The Virtual Memories Show
Episodes
Episode 148 - The Guest List 2015
29 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
More than 30 of the year's Virtual Memories Show guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2015 and the books they hope to get to in 2016!...
Episode 147 - Peter Kuper
14 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Alt-comix lifer Peter Kuper joins the show to talk about his new graphic novel, RUINS (Self-Made Hero), co-creating World War 3 Illustrated, teaching ...
Episode 146 - David Jaher
05 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
David Jaher joins the show to talk about his amazing new book, The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World (Crown). ...
Episode 145 - Kathe Koja and John Clute
01 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Novelist and immersive theater director Kathe Koja joins the show to talk about her new novel, The Bastards' Paradise, the arc of her career from spla...
Episode 144 - Posy Simmonds
24 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
UK cartooning legend Posy Simmonds, MBE (Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe) joins the show to talk about her career, discovering her long-form voice, being a...
Episode 143 - Jennifer Hayden and Summer Pierre
17 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Graphic Lives! Jennifer Hayden (The Story of My Tits) and Summer Pierre (Paper Pencil Life) join us for a live episode of the The Virtual Memories Sho...
Episode 142 - Rupert Thomson
09 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Rupert Thomson returns to the show to talk about his new novel, Katherine Carlyle (Other Press, 2015). We also discuss IVF babies, researching "in cha...
Episode 141 - Francoise Mouly
03 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Designer, editor and publisher Francoise Mouly joins the show to talk about 20+ years of New Yorker covers, launching TOON Books and cultivating a lo...
Episode 140 - Dylan Horrocks
25 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Dylan Horrocks, the cartoonist behind Hicksville (Drawn and Quarterly) and Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen (Fantagraphics), comes from New Zealand to join...
Episode 139 - Derf Backderf
19 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Derf Backderf made a mid-career course correction, going from alt-weekly cartoons to full-length graphic novels like My Friend Dahmer and his new book...
Episode 138 - Bill Griffith
10 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Bill Griffith is best known for nearly 30 years of daily comic strips featuring the absurd, surreal American treasure known as Zippy the Pinhead, but ...
Episode 137 - Scott McCloud
05 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Is Scott McCloud comics' leading theorist or a deranged lunatic? Find out in this lengthy conversation we recorded during SPX 2015! Scott talks about ...
Episode 136 - J.D. McClatchy
27 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The great poet, critic, librettist and bon vivant J.D. McClatchy joins the show to talk about outliving his idols, adapting my favorite novel to opera...
Episode 135 - Irvine Welsh / Dmitry Samarov
22 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh joins the show to talk about writing, choosing Chicago over LA & NYC, his fascination with boxing, the art world, an...
Episode 134 - Angel, Lion, Ox, Eagle
14 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Warren Woodfin joins the show to talk about guest-curating Liturgical Textiles of the Post-Byzantine World at the Met (runs through Nov. 1, 2015). W...
Episode 133 - What If We Give It Away?
07 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Stona Fitch joins the show to talk about his careers as a novelist, a publisher, and a freelance writer, the benefits of corporate hackwork, his decis...
Episode 132 - Rootless People
31 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Bollen, author of the new novel Orient (Harper, 2015), talks about the difference between a murder mystery and a literary thriller, the pe...
Episode 131 - Ever After
25 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
John Clute, author, critic, and science fiction encyclopedist, joins the show at Readercon 2015 to talk about aftermath culture, SF's ghettoization, t...
Episode 130 - The Cult of Experience and the Tyranny of Relevance
18 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Elizabeth Samet, professor of English at West Point and author of Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point and No Man's...
Episode 129 - Donkey Skin
11 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Amanda Filipacchi joins the show to discuss her newest novel, The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty: A Novel (WW Norton), her solution to sexism in pu...
Episode 128 - Impecunious Nobles
04 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
"I remain certain that there is no one else who has had this sort of aesthetic influence." So says Rhonda K. Garelick, author of Mademoiselle: Coco Ch...
