In this episode of the podcast, Lisa Wells, the author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, discusses her latest report for Harper’s Magazine, “To Be a Field of Poppies,” with Ann Neumann, the author of The Good Death, and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca. The trio’s discussion of death is profound and unorthodox, yet humor-filled as well. Wells lays out the process of natural organic reduction (NOR), Neumann delves into society’s fascination with the dead rather than the dying, and Lucca opens a conversation about the role of capitalism in the funeral industry. This episode is unquestionably life-affirming.

Read Wells’s article: https://harpers.org/archive/2021/10/to-be-a-field-of-poppies-natural-organic-reduction-composting-corpse/

This episode was produced by Violet Lucca and Andrew Blevins.

To Be a Field of Poppies

In “The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s story for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, a woman visits an old friend whose husband has recently died, only to discover that the nature of her friend’s grief is more chilling than she could have imagined. Oates is joined by her former student Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s, to discuss the connections between writing and teaching, and between writing and time. Revisiting stories by Jorge Luis Borges, John Updike, and more, they consider the ghosts that haunt Oates’s story, the ghosts that haunt fiction, and the ghosts we would argue with if given one more chance. 

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“The Return,” Joyce Carol Oates’s short story in the August issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/joyce-carol-oates-the-return/?logged_in=true
A complete collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories
Short stories by John Updike: https://bookshop.org/p/books/trust-me-short-stories-john-updike/11077187?ean=9780449912171
Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Borges and I”: https://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/Borges%20and%20I.pdf
Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: https://bookshop.org/p/books/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-gabriel-garcia-marquez/286337?ean=9780060883287
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov: https://bookshop.org/p/books/pale-fire-vladimir-nabokov/581281?ean=9780679723424
John Gardner and William Gass’s debate over literature: https://medium.com/the-william-h-gass-interviews/william-h-gass-interviewed-by-thomas-leclair-with-john-gardner-1979-e6de4d424107
Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School”
A Void by Georges Perec: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-void-georges-perec/623575?ean=9781567922967
James Joyce’s Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.: https://bookshop.org/p/books/ulysses-james-joyce/1408797?ean=9780679722762 https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-james-joyce/17762276?ean=9780142437346

4:00: Teaching allowed you to “open a door, step into that other world of people”
7:01: “It’s such a pleasure to read with other people”
10:38: On being a “puppet-like dummy”
14:06: “Not everyone is reading autofiction”
23:00: “I find myself going into a surreal world, because the lost person is still real to the deeper self”
25:21: Even in postmodernism, “there’s always that core of the lone beating heart”
31:03: “If I’m writing a novel, it stretches out to the horizon”
41:31: “If people came back from the dead, they would be the same people they were before”

Joyce Carol Oates

In the spring of 2001, Benjamin Hale’s six-year-old cousin went missing in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting one of the largest search-and-rescue missions in Arkansas history. Her miraculous discovery is a story in itself, but in a long Folio for the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, Hale also tells of the loss of another young girl in the same woods, decades prior, that seems eerily connected to his cousin’s. In conversation with Harper’s editor, Christopher Beha, Hale tackles questions of belief raised by a sequence of events so uncanny that they have prompted listeners—as well as those intimately involved—to search for other explanations.

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“Who Walks Always Beside You?” Benjamin Hale’s essay in the August issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/who-walks-always-beside-you/
“The Last Distinction?” Benjamin Hale’s piece from August 2012 about monkeys: https://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/the-last-distinction-talking-to-the-animals/

2:10: “I try to give the nutshell version and end up giving a story for an hour”
10:50: Having to live in order to save another
13:51: “My militant atheism was more informed by Carl Sagan” than Richard Dawkins
17:00: There are certain things I don’t understand, I will never understand, and I’m okay with that.”
20:54: The ethos of Arkansas
25:16: “Go to the water, go to the river”
30:42: On the 5,000 words that didn’t make the cut

The Lost Child

Stephen Sondheim may have brought the cryptic crossword to America, but Richard E. Maltby Jr. brought it to Harper’s Magazine. The lyricist, director, and cryptic creator sat down with Harper’s and one of his checkers, Roddy Howland Jackson, to talk about the history of the puzzle, the declining use of dictionaries, and the rise in word puzzle fascination. After all, “What holds the country together is the diversity of different nerd populations.”

