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.

On the uncharacteristically consensus-driven seventh episode of a usually contentious new podcast, co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen linger on the bitter virtues and delicious vices of Martin Amis’s third novel Success. Topics discussed include brotherhood; decadence; incest; murder; suicide; the hatred of roommates; time and novelistic structure; the geography of London; yobs; toffs; doubles; inversions; sisters; exes; anatomy; day jobs; impotence; baldness; sexual despair; sexual fulfillment; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Kingsley Amis; Nabokov; Bellow; Roth; Rushdie; Ishiguro; McEwan; Hitchens; levels of darkness; nihilism; the imagination of interior spaces; lies; euphemisms; class hierarchies and their collapse; teeth and the price of fixing them; provinciality; Mid-Atlanticism; transitional novels; ambition; reputations, their deaths and rebirths; the revelation and concealment of character through voice; attraction and repulsion; prose styles quiet and loud; what it means to be tonto; and much more. Thank you for listening.

On this episode of a new ideologically idiosyncratic podcast, Maureen Tkacik of the American Prospectjoins co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen to discuss the life and crimes of the late Richard B. Cheney. Topics discussed include Joan Didion’s 2006 essay on Cheney and his status as her final and perhaps most sinister muse (beyond even Manson); the fleeting and febrile ‘innocence’ of America and its elected officials; 9/11; Al Qaeda; the Iraq War; lying; the Iran-Contra scandal; the problem with laws being their enactment and thus the inconvenience for high-ranking officials who must violate them; torture; surveillance; Cheney as hero of Benjamin Netanyahu; Stephen Miller as heir of Cheney; President Ford’s habit of kissing coed beauty contestants; the war on terror as model for the Trump administration’s domestic policy; plenary power; apprenticeship to power and the sublime fantasy of its limitlessness; fathers and daughters; Liz Cheney’s split from Trump after January 6; Mary Cheney’s Caribbean vacation at the time of 9/11; neoconservatives as chameleons in the slipstream between the Republican and Democratic parties; Bob Dole’s 93rd birthday lunch at the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland and one co-host’s failure to crash it; John McCain’s rescue of the Affordable Care Act as he was dying of brain cancer; former Ramparts editor David Horowitz and whether his offspring is a prominent venture capitalist; the twerpicide of Charlie Kirk; watching Candace Owens “for research”; Justice Antonin Scalia; the film Vice; the film Dick; Halliburton; the consensusphere; the shattering of the revolving door between governments and corporations; the Cheney/Lieberman debate; the Cheney/Edwards debate; William Kristol’s epic 2014 interview with Cheney; Kristol’s fondness for New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and the perception of any idealist as a mark to be converted to liberal imperialism; Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s avoidance of the taint of Watergate; their figurative assassination of Vice President of Nelson Rockefeller, aka the Halloween Massacre, and elevation of Dole to the 1976 Ford ticket; Grover Norquist; the whereabouts of guest and co-hosts during the attacks of September 11, 2001; what a good idea morally to invade Iraq via Christopher Hitchens; what a bad idea it was actually to invade Iraq via reality; Tkacik’s childhood in China; one co-host’s case for invading China and another’s sincere wish of “good luck with that”; and much more. Thank you for listening.

On a new episode of an intergenerational podcast, guest Sloane Crosley and co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen discuss the 1970 documentary ⁠Norman Mailer vs. Fun City, USA,⁠ about Mailer’s failed 1969 campaign for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, and tomorrow’s mayoral election. Topics discussed include: the co-hosts’ whereabouts and the origins of their names; the time Matt Damon met Prince and the time Sloane avoided meeting Matt Damon; a visit to a Brooklyn cheese shop with two movie stars; Meghan McCain’s literary collaboration with Michael Ian Black; NYRB singles meet-ups; Arthur Hammerstein; the alliance of Sloane’s grandmother with New York Mayor Ed Koch; Simon & Garfunkel’s 1980 concert in Central Park and all the joints smoked in the audience; Howard Hughes, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio; the nature of charisma; speaking in paragraphs vs. speaking in sentences; Norman Mailer’s dialectics; his notion of an experimental city where the entire population took LSD daily and whether after four years it would result in an epidemic of liver cancer; public housing towers of 50,000 units built of Legos; the visionary New York of Ghostbusters 2; Curtis Sliwa as cat person; Andrew Cuomo as dog person; Corinthian leather; socialism; fear; the city’s newspapers’ hostility to Zohran Mamdani; the unsuitability of members of Generation X for political leadership; the inevitability of Millennial political hegemony; the specter of a right-wing Zoomer anti-Mamdani in 2029, and much more. Thank you for listening.

In this episode of a new podcast, Vincenzo Barney, Clementine Ford, and Christian Lorentzen discuss the many films of the late actress Diane Keaton; her range and acting style; the lives of Louise Bryant and Jack Reed; the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, an occasion that prompts one co-host to red-bait another during a discussion of Reds; Annie Hall, missing Keaton; the never married Keaton’s mid-to-late career genius playing divorcees; the devastating greatness of Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon; the rage and charisma of Albert Finney; the potent use of classic rock (Rolling Stones, Eagles, Bob Seger) in that film; the in-flight movie options on the red-eye Norse Atlantic flights from JFK to Gatwick; The First Wives Club and its formative influence on one co-host; how to bond with your mother through cinema and home video; Nancy Meyers’s collaborations with Keaton from Baby Boom through Father of the Bride pictures to Something’s Gotta Give; comparison of Keaton to her castmates, peers, rivals, and heirs, including Teri Garr, Jill Clayburgh, Sissy Spacek, Lily Tomlin, Madeline Kahn, Meryl Streep, Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Diane Weist, Tilda Swinton, Cate Blachett, and Jennifer Lawrence; the never-released pilot of the canceled HBO series The Corrections, adapted by Noah Baumbach from the novel by Jonathan Franzen and starring Wiest instead of Keaton; one co-host’s impression of Keaton as Kay Corleone in the The Godfather Part II; the 2008 heist comedy Mad Money, starring Keaton, Katie Holmes, Queen Latifah, and Ted Danson, as yet unseen by any of the co-hosts; and much more. Thanks for listening. HOW TO THROW MONEY OUR WAY: Quality Lit Game now has membership options on both Patreon and Substack. We've been grateful and pleased by the response to the first two episodes. If you'd like to keep the episodes coming, please sign up at one of those locations. The three of us are all freelance writers with additional side hustles and every bit helps. Future episodes are in the works with fascinating literary, cinematic, and other intellectual topics, as well as illustrious and notorious guests. More soon.

On Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket, recent reviews of the novel, and the challenges of reviewing Pynchon. Plus, talk of Oprah's Book Club, Norman Mailer, Cormac McCarthy and more. Co-hosted by Christian Lorentzen, Clementine Ford, and Vincenzo Barney.