how to win the lottery: a book club p...

a book club, like oprah’s if oprah were two suburban guys from new jersey, or reese witherspoon’s if reese were two suburban guys from new jersey, except without the engine of fame that those two huge stars provide. but come on: oprah is not going to answer your emails. (trust us, we know.) every two weeks, a new book microscoped and surgeried by benevolent despot joey lewandowski and disgraced college professor "shreds"... with your help! here's a guarantee: every episode ends with an arrestable crime. will it be something boring like credit card fraud or something sexy like a casino heist? listen to find out.

Books
Fiction
Hobbies
1
300,000,000 by blake butler
"the best thing about planning to kill everybody in america is you can begin with anybody in america."
55 min
2
season twelve theme and reading list
publishers weekly has called him "an endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer."
12 min
3
blood meridian by cormac mccarthy
"this is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. seen so, war is the truest form of divination. it is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. war is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. war is god."
52 min
4
moby dick by herman melville
"small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. the white whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung."
62 min
5
season eleven theme and reading list
we once again prove we're the world's most patriotic podcast.
11 min
6
flee by evan dara
"i go for a walk around downtown and: steinbach, closed, kitchen etc., closed. of course, abernathy's, closed! and you know i want, i really want not to just click on amazon, but what can...? because like amazon's nowhere so they can be anywhere, and sure that's handy but what i want, what i'm missing is what -- here-ness, ok?, herity. damn, there isn't even a word for it, not a one that gets close, it must be important... but that's it, you know; the grace of the heart that comes from something being here, just, right, here. where you can maybe drag a finger across it. see it in a window reflection. not when i want it, not when i need it, but enduring, earth-solid, a part of—"
38 min
7
radio free vermont by bill mckibben
"the gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills."
40 min
8
the shame by makenna goodman
"the solitude of vermont was weighing on me; the community was mythological; in reality life was isolating, each household its own entity."
35 min
9
season ten theme and reading list
suck shit, sufjan stevens. (#4)
11 min
10
drive your plow over the bones of the dead by o...
"the winter starts straight after all saints’ day. that’s the way here; the autumn takes away all her tools and toys, shakes off the leaves—they won’t be needed anymore—sweeps them under the field boundary, and strips the colors from the grass until it goes dull and gray. then everything becomes black against white: snow falls on the plowed fields."
47 min
11
stephen markley interview (author of the deluge)
we talk to stephen markley, author of the deluge, about prescience, cynicism vs. optimism, and mutual friends.
48 min
12
the deluge by stephen markley
[warning: this news xpere is intended to be consumed with 3d asmr fractal visuals and a soothing binaural soundscape. without these elements, some users may find this content disturbing.]
74 min
13
the man with the compound eyes by wu ming-yi
"i said that’s not what my father taught me. my father said there were two things in this world that would never change: the mountains and the sea."
42 min
14
jeff wood interview (author of the glacier)
we talk to jeff wood, author of the glacier, about ohio literature, two dollar radio, and david lynch's twin peaks part 8.
65 min
15
the glacier by jeff wood
"houses destroy and rebuild themselves in a repeating cycle of self-annihilation and regeneration. the neighborhood crumbles and reconstructs in a looping circuit of collapse and assembly, over and over and over again—"
40 min
16
square wave by mark da silva
"a churning violet cylinder of smoke, a thousand feet tall and growing with no compromise to its proportions, rose off forty smoldering broadleaf acres on a windless morning on the indian plateaus. the second millennium had seventy days left to it."
49 min
17
fever dream by samanta schweblin
"those are stories my mother tells. neither you nor i have time for this. we’re looking for worms, something very much like worms, and the exact moment when they touch your body for the first time."
31 min
18
deb olin unferth interview (author of barn 8)
we talk to deb olin unferth, author of barn 8, about heist stories, teaching literature, and chickens.
62 min
19
barn 8 by deb olin unferth
"barn 8 was the first thing to truly go wrong. later everyone would say so. the mistake of barn 8 would endure. barn 8 would go down as the colossal error that ensured the defeat of the greatest animal heist in recorded history."
38 min
20
something new under the sun by alexandra kleeman
"terrible, definitely. but it’s not really an emergency, he thinks, putting on his signal and shifting into the fast lane, if you can drive around it. an emergency would be everywhere you looked, inescapable; some long-submerged animal intelligence would recognize it with fierce instinct. in an emergency, the mind would not drift aimlessly from daydream to distraction as his did now, in search of something to grasp."
58 min
21
the overstory by richard powers
"sounds come up and out of nick’s mouth, syllables that mean, loosely, oh, my hopeless jesus. he has seen monster trees for weeks, but never one like this. mimas: wider across than his great-great-great-grandfather’s old farmhouse. here, as sundown blankets them, the feel is primeval, darshan, a face-to-face intro to divinity. the tree runs straight up like a chimney butte and neglects to stop. from underneath, it could be yggdrasil, the world tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world above. twenty-five feet aboveground, a secondary trunk springs out of the expanse of flank, a branch bigger than the hoel chestnut. two more trunks flare out higher up the main shaft. the whole ensemble looks like some exercise in cladistics, the evolutionary tree of life—one great idea splintering into whole new family branches, high up in the run of long time."
58 min
22
land of milk and honey by c. pam zhang
"on sunday we slathered brioche with cultured butter, dolloped crème fraîche on daubes, and spooned a pudding of aida’s creation. the interior was so creamy it recalled the molten center of the earth. if the land of milk and honey produced no further milk, this meal proclaimed, then we would sup of the last like kings and queens."
47 min
23
season nine theme and reading list
we're thinking local, reading global.
21 min
24
first blood by david morrell
"his name was rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of madison, kentucky."
56 min
25
david connerley nahm interview (author of ancie...
we talk to david connerley nahm, author of ancient oceans of central kentucky, about "delicate" horror, the editing process, and ernest p. worrell.
53 min