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
Richard E. Maltby Jr.’s puzzles in Harper’s: https://harpers.org/sections/puzzle/
A link to uploads of Stephen Sondheim’s Crossword Puzzles: http://blogfott.blogspot.com/2014/07/putting-it-together.html
Christopher Tayler on T.S. Eliot’s legacy: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/09/t-s-eliot-legacy-an-hallucinated-man-the-wasteland/
Ryan Ruby on Nabokov: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/halensee-a-fathers-guide-to-nabokovs-berlin/

4:01: Stephen Sondheim’s cryptic crossword legacy
7:51: The musicality of the cryptic
14:14: “If you’re going to do something that is tricky, you have to be fair.”
17:44: There’s no such thing as the English language.”
26:26: On getting stumped by your own puzzle
33:56: Modernist poetry’s puzzles and contemporary poetry’s…plain prose
38:09: Clues are “designed to be read wrong.”
39:56: Nabokov’s crossword legacy
47:06: The dictionary as Bildungsroman
55:26: Wordle! Spelling Bee! “As the language gets more and more debased, people seem to be more interested in language.”
1:02:41: A cryptic proposal

Richard E. Maltby Jr.’s Cryptics

In his September cover story for Harper’s, Justin E. H. Smith sets out to define Generation X, that nameless cohort wedged between boomers and millennials whose members, in midlife, now face “an annihilation of almost everything that once oriented us.” Smith argues that Gen X, having come of age before the erosion of fixtures like liberal democracy and rock and roll, failed to protect postwar counterculture from commercialism and corporatization. As debates about art and politics loom large today, Smith affirms the essential link between the two while championing what he identifies as his generation’s core pursuit of artistic autonomy and human liberation. Editor of Harper’s and fellow Gen Xer Christopher Beha sat down with Smith to discuss intergenerational relations, how Smith’s essay evolved over the editorial process, and how art at its best interrogates the arguable and not the obvious.

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“My Generation” Justin E. H. Smith’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/
“Permanent Pandemic” Justin E. H. Smith’s piece from June 2022 about the endurance and overextension of COVID-19 digital infrastructure: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/06/permanent-pandemic-will-covid-controls-keep-controlling-us/

2:24: “my ideal audience is Harper’s readers”
3:22: the relationship between art and politics
19:07: “as a teenager in the 1980s, there was a widespread sense that our era was kind of a weak aftershock of what our parents had experienced.”
27:04: “I think one way to think about this generation is a generation that came of age intellectually and emotionally and perhaps politically before the September 11 attacks.”
37:06: “If we think that the state of emergency requires of us that we stop thinking about art as an autonomous sphere of creation … once you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.”

Generation X

Reviewing Zadie Smith’s The Fraud for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine, Adam Kirsch takes stock of Generation X as a literary phenomenon. He finds “Gen X lit” to be composed of two distinct waves, between which Smith is caught. The younger wave, including writers Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, and Tao Lin, has formed its ideas about art, culture, and society partly in opposition to predecessors like David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and Dave Eggers—who claimed a great moral power for art—and partly in response to the younger millennials, who question whether art has any value at all. Kirsch is joined in this episode by Harper’s deputy editor Jon Baskin to discuss how Smith’s historical fiction operates within this literary lineage, why autofiction came to succeed the confessional memoirs of the Nineties, and what the novel form can do for us.

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“Come as You Are” Adam Kirsch’s review in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/come-as-you-are-kirsch/
“My Generation” Justin E. H. Smith’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/

6:01: “Instead of rushing up to the reader and giving them a bear hug and saying, ‘This is who I am, please love me,’ which I think is a sense that I often get from David Foster Wallace, these younger writers are a lot more complex and ironic and elusive.”
8:46: “Autofiction makes it possible to emphasize the moral ambiguities that memoir has to apologize for or hide.”
14:21: “Smith is writing about things that have come up in her fiction since the beginning—things like: Is it my job to be politically virtuous as a writer? Or am I supposed to be telling some other kind of truth? Is there some sort of artistic mission that is somehow removed from political virtue?”
18:44: “If you step back and make it an alternative reality—in this case, something in the past—you can make more of an effort to see all the way around the subject. And that’s something that Smith does very well in The Fraud.”
31:06: “So much of it is about this sort of solidness and resistance to getting involved in things … As we get older and assume different roles in life, something of that remains, the desire to be a sort of Bartleby and say no rather than yes—maybe that’s what Gen X will be remembered for.”

The Gen X Novel

Isolated for years by strict censorship laws, community infighting, and language barriers, the writer Amir Ahmadi Arian often turned to Hamed Esmaeilion’s work for solace. In addition to authoring short stories and two novels, Esmaeilion chronicled mundane moments with his family on a blog that resonated deeply with Arian, someone of the same generation also working and living in the Iranian diaspora. Following the tragic death of Esmaeilion’s wife and daughter in the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020, Arian witnessed his friend publicly mourn his family and transform his fury into action. Arian sat down with Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, to discuss Esmaeilion’s journey into activism and the responsibility of Iranian diasporic artists.

