Quality Lit Game

On a wholesome episode of a new podcast, co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen turn to Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel Pnin. Topics discussed include the theme of the holy fool; how to write about an innocent man when you’ve just written about a monster; etymology; living in a language other than the one you were born into; teaching a language you don’t know how to speak; genres; the campus novel; malapropisms; meanness; sweetness; cuteness; Upstate New York; John Updike; Edmund Wilson; Charlotte Bronte; Cervantes; the philosophy of gesture; bowls; bubblers; shadow-tails; soccer balls; bipolar disorder queens; Wilhelm Reich; the Kinsey Report; infidelity; unequal love; earth fathers; water fathers; how long novels should be; serialization; selling out; renting a room; parties; panic attacks; pyrographic screens; ophthalmology; cruelty; the Holocaust; zippers; the many manifestations of the squirrel; and much more. Thank you for listening.

On yet another episode of a new podcast given over to the dubious subject of controversial cinematic literary adaptations, co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen review the new film “Wuthering Heights” by Emerald Fennel and the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Topics discussed include camp; the gothic; the erotic; Catherine Earnshaw and Mr. Heathcliff; Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi; ribbons; The Kissing Booth; When Eight Bells Toll; Anthony Hopkins; amphibious spies; James Bond; Laurence Olivier; piracy; mysterious sources of wealth; earrings; sado-masochism; costumes; mansions; Charli XCX; dogs and their execution via hanging; public hangings of humans as a source of communal arousal; Jane Austen; the Lintons, Edgar and Isabella; the Grange; haunted houses; clanging radiators; whether "Wuthering Heights" is superior to Hamnet; and much more.

On the raucous tenth episode of a new podcast, n+1 film critic A.S. Hamrah joins co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen to talk about his new books Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing 2018-2024  and Last Week in End Times Cinema. Topics discussed include the beautifully lit movie screens of New York City; Amy Adams; Hillbilly Elegy; MTV girls; Amazon propaganda; aliens and their anatomy; giant baskets full of gourmet cheese; bribery and backlash; Trumpist cinema; Nocturnal Animals; Bidenist cinema and whether such a thing existed; Megalopolis; The Cotton Club; Apocalypse Now; The Godfather Part III; One From the Heart; Garden of Stone; Francis Ford Coppola; whether a film can also be admirable and “a failure”; Hollywood studio propaganda against auteurs and the trade magazines that publish it; Bond villains; Yaphet Kotto; Christopher Lee; James Stewart; biopics and their recent proliferation; farmhands of Lunenberg, Massachusetts, and their taste in movies; whether popularity indicates quality or the opposite; the effects of time on films’ reputations; Sinners; One Battle after Another; Hamnet; the Paris Theater; Noah Baumbach; Whit Stillman; Martin Scorsese; Chloé Zhao; David Fincher; the effects of location on the film-going experience; Christopher Nolan; setting The Odyssey in the Greater Boston Area; Quentin Tarantino; Gaza; the IDF; good and evil; revenge; whether in the future corporate publishers will publish literature and Hollywood studios will make movies; and much more. Thank you for listening.

On a woodsy episode of a new podcast, co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen review Train Dreams, a film by Clint Bentley adapted from the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson. Topics discussed include: modernity; time; fire; murder; subtext; Terrence Malick; The Big Lebowski; lumberjacks; logging; timber; the superiority of the theatrical cinematic experience when it comes to films largely consisting of majestic shots of forests; bridge construction; locomotives; hybrids of humans and wolves; whether a dog can shoot a human with a gun; Cormac McCarthy; stylistic dilution; Jesus’ Son; Isaac Babel; clouds; highways; Joel Edgerton; Felicity Jones; Hollywood’s strange reliance on British and Australian actors for the portrayal of old-timey Americans; cosmic retribution; deforestation; William H. Macy; racial violence as America’s original sin; hummingbirds; hillsides; television; the happiness of lying in the grass with your spouse after a long day’s work; and much more. Thank you for listening.

On the contentious eighth episode of a new podcast, co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen review Hamnet, the new film by Chloe Zhao, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name. Topics discussed include lead actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley; one co-host’s fondness for the movie, especially its first half; the two other co-hosts’ utter loathing of the film; the use of Shakespeare; screaming; trees; womblike hollows; open weeping in movie theaters; twins; communication of the bubonic plague; maternal powers of resuscitation; kitsch; Shakespeare in Love; Joseph Fiennes; the late Sir Tom Stoppard; shot composition; Romeo and Juliet; historical fiction and historical accuracy; triteness; trauma; Normal People; male bulk and its sex appeal or lack thereof; whether Shakespeare had an eight-pack; Orpheus and Eurydice; child actors; head size; Stephen Greenblatt’s 2004 article “Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet” in the New York Review of Books; James Shapiro’s 2025 article “The Long History of the Hamnet Myth” in the Atlantic; sword fighting; Steven Spielberg; the Hallmark Channel; parents busy with their careers when their children die; adultery vs. child death as autofictional theatrical inspiration; the Sonnets of Shakespeare; the conjugation of Latin verbs; apples; calyxes; and much more. Thank you for listening. 

Correction: At one point a co-host states that Maggie O’Farrell’s novel won the National Book Critics’ Circle Prize for fiction in 2021; it was merely a finalist. We regret the error.