In today’s episode, Anna-Lena Schmidt, Jonathan Möck, and Vanessa Wohlfeil try to come to terms with Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel A Separation. We talk about tourism, class conflicts, and unreliable narration.

In A Separation, we follow a female translator to Greece where she is to find her husband from whom she is attempting to get a divorce. This plot about a failed marriage turns into a mystery thriller, as the husband turns up dead in rural Greece, the predominant setting of the novel. But rather than being a clichéd crime novel, what follows is a mediation marriage, infidelity, loss, and mourning.

Kitamura’s third novel received enthusiastic blurbs from fellow writers, such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Kushner, Jenny Offill, and Rivka Galchen. Her writing echoes the talents of Han Kang, Hiroko Oyamada, and Claire Messud. Her latest novel, Intimacies, was featured on a list of book recommendations by Barack Obama for the summer of 2021. music & sounds by: Axl Rhodes, listen to "Netrunner" in full!

find the LITHUB article here: https://lithub.com/katie-kitamura-on-subverting-tropes-in-a-separation/

In today's episode, Tim Albers, Johanna Manz, and Marcel Hartwig discuss Catherine Lacey's sophomore novel The Answers (2017). The novel introduces us to Mary Parsons whose real name is Junia Stone. She has chronic physical pains and takes up a special holistic treatment that adds tremendously to the already existing financial burden of her life. In order to cope with her rising debts she responds to an ad and is hired as “Emotional Girlfriend” in a Girlfriend Experiment. The purpose of the latter is to decipher the neurobiological mysteries of a successful love relationship. In this experiment, the work of the relationship is split up, every woman hired for a different emotional performance is reduced to a role and love’s work becomes a scripted set of data. Our conversation about The Answers explores the narrative form and the themes of Lacey's book. Together we ponder the merits of the novel’s Girlfriend Experiment.

music & sounds by: Axl Rhodes, listen to "Netrunner" in full!

In today's episode, Tabea Herman, Vanessa Wohlfeil, and Marcel Hartwig discuss Alexandra Kleeman's debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015). The novel takes us into the unnamed suburban world of A where her flatmate B is trying to become more and more like her, while she finds herself gradually withdrawing from her TV-obsessed boyfriend C. The choice of names already hints at the novel’s deep dive into postmodern prose. Today's conversation will cover Kleeman's prose style, aspects of body horror, and late capitalist consumer culture.

music & sounds by: Axl Rhodes, listen to "Netrunner" in full!

Find the referenced NYT-article, "Alexandra Kleeman Finds Reality All Too Surreal" by Lauren Christensen, here