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save 
“Waiting for the Lights,” Amir Ahmadi Arian’s report in the September issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/waiting-for-the-lights/
Arian’s English-language debut novel, Then the Fish Swallowed Him  
Esmaeilion on his memoir, It Snows in This House: https://bookshop.org/p/books/then-the-fish-swallowed-him-amir-ahmadi-arian/8025040 
Canada’s response to the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 tragedy: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/response_conflict-reponse_conflits/crisis-crises/flight-vol-ps752.aspx?lang=eng

7:24: “Before thinking about how to develop your characters, or how you structure the story, or the themes you want to focus on, the first thing you had to consider was: Will the book I am writing survive the censorship office” 
9:01: “I think it’s kind of a miracle we still have a literary culture, given the circumstances.” 
13:00: “The whole process is made to intimidate you, to show you that they know more about you than you would think and actually use it against you.” 
13:29: “He was being interrogated when his father-in-law passed away.” 
26:52: “So you go through all this difficulty, all this trouble, to just have an ordinary life.” 
28:31: “It’s not so much a decision that he made to pursue justice, it’s just an inevitable turn of events. There’s nothing else left to do.” 
33:12: “There was this hunger for any figure outside of Iran that could bring people together.”
37:52: “All walks of life, all stripes, they were there, they were together shouting the same thing.” 
40:05: “The thing about the government in Iran is they have mastered the art, if you can call it the art, of containing any kind of revolutionary mass protest.” 
44:43: “The way out of Iran has been pretty much a one-way road.” 
47:17: “I have the freedom to tell what I want to tell, to tell the stories that I think are untold and unknown, while carrying the life that I had in my chest.”

Hamed Esmaeilion

Today we’re rerunning an episode from 2018 featuring two interviews with Harper’s Magazine’s former New Books columnist, Lidija Haas, and with our current Easy Chair columnist Rachel Kushner. Listen in advance of our event tonight at the Center for Fiction, “What Happened to Gen X?,” which will see Harper’s editor Christopher Beha in conversation with his generational peers Rachel Kushner and Ethan Hawke as they explore the question at the center of our September issue.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and Brett Kavanaugh’s irate response—was an excruciating bit of political theater, complete with righteous speeches from both sides of the aisle. (It also proved to be not much more than spectacle, as Kavanaugh was sworn in as an associate justice earlier this week.) Nevertheless, the event illustrated how we are socialized to perform and understand gender, race, and class. In this episode, New Books columnist Lidija Haas joined Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca to discuss a handful of recent publications that deal with these issues: Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings, Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad, and Kristen M. Ghoddsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. In the second segment, Rachel Kushner, the author of The Mars Room and Telex From Cuba joined Lucca to discuss an essay she wrote that was included in the October 2018 issue’s Readings section, pulled from her memories of the late Nineties New York art world.

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“Learning to Wait,” Rachel Kushner’s latest column for the October issue of Harper’s: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/learning-to-wait/
Rachel Kushner’s latest book, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Hard-Crowd/Rachel-Kushner/9781982157708
Lidija Haas in the Harper’s archive: https://harpers.org/author/lidijahaas/
Lidija Haas’s review of Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad for Bookforum: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2503/rebecca-traister-s-case-for-feminist-rage-20155
“Red Letter Days,” Rachel Kushner’s 2018 essay on the late Nineties New York art world: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/10/red-letter-days/
“What Happened to Gen X?”, our event tonight at the Center for Fiction: https://centerforfiction.org/event/the-center-for-fiction-and-harpers-magazine-present-what-happened-to-gen-x/

From the Audio Archive: Rachel Kushner

With Trump as the forerunning Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic Party appears to be falling back on the same familiar logic: better than the alternative. But certain progressive candidates are still looking to disrupt the status quo, however unlikely support from the establishment left may be. In this week’s episode, Harper’s Magazine’s Washington editor, Andrew Cockburn, joins senior editor Elena Saavedra Buckley to survey the landscape of the 2024 election with a focus on three insurgent candidates: Marianne Williamson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Cornel West. 

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save 

Andrew Cockburn’s article “Against the Current”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/against-the-current
 
3:03: “Popping up on the picket line is actually a very hard turn for him as a president.” 
4:08: “It’s Trump all over, fake populism as usual.” 
5:40: “It’s only when the DNC decided to throw its full weight behind him … then Biden was popular for a while.”
7:42: “He’s really not that old.” 
12:10: “I can’t think of any example where a president nominates a strong alternative. Instinctively no leader wants to be encouraging a potential rival.”
14:39: “You don’t get anywhere by promising to make people’s lives better. The only thing you can do is convince people the alternative is worse, which is an infinitely depressing point of view.” 
17:30: “Obviously the candidate who has gotten the most attention has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he has evoked a hysterical response.” 
19:14: “Marianne Williamson, who has gotten much less attention, has detailed proposals on everything.” 
19:53: “Cornel West has the most straightforwardly progressive agenda.” 
26:58: “She said the Republicans were like the dog who caught the car, and it was a car full of angry women.” 
28:44: “When people are asked why they don’t support Biden, they always cite the economy. The economy seems to be doing well, and yet, people are hurting.” 
31:38: “It’s getting late now for any kind of insurgency.” 
39:40: “The other fear is that people who would never vote for Trump can’t be bothered to vote for Biden or stay home.”

