Third Person Limited: A Books Podcast

It's the big one here: Sam Spade and The Maltese Falcon. With this classic, Hammett pushed himself and the boundaries of the hardboiled genre he'd already mastered to create a gem of a novel that still resonates today, nearly 100 years after its publication. The inimitable cast of stylized characters swim against an undercurrent of noir cynicism that finally defeats them all. Plus, a statue of a bird.
 
Works cited this episode:
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key, Dashiell Hammett
Reservoir Dogs, dir. Quentin Tarantino
The Maltese Falcon, dir. John Huston
Satan Met a Lady, dir. William Dieterle
The Black Bird, dir. David Giler
Return of the Maltese Falcon, 
Monsieur Spade, AMC networks
The Big Sleep, dir. Howard Hawks
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Da Vinci Code, dir. Ron Howard
"The Big Knockover," Dashiell Hammett
"$106,000 Blood Money," Dashiell Hammett
"This King Business," Dashiell Hammett

We welcomed legendary novelist and short story writer T.C. Boyle to the show, to discuss his latest novel, No Way Home. T.C. also shared some very depressing thoughts about environmental catastrophe, which he has chronicled extensively in his fiction, and some less depressing thoughts about his approach to the craft of writing. 
Then, Nathan explains why he doesn't like the Black Eyed Peas, but isn't mad about it, either. Maybe we should all aspire to such equanimity.
Works cited this episode:
Already Dead, Denis Johnson
A Friend of the Earth, T.C. Boyle
The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle
Blue Skies, T.C. Boyle
The Terranauts, T.C. Boyle
“After the Plague,” T.C. Boyle
October Light, John Gardner
“Let’s Get It Started,” The Black Eyed Peas
A Court of Thorn and Roses, Sarah J. Maas
The Sea, John Banville
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
 

 
We launch the Summer of Dashiell Hammett with our deep dive on the Continental Op, the unnamed private investigator who starred in 28 stories and two novels. The San Francisco-based Op delivered a hardboiled fist to the drawing rooms, tea parties, and other twee scenarios that constituted detective fiction before his advent, changing the face of the genre forever.
We also dug into Angel Down, the most recent Pulitzer winner for fiction, and found this story of a celestial being who is dragged through the muck of World War I’s trenches compelling in spite of the gimmick that Nate didn’t like.
Works cited this episode:
 
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
The Dain Curse, Dashiell Hammett
“This King Business,” Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
“The Tenth Clew,” Dashiell Hammett
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer
Angel Down, Daniel Kraus
Herscht 07769, László Krasznahorkai
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Angels in America, Tony Kushner
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
ttyl, Lauren Myracle
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Odyssey, Homer
O Brother Where Art Thou, dir. Ethan and Joel Coen

We were excited to have novelist and musician Willy Vlautin join us for a discussion about his career in both fields and his newest novel, The Left and the Lucky, which John Mulaney called “electric.” Willy covered his influences, why it was great to learn that some random lady hates him, and the interplay between his career as a songwriter and writer of fiction.
 
Then, what’s it like to read everything a single author wrote over just one summer? For us, of course, this means tackling crime fiction master Dashiell Hammett’s entire output. Hammett might not be on the New York Times’ “Best Summer Reads” list, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t curl up on a beach towel with his highly polished stories of violence, irony, and bootleg whiskey.
 
Works cited this episode:
 
Don’t Skip Out on Me, Willy Vlautin
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Joyce Carol Oates
The Night Always Comes, Willy Vlautin
Lean on Pete, Willy Vlautin
Northline, Willy Vlautin
A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
The Deverry Cycle, Katharine Kerr
The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells
Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan
The Sopranos, created by David Chase
The Millennium trilogy, Stieg Larsson
The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
iCarly, created by Dan Scheider
Executive Orders, Tom Clancy
Dombey and Sons, Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Jazz, Toni Morrison
Sula, Toni Morrison
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Spade and Archer, Joe Gores
The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum

We’re going to Hell with literary man-about-town Ed Simon, founder of the Pittsburgh Review of Books (with which our podcast is affiliated) and author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain. Ed helps us figure out why the legend of Faust still feels fresh in our world today, where nobody ever makes short-sighted deals that turn out badly in the end.
 
Then, we put Catcher in the Rye on trial. Does it deserve its vaunted position in the high school curriculum? And what do we want high schoolers reading, anyway, you big phony?
 
Ed Simon has several books out now.
 
