’ve read Catherine Nichols’ articles in the past and they are wonderful and muscular. In my insomnia I have also been pondering the question of why materialism is perhaps the philosophy of power now like Nichols proposes and my own theory is that as capital became ascendant and labor weak, it co opted that sexy sexy “this is the sad , real state of the world so let’s rise up!” into “this is the sad, real state of the world and you can’t change it, chump!” seeing as it was an easy and strong argument to make in the absence of an opponent really. They kind of won and are happy to crow about that lived world. And I think it remains persuasive to the layperson. Big government having only possibly emerged again after 50 or so years. Anyways if that even makes sense this is just conjecture and I am no expert, just an avid reader. Thanks for the great listen, and you’ve got a fan in me!

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