125: Helen Phillips (THE NEED) and Samanta Schweblin's FEVER DREAM

In This Episode:

Helen Phillips jumps right into the surreal and strange place that is the Damn Library. She's well used to it, since she's the person who wrote The Need, which we all talk about, and its depiction of motherhood, and the weird, and many other vague details that we dance around since we really don't want to spoil anything. We also talk about Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, which has no baseline of normalcy, and maybe the original title in Spanish makes more sense for it. Get into it.

The Ep. 125 Bookshelf

THIS EPISODE'S BOOKS:

The Need by Helen Phillips
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, trans. by Megan McDowell

WHAT'D YOU BUY?:

Drew: The Cactus League by Emily Nemens
Helen: Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Christopher: Baby by Annaleese Jochems

ALSO MENTIONED:

The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips
Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips
One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box by Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso, and Dave Eggers
the works of Jeff VanderMeer
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Ongoingness by Sarah Manguso
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
”How to Unlearn Everything” by Alexander Chee (The Cut, 10/30/2019)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Host (2006)

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Helen: The Agnes Martin gallery at the Harwood Museum in Taos, NM // Brian Eno’s Music for Airports series
Drew: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino // Parasite (2019)
Christopher: Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth

The Damn Bar