Episode 643 - Kate Maruyama
The Virtual Memories Show
One of my fave guest/friends, , rejoins the show to celebrate her wonderful new novel, (Running Wild Press)! We talk about the book's long gestation/publishing history, Kate's love of old Hollywood & costume design, closeted movie stars and how she told the story of a gay relationship in the '30s & '40s, and how it felt to write a non-horror horror story. We get into her own Hollywood experience in the '90s, how it informs Alterations, and how it felt to repeatedly smash into the glass ceiling, as well as how ghosts creep into everything she writes, how older people become invisible...
info_outline
Episode 642 - David Denby
The Virtual Memories Show
With his fantastic new book, (Holt), writer and critic explores the impact on American culture of Jews Unbound through profiles of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. We talk about how he selected his four subjects, how each of them came of age in an environment that Jews hadn't experienced in millennia, the ways each handled the responsibilities of family against their careers, the difference between "Jew" and "Jewish," and which one unfolded the most to him over the course of writing the book. We get into why Bernstein's greatest role may have been as a...
info_outline
Episode 641 - Peter Stothard
The Virtual Memories Show
Can we find the poet in their poems? With (Yale University Press), explores how the life of the great Roman poet unfolds though his art and the histories. We talk about why he wrote this biography through a critical study of Horace's poems (and why that's been a controversial approach), how Horace embodied the artist-as-madman long before the Romantic era, and why it was important to show the alienness of Horace's verse and how nervous Peter was about translating him into English to show how the Latin works. We get into Horace's place in Rome's history, how he bridged Greek poetic modes into...
info_outline
Episode 640 - Cecile Wajsbrot
The Virtual Memories Show
With her bewitching and beautiful novel (Seagull Books, translated from French by , who joins our conversation), takes us on a tour of Chenobyl's Forbidden Zone, the High Line in NYC, Dresden, Paris, under the shadow of the Time Passes section of Virginia Woolf's . We talk about the challenges of writing a first-person novel about translation, the strange ways Woolf has followed Cecile throughout her careers as author & translator, and how it felt to see her novel about translating Virginia Woolf into French get translated into English. We get into her literary career, how Time...
info_outline
Episode 639 - Keiler Roberts
The Virtual Memories Show
She may be able to quit cartooning (for a while), but can't quit The Virtual Memories Show! With her wonderful new book, (Drawn & Quarterly), Keiler returns to comics with a collection of (mostly) hilarious vignettes about domestic life, middle-age, the impact of multiple sclerosis, and having too many pets. We talk about why she walked away from comics and how she came back, how she avoids memoir in favor of memory (and humor), how she still has anxiety over drawing but is way too tired to have social anxiety anymore, and why she branched into kitschy craft-modes that no one would...
info_outline
Episode 638 - Peter Kuper
The Virtual Memories Show
With his new graphic novel, (WWNorton), brings us the 400-million-year history of insects in their own words as they take a post-human tour of the New York Public Library. We talk about how Insectopolis began when he was around 4 years old and saw the 17-year cicada brood, how Peter needed a new mode of comics-making for this book, and how he made the NYPL a key character in the project. We get into mankind's dependence on insects, the stories of forgotten entomologists (and why they were forgotten), his experience getting a at the NYPL during COVID and how he found all the great &...
info_outline
Episode 637 - Vauhini Vara
The Virtual Memories Show
With (Pantheon), tech writer explores how our sense of self has been co-opted, quantified, and exploited by big tech as a way of selling us more stuff or selling us to third parties. We talk about what we talk about when we talk about our Google searches (& Amazon purchases, Twitter subject preferences, etc.), the interface of exploitation and self-expression, what selfhood means to tech companies vs. what it means to us, and what she learned when she fed chapters of her book into ChatGPT. We get into agency vs. coercion, how the promise of tech so often gets inverted, how ChatGPT tried...
info_outline
Episode 636 - Craig Thompson
The Virtual Memories Show
Artist joins the show at long last to celebrate his new book, (Pantheon). We talk about how he spent ten summers of his childhood helping farm ginseng, how that herb connects rural Wisconsin with China and South Korea, how he balanced history, journalism, economics, and memoir in the pages of his book, and why he chose to make Ginseng Roots as a serial comic rather than a standalone book and how that affected his creative process. We get into how the book serves as a sort of midlife revision of his breakthrough book, , how the last chapter of the book had to happen in near-real-time, how a...
info_outline
Episode 635 - Ari Richter
The Virtual Memories Show
Artist, professor and now like-it-or-not cartoonist joins the show to talk about his fantastic book, (Fantagraphics). We talk about how he he began this project in the wake of the Tree of Life massacre in 2018, how it helped him exorcise the demons of his imagination after a lifetime of hearing his family's stories about the Holocaust, and how the book centered around intergenerational trauma and collaboration. We get into how he incorporated his grandfathers' holocaust memoirs into the book, why he found different styles for each section of the book, what he had to learn about comics...
info_outline
Episode 634 - Dan Nadel
The Virtual Memories Show
Author and curator Dan Nadel joins the show to celebrate the publication of his amazing new biography, (Scribner). We get into Robert Crumb's significance in American art, comics, and culture, Dan's first experience with a Crumb comic (it was an ish of ), the challenge of capturing the underground comics scene of the '60s & '70s, and what it took for him to get over the "R. Crumb" persona and realize how integrated Robert's personality is. We talk about Crumb's role as nexus in the history of comics, the book's focus on Crumb's drawing and how different tools opened him up artistically,...
info_outlineOne of my fave guest/friends, Kate Maruyama, rejoins the show to celebrate her wonderful new novel, ALTERATIONS (Running Wild Press)! We talk about the book's long gestation/publishing history, Kate's love of old Hollywood & costume design, closeted movie stars and how she told the story of a gay relationship in the '30s & '40s, and how it felt to write a non-horror horror story. We get into her own Hollywood experience in the '90s, how it informs Alterations, and how it felt to repeatedly smash into the glass ceiling, as well as how ghosts creep into everything she writes, how older people become invisible but have stories to tell, and how important it was to have a champion in Toni Ann Johnson for this novel. We also discuss present-moment Los Angeles, the craft book about novella-writing she's co-writing, the need to decolonize her writing students, the (maybe non-existent) influence of Jodie Foster's Home For The Holidays on Alterations, the essay she wrote around the decline & death of her mother, Kit Reed, and more. Follow Kate on Bluesky and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter