Burned By Books

Apr 14 2025 160 ep. 50 mins 84

Burned By Books Podcast artwork

A podcast for writers and readers who are obsessive about their books. Interviews with established and up-and-coming writers, and recommendations for the best in contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama. Chris Holmes. Chris is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Betsy Lerner, "Shred Sisters" (Grove Press, 2024)

Apr 14 2025 41 mins

It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explai

Colum McCann, "Twist" (Random House, 2025)

Apr 09 2025 51 mins

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth. Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where

Lauren Elkin, "Scaffolding" (FSG, 2024)

Apr 03 2025 58 mins

Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, ﬁnds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective. Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belle

Emma Pattee, "Tilt" (Marysue Rucci Books, 2025)

Mar 25 2025 48 mins

Set over the course of a single day, an electrifying debut novel from “a powerful new literary voice” (Vogue) following one woman’s journey across a transformed city, carrying the weight of her past and a fervent hope for the future. Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen. Annie is nine months pregna

Joseph Earl Thomas, "God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer" (Grand Central Publishing, 2024)

Mar 07 2025 49 mins

After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man

Nora Lange, "Us Fools" (Two Dollar Radio, 2024)

Feb 25 2025 51 mins

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to co

Cynthia Weiner, "A Gorgeous Excitement" (Crown, 2025)

Feb 20 2025 39 mins

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk o

Adam Ross, "Playworld: A Novel" (Knopf, 2025)

Feb 06 2025 72 mins

“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.” Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the press

Rufi Thorpe, "Margo's Got Money Troubles" (William Morrow, 2024)

Jan 29 2025 61 mins

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enoug

"Kazuo Ishiguro is Not Writing World Literature"

Jan 23 2025 54 mins

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who