Grand Podcast Abyss

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. (See our earlier Woolf episode on To the Lighthouse here.) We consider the novel as media object, mock biography, literary parody, erotic invitation, and more, a history of English literature doubling as a family history tripling as a poet’s biography, one of Woolf’s most audacious experiments. We further trace the politics of this novel of gender transition and gender fluidity across questions of identity and sexuality, race and class, the power of culture and the transmission of property. Above all, we join in Woolf’s celebration of literature’s transformative power. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about E. M. Forster’s classic novel Howards End. We discuss the perennial question of Forster’s stature within modernism—minor or major novelist?—and defend Howards End as the 20th-century answer to Pride and Prejudice. We discuss the author’s sexuality and politics, the novel’s social, economic, and mythic allegory, the disarmingly casual but also didactic narrative style, and the overall value of Forster’s famous injunction “only connect.” Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about D. H. Lawrence’s banned book of 1915, The Rainbow, the family saga of the Brangwens from the introduction of industrialism to rural England in the mid-19th century to the cultural modernity of the early 20th century. We discuss Lawrence’s many productive contradictions and conflicts, his style’s mix of the Biblical and the modern-abstract, his creation of characters that are not stable egos but zones of affect, his critique of Christianity and elevation of antinomian and gnostic ideas, his portrayal of sexuality and nature, his anti-natalism and rejection of family, his attack on political abstractions like the state and democracy, his anarchic individualism and attraction to power, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. We consider Hardy’s unique status as great novelist and great poet and his role as transitional figure between Victorian and modernist; we discuss common criticisms of his fiction, rehearse his biography, and broach his views on literature. Then we examine the contradictory views of nature and society offered by his most famous novel, paying special attention to the mythic roots of his modern tragedy, or his reinvention of the ancient rite of tragedy to renew its purpose in modern times. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. We consider the novel’s mix of Gothic romance with social realism, its invitation to a psychological reading and projection of the psyche onto exteriors and landscapes, its allegorical and Christian quality, its nostalgia for the Romantic era, its political implications for questions of gender and empire and class, its changing reputation in modern criticism, and more. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. We discuss the collective biography of the Brontë family up until Emily and Anne’s death, then we consider the novel’s beginning in the mode of Gothic romance and ending in that of domestic realism, its intricate structure and nested narrators, the combination of social and metaphysical meanings the narrative may hold, Brontë’s dialogue with the Romantic tradition and with Milton, interpretations of the novel offered by prominent critics (Terry Eagleton, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nancy Armstrong, Camille Paglia), and more. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We consider the novel’s context in Shelley’s biography and milieu; its criticism of revolutionary politics, sublime aesthetics, and overweening science; the connection it draws between magic and science; its intricate, complex structure; its roots in Greek myth and Christian religion; its inception of the science fiction genre, as well as its participation in epic, tragic, Gothic, sentimental, and domestic genres; the differences between the 1818 and 1831 texts; the possibility that Mary Shelley is a neglected figure in the tradition of conservative literature; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow for to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode on Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is free in its entirety. We discuss Bolaño’s romanticism and anarchism, his descent from Troubadours and American novelists, his polemics on Latin American literature, his attempt to create a truly revolutionary art, love, and politics inassimilable to totalizing institutions, his cosmic or gnostic dimension, and much more. Please enjoy! Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Gabriel García Márquez’s monumental novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. We discuss the novel’s artistic and historical significance, the nature and legacy of magical realism, and the author’s own life and controversial political involvements. Then we investigate the novel’s intensely intricate plot, its themes of time (circular or linear), the limits of politics, and the meaning of incest, its movement among wildly divergent genres (epic, tragedy, utopia, family saga, shaggy-dog joke), its significance as a microcosm of the Latin American and Caribbean experience as metaphors for the human condition, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.comWelcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 30 minutes are free, is about Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. I begin first with my checkered personal experience with Lispector’s writing, then the three phases of her reputation among Anglophone readers, and finally her biography. Then I embark on an explication of the novel, which I interpret as no less than an attempt to create a new religion, a new ritual, and a new gospel in the middle of the 20th century, a fusion of heaven and hell, matter and spirit, good and evil, like none seen before, equal parts disturbing and profound. Several ongoing themes of The Invisible College gather to their shattering climax here. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: