Brendan Hunt

speaker

297 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 4 May

Brendan Hunt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Selected Shorts · Too Hot For Radio: Jonathan Lethem "The King of Sentences" · 4 May 2026 podcast

One of the lines in the essay is...

when people use the word original 90% of the time, it just means they don't know what the sources were.

And that quote has sort of plopped into internet discourse, and it floats around with my name on it.

So now that quote is attributed to me, but I think someone else said it first.

Well, I think this story, you know, it's a long time ago that I wrote it.

And when I look at it and I remember the feeling I was having around the

the imaginary writer, I think it conflates for me my reverence in my 20s when I was kind of just trying to make myself into a writer and I was not published yet and I was a little bit crazy like the two characters, you know, the two young characters in the story are.

I think the two people I was thinking of who are both, who were, one is gone,

but have both been fairly reluctant to appear, although they're not quite as invisible as Thomas Pynchon, were Thomas Berger, the author of Little Big Man and many other great novels, and Don DeLillo, who's fortunately still with us, super genius of the sentence in particular.

I think my feeling of how I wanted to somehow impress these two people, I had a strong parasocial feeling for them each at that time.

I was playing with and exaggerating my own bizarre and useless impulse to present myself to my heroes.

The funny thing is I did eventually get to know them each in different ways slightly.

But I can recall that grain of craziness in my desire to, you know, at that time their books were companions that made, that transformed me.

And so I somehow I wanted that to slip into a, you know, a relationship to the people who'd made the books.

But those are not the same thing.

Well, I mean, the funny thing is I'm not, you know, I'm sort of like a person somewhere in between the two poles of the story.

I'm not that shy.

I kind of like talking to people.

And so I'm a little bit still the crazy person yearning to connect as well as the

aging, graying, bearded author who might get bum-rushed by a fan.

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