Episode 127 - The Meandering Reflections of a Literary Sybarite
28 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Pulitzer Prize-winning book reviewer Michael Dirda rejoins the show to talk about his new collection, Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Li...
Episode 126 - People From Away
21 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Award-winning author Elizabeth Hand joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about her latest novel, Wylding Hall. We also talk about her need to try d...
Episode 125 - Signal Boost
14 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Dan Perkins (a.k.a. Tom Tomorrow) joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about 25 years of making This Modern World, his new Kickstarter that annihil...
Episode 124 - Don't Fall
07 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan David Kranz joins the show to talk about his new novel, Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (Henry Holt). We talk about wha...
Episode 123 - The Hidden Wish of Words
30 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Langdon Hammer joins the show to talk about his monumental new biography, James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf). We discuss Merrill's signific...
Episode 122 - A Muse Apart
15 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Farrar Straus Giroux president Jonathan Galassi has spent a lifetime in the literary publishing world, but now he gets to experience it all over again...
Episode 121 - The Limits of Love
09 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
British author Christie Watson joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about her newest novel, Where Women Are Kings. We discuss the process of adop...
Episode 120 - Laboratory of Imagination
01 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The great Lorenzo Mattotti joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about art, comics, fashion, and the trees of Patagonia. It's a fascinating conver...
Episode 119 - Paid In Full
19 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Cartoonist Chester Brown joins the show to talk about his life in comics, his history with prostitutes, his evolution into libertarianism, the cathars...
Episode 118 - Table Talk
13 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
It's VMS Live! This episode comes from the panel, "Satirical Representations of Hitler in Contemporary Culture," held May 6, 2015 at the Goethe-Instit...
Episode 117 - Vernissage
04 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Artist Jonah Kinigstein is having his moment... at 92! His venomous editorial cartoons have been collected in a new book, The Emperor's New Clothes, a...
Episode 116 - Magic City
28 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Thane Rosenbaum makes his second appearance on the show to talk about his new novel, How Sweet It Is! (Mandel Vilar Press), as well as his family hist...
Episode 115 - Idlers and Belgians
20 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Edward Mendelson joins the show to talk about his new memoir, Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (New York Review Boo...
Episode 114 - Roller Coaster
14 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Brad Gooch joins the show to talk about his new memoir, Smash Cut, stumbling into a career as a literary biographer, his forthcoming bio of Rumi, the ...
Episode 113 - Palimpsest
06 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
When he was a kid in Minnesota, Michael Meyer papered his walls with National Geographic maps. A Peace Corps stint in 1995 began his 20-year odyssey i...
Episode 112 - Remainder
29 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The great poet, essayist, novelist, memoirist and TV host Clive James joins the show to talk about poetry, mortality, TV, Cultural Amnesia, Australia...
Episode 111 - Time, Memory, Friendship, Poetry, Art
24 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Prue Shaw joins the show to talk about Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. We talk about our favorite parts of the Dante's Commedia, the poem's tran...
Episode 110 - Thru' These Architects' Eyes
17 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Witold Rybczynski discusses his newest book, How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit, and talks about that humanist approach to buildings, the p...
Episode 109 - The Confidence Man
10 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Walter Kirn joins the show to talk about his latest book, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, all about his relat...
Episode 108 - From Asterix to Zweig
03 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Renowned literary translator Anthea Bell joins the show to talk about getting her start in foreign languages, the schisms in the world of literary tra...
Episode 107 - Silence in Translation
17 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Playwright and author Yasmina Reza joins the show to talk about her new book, Happy are the Happy (Other Press). We also discuss the confluence and d...
Episode 106 - The Magic Circle
10 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Educator Matt Farber joins the show to talk about his new book, Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning (Peter Lang Academic). We ...
Episode 105 - Sincere Observation
04 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Artist Mimi Gross joins the show to talk about her art, her life, and the joys of collaboration. How did she carve out an identity separate from "da...
Episode 104 - It Came From Gen X!
28 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Editor, book-blogger and podcaster Ron Hogan joins the show to talk about his 20-year history with the literary intenet, launching Beatrice.com, tak...