Works cited this episode:
 
“Hypergraphia: On Prolific Writers and the Persistent Need to Produce,” Ed Simon, LitHub
“The New Fabio is Claude,” The New York Times
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe
“Bart Sells His Soul,” The Simpsons
Hellraiser, dir. Clive Barker
Morphology of the Folk Tale, Vladimir Propp
“The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” Charlie Daniels Band
“Theophilus,” The Book of Drama, Hrotsvitha
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy D. Snyder
“High School English and the Making of American Readers,” Alexander Manshel, American Literary History
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
“Texts Most Frequently Taught in U.S. Secondary Classrooms are Nearly Identical to List from Decades Ago,” National Council of Teachers of English
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crucible, Arthur Miller
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Night, Elie Wiesel
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
King Dork, Frank Portman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes
The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
1984, George Orwell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

Women everywhere have an indescribable urge to get up and go west. That would be weird if it was real; in the hands of Alice Martin, author of the novel Westward Women, it’s not only weird but an incredible conceit for a thoughtful work of literary fiction that’s among the best books we’ve read this year. We were lucky to get Alice as a guest.
This was followed by some deep thoughts about exposition in fiction, such as “what is it” and “is it for girls?” Turns out it’s for everyone, but there may be some expectations about how manly men writers don’t do much of it, because it’s not masculine to tell people what you’re thinking, I guess?
Westward Women is out now.
 
Works Cited this episode:
 
A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Caroline Kirkland
On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle
Bunny, Mona Awad
The Husbands, Holly Gramazio
Once and Again, Rebecca Serle
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison
Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
The Housemaid, Freida McFadden
Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
Legends of the Fall, dir. Edward Zwick

We had a great time with Nina McConigley, author of the new novel How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, which hits all the beats you want from a book where a character named Agatha Krishna says, “We blame the British.” Nina shared with us her thoughts on how colonialism divided not only countries but selves, and where characters (and real people) find themselves within those divides.
Then, how can you tell if a translated work is good when you don’t know the author’s language? Maybe the translator created something great that isn’t really true to the original version, or brought down a great work with their bad translation. (Note to translators: We think you are cool and the above scenario is purely hypothetical.)
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is available now.
 
Works cited this episode:
Angels in America, Tony Kushner
Cowboys and East Indians, Nina McConigley
Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto by Mark Polizzotti
The Odyssey, Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell
On the Soul (De Anima), Aristotle, translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

We were fortunate to have Jared Lemus, author of the story collection Guatemalan Rhapsody, join us to discuss masculinity and empathy in fiction. Jared recently won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut story collection, and he was also once Nate’s co-worker. (Which is also a noteworthy achievement.)
Plus, what if the author was peering over your shoulder while you read their book? They aren’t, but what if you intentionally imagined that they were, and it was up to you to figure out what they’re doing with their writing? This is all just hypothetical and not a real topic from our podcast.
Works cited this episode:
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, Nina McConigley
Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
Paradise Lost, John Milton
“The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes
“The Intentional Fallacy,” W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and M.C. Beardsley
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Beowulf

We’re excited to welcome filmmaker and author John Sayles to the show. John spoke with us about his most recent novel, Crucible, which focuses on the impact that an egocentric automobile magnate’s uninformed plans has on the economy and other populations. Sounds vaguely familiar. We also dove into John’s career, screenwriting vs. writing fiction, and what makes Pittsburgh so great.
 
Then, our intrepid hosts returned to a topic hinted at last time: how much overlap there is between the books the two of us have read? What a shocker: we both read Moby-Dick!
 
Crucible by John Sayles is out now
 
Works cited this episode:
 
A Moment in the Sun, John Sayles
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt, John Bellairs
Want, Lynn Steger Strong
Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Lisa Sunshine
Don’t Skip Out on Me, Willy Vlautin
The Killer is Dying, James Sallis
Pulp Fiction, dir. Quentin Tarantino
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

 
So your manuscript was rejected by another publisher. Will you revise your work to meet the shifting whims of the marketplace, or hold steady to your uncompromising vision, bragging all the while about the rejections you’ve accumulated like tumbleweeds tangled in a barbed wire fence? Meanwhile, we also wonder if one can ever truly read a book alone, or if the various social contexts are inextricable from that experience, like tumbleweeds tangled in a barbed wire fence.
 
 
Works cited this episode:
 
“Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with reframing rejection?” Brittany Allen, LitHub
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
“Host,” David Foster Wallace, The Atlantic
“In Defense of the Traditional Review,” Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Sundial, Catriona Ward
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
She’s Come Undone, Wally Lamb
I’m Losing You, Bruce Wagner
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
“The Couch,” Seinfeld, created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld
Beloved, Toni Morrison