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The Big Book Project
The Big Book Project is a multi-venue reading experience for bibliophiles fascinated by long or dense works of fiction and interested in discussing them with others, one novel at a time.
The works selected will be capacious novels from the mid-nineteenth century through today that possess an abundant writing style or complexity in structure and themes.
The notion that reading need not be a solitary activity has special resonance with these novels given that there is much to discuss, elaborate upon and question in the authors’ expression of ideas. I like to think of these novels as abundant because I appreciate their richness and volume, characteristics bestow a sort of grace to luxuriate with the text.
The critic and scholar Alexander Nehamas writes that when a work of art beckons, it is because we do not fully understand it but feel the strong desire to do so. And it is this deliberative process, the journey, of trying to understand why a novel is extraordinary that I want to explore with fellow readers at The Big Book Project.
We discuss books like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
The Big Book Project
Latest Episodes
The Latin American Tradition of Voracious Reader-Writers
Anxieties of Experience, with Professor Jeffrey LawrenceLori talks with scholar, translator, and novelist Professor Jeffrey Lawrence about his book Anxieties of Experience:The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bola...
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Anjet Daanje's The Song of Stork and Dromedary with translator David McKay
Translator David McKay returns to the show fifteen months after his last visit when we discussed Daanje's The Remembered Soldier, which would go on to win the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize. McKay's latest collaboration with Daan...
Sasha Sokolov's A School for Fools and Between Dog and Wolf, with Jose Vergara
https://substack.com/@thebigbookprojectLori is joined by Jose Vergara, Associate Professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College, for a deep dive on Sasha Sokolov, the great destabilizing stylist of Soviet literature and a true writer’s w...
Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer: Inner Lives Bursting With Color | The Big Book Project
https://substack.com/@thebigbookprojecthttps://www.instagram.com/thebigbookproject/Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer is a 700 page novel about a man who wakes in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact but no memory of who he is o...