Episode 103 - Nostalgia of the Infinite
20 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The great cartoonist Jim Woodring joins the show to talk about comics, surrealism, Vedanta, the principle of fluorescence, and why he may be the reinc...
Episode 102 - The Sprinter
13 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Bon vivant Claudia Young joins The Virtual Memories Show to talk about fine dining, songwriting, the Flora-Bama, getting around Vietnam in a wheelchai...
Episode 101 - Simple Tricks and Nonsense
06 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Let's kick off 2015 wtih a conversation with Levi Stahl, editor of The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany!
Episode 100 - The Hollow Man
30 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Let's celebrate the 100th episode of The Virtual Memories Show with the most boring guest ever: your host, Gil Roth! (with questions from dozens of pa...
Season 4, Episode 48 - The Guest List 2014
16 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
More than 30 of this year's podcast guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2014! Guests include Maria Alexander, Ashton Applewhite, Davi...
Season 4, Episode 47 - Creativity on Demand
09 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
From Rahway to Hollywood, by way of Underworld! Kaz joins the show to talk about his career(s) as a cartoonist, animator and artist. We talk about ho...
Season 4, Episode 46 - Success is Embarrassing
02 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Artist Wayne White joins the show to talk about how his life and art have changed since he starred in the documentary Beauty is Embarrassing (which, i...
Season 4, Episode 45 - Our Lady of Organized Vituperation
25 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Mucho Cubismo! Mary Fleener joins the show to talk about her career in cartooning, her love/hate relationship with LA (mostly hate now, but there was...
Season 4, Episode 44 - Slow Learner
18 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The legendary Jules Feiffer joins the show to talk about his new comic noir, Kill My Mother, as well as the preceding 60+ years of his career as a car...
Season 4, Episode 43 - The Way of Pen and Sword
11 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Maria Alexander joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about her debut novel, Mr. Wicker, her intern/protege relationships with Clive Barker and Neil...
Season 4, Episode 42 - I Was a Teenage Structuralist
03 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Richard Gehr's new book, I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker's Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists, profiles a dozen of the great cartoonists...
Season 4, Episode 41 - Look Day
28 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Sam Gross' gag panels warped me at a young age, so it was an honor to get him on mic to talk about his nearly six-decade cartooning career. We sat dow...
Season 4, Episode 40 - Much Abides
21 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Ashton Applewhite is on a crusade against ageism. She joins the show to discuss the myths and roots of ageism and her talk series, This Chair Rocks. ...
Season 4, Episode 39 - 35 Cents & a Stamp
14 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
John Porcellino has been publishing his King-Cat Comics & Stories mini-comics for 25 years, but I managed not to check them out until last month. BIG...
Season 4, Episode 38 - A Sense of Someplace To Go
06 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast often hangs out at the intersection of art and commerce, so I was happy when Dmitry Samarov drove up in a cab with his sketchbook!* Dmitr...
Season 4, Episode 37 - May God Remember
29 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
During the middle of the High Holidays, two Jews sit down in Manhattan to talk about antisemitism! Daniel Goldhagen joins the show to talk about his ...
Season 4, Episode 36 - Time's Bomb
23 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"Fatherland is really about who my father was, getting to understand him, and also an attempt to explain how politics can tear a family apart, just li...
Season 4, Episode 35 - Jewish Gothic and the Restless Artist
16 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Come for the Friedman, stay for the Lippmann! Or vice versa! This week's podcast features two great conversations: first I talk with Drew Friedman a...
Season 4, Episode 34 - Parental Guidance
09 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The great Roz Chast talks about cartooning, The New Yorker, Disco the Talking Parakeet, and her fantastic new book, Can't We Talk about Something More...
Season 4, Episode 33 - The Peace Poet
02 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Charles Bivona's business card reads, "Poet, Writer, Professor," but he's a lot more than that. Over the course of an hour, we talked about what it ...
Season 4, Episode 32 - The War Poet
26 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Rose, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Drew University, joins the show to talk about his new book, The Literary Churchill: Au...