Party Fouls

Inspired by the pulp collectors Gary Lovisi and Lucille Cali, Harper’s Magazine senior editor Joe Kloc embarked on a freewheeling search for a magazine lost to time: the inaugural issue of Golden Fleece Historical Adventure. In this week’s episode, Kloc joins Violet Lucca to discuss his adventures exploring the world of pulp magazines, the act of collecting, and Lost at Sea, a book based on a previous feature Kloc wrote for Harper’s, slated for release in 2025. 


Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
“The Golden Fleece”: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/the-golden-fleece-kloc/
“Empathy, My Dear Sherlock”: https://harpers.org/archive/2020/09/empathy-my-dear-watson-netflix/
“Lost at Sea”: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/lost-at-sea-richardson-bay/

3:55 “What appealed to me about Gary and pulp collecting in general is, this is really for the love of the game.”
4:06 “I was interested in the idea that people would be so passionate about those objects when it didn’t have that same monetary incentive.” 
16:20 “Pulps technically mean only the magazines, not the paperbacks.” 
19:00 “These pulp writers became those comic book writers. Those comic books become comic book movies, and these comic book movies are constantly competing for your attention.” 
25:52 “It gives you a feeling of being a child and remembering a time when all was before you and anything could happen.” 
27:28 “These objects carry a deeper meaning, even if they’ve been destroyed or lost.” 
37:18 “It’s hard to describe the power of Sherlock Holmes in the pulp collecting world.” 
41:02 “I’m not going to let go of my imagination. It always has been fun to think like this and it always will be fun to think like this.” 
44:40 “It’s a form of vernacular creativity.”

Pulp Fiction

In June, writers Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner joined Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Carroll for a conversation and Q&A in front of a live audience at the NYU Skirball Center in downtown Manhattan. Listen to Cusk and Lerner read from their recent Harper’s essays and discuss the state of contemporary fiction, Cusk’s use of artists’ biographies in her newest novel Parade, reading in a second language, parenthood, the role of ego in writing, and much more.

Subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for only $16.97 per year: harpers.org/save.

“The Hofmann Wobble” by Ben Lerner, from the December 2023 issue of Harper’s
“The Spy” by Rachel Cusk, from the October 2023 issue of Harper’s
11:31: “You can’t be both an encyclopedia and a news source without some kind of contamination.” —Ben Lerner
19:09: “First of all, I thought, God, if I’d never told anyone who I was, starting with my parents, if I hadn’t accepted that containment in myself, what would I have created? What would my relationship to reality be?”  —Rachel Cusk
25:18: “I mean this as a total compliment, but I read your books with a lot of dread.” —Ben Lerner to Rachel Cusk
26:36: “What the novel has tried to do, kind of wrongly, I guess, in the end, is for the act of reading to also be an act of shared experience.” —Rachel Cusk
28:34: “Being a good parent in the moment of composition, if you’re trying to take care of those imagined readers, can be deadly for the work – not always, but sometimes.” —Ben Lerner
28:49: “On the other hand, having kids for me, especially young kids, it does refresh your wonder before language.” —Ben Lerner
29:43: “If your work can change in the way you change, or people change, when you have children, I think that’s a really powerful thing.” —Rachel Cusk
32:10: “I’m really into animal vocalization stuff.” —Ben Lerner
34:23: “French has completely changed my English.” —Rachel Cusk
40:24: “My dad told me never to learn to type because I would end up being someone’s secretary, which was kind of feminist of him I guess, but typing is the thing I’ve done the best with in my whole life.” —Rachel Cusk
41:23: “I think there’s a lot of ego involved in the claim to disavow ego in writing.” —Ben Lerner
42:45: “What is a shame is the idea that examination of self is egotistical.” —Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner: Live in Conversation

Since 1850, Harper’s Magazine has provided its readers with a unique perspective on the issues that drive our national conversation, featuring writing from some of the most promising to most distinguished names in literature—from Barbara Ehrenreich to Rachel Kushner. Listen as Harper’s editors and contributing writers take a deep dive into these topics and the craft of long-form narrative journalism.

Subscribe to the magazine for only $16.97 per year: harpers.org/save

To Be a Field of Poppies

Harper’s Magazine

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