Season 4, Episode 31 - Critical Mass
18 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Wilson, book reviewer, columnist and founder of the Books, Inq. blog, completes our August book critics miniseries! Frank talks about 50 years ...
Season 4, Episode 30 - Bookslut's Holiday
11 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Jessa Crispin, founder of Bookslut and Spolia, joins us to talk about 12 years of book-blogging, the downsides of learnign to write online, how she l...
Season 4, Episode 29 - Bookman's Holiday
04 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda rejoins the Virtual Memories Show at Readercon 2014 to talk about the time Neil Gaiman tried to ex...
Season 4, Episode 28 - Re-Explaining Hitler
29 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Ron Rosenbaum returns to the show to talk about the new edition of his amazing book, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (Da C...
Season 4, Episode 27 - Buddy Rich's Teeth and the Corruption of Reality
22 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"It's said that the sources of writing are mysterious, but the sources of not writing are pathological." Ron Slate spent more than two decades in the...
Season 4, Episode 26 - Fail Better
15 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"Artistically, LA's a disaster. It's full of amazing stories. But as a city, it's not a city. Nobody but bus-drivers see the whole place." Singer-son...
Season 4, Episode 25 - Dogs of LA
08 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Comedy legend Merrill Markoe joins The Virtual Memories Show to prove Christopher Hitchens wrong: women can be very funny! We talk about her career, h...
Season 4, Episode 24 - From Billiards to Bach
01 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
How does a man go from being a ne'er-do-well in a Pennsylvania mining town to a tutor at St. John's College? Peter Kalkavage joins the show to talk ab...
Season 4, Episode 23 - Haste Ye Back
16 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The great cartoonist (and designer and illustrator) Seth joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about memory and time, his love of digression, being ...
Season 4, Episode 22 - Wax, Rhapsodic
09 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"When I first started out, what I liked was the unlikely image, the unlikely metaphor. What I like now is finding that simple sentence that captures s...
Season 4, Episode 21 - Theory and Practice
03 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"I'm never gonna be a parent, but if I were, I'd be like, 'We're skippin' this Goodnight, Moon thing; you're goin' to Pale Fire.'" Cartoonist Katie S...
Season 4, Episode 20 - Bildung Stories
26 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"Zweig was immersed in the problem of the disjunction between our grand desires for the kind of life we dream we should be living and the actual circu...
Season 4, Episode 19 - The Customer is Always Wrong
19 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Mimi Pond joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about Over Easy, her 15-years-in-the-making, New York Times bestselling graphic novel about diners, ...
Season 4, Episode 18 - Persona
13 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Listen in to part 2 of my conversation with Linn Ullmann about her new novel, The Cold Song (Other Press)! We talk about her writing habits and pract...
Season 4, Episode 17 - Lady with a Dog
06 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In part 1 of our first 2-part episode, Linn Ullmann talks about the influences of her parents -- Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman -- on her storytelling...
Season 4, Episode 16 - Euphonic Sounds
28 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer, and translator Lynne Sharon Schwartz sat down with me to talk about her newest essay collection, This I...
Season 4, Episode 15 - Hello Columbus
21 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"I'm a person who works in comics and knows a lot about comics, and I'm teaching people who know nothing about comics to talk to other people who know...
Season 4, Episode 14 - They Call Me MISTER Hyde!
14 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"I like that we live in an age that's increasingly curious about this dark side, and not merely in terms of its pure darkness, but of how seemingly or...
Season 4, Episode 13 - Reading Maketh a Full Man
07 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Literature professor and book critic DG Myers is dying of cancer, but that doesn’t mean he’s planning to go gentle into that good night. In a wid...
Season 4, Episode 12 - Window, Pain
31 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Tova Mirvis joins The Virtual Memories Show to talk about her brand-new novel, Visible City and how she learned to act on her unhappiness, as well a...
Season 4, Episode 11 - Stick and Move
25 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“Claressa Shields was the first boxer who showed me that women can be artists in the ring, like men. It was kind of like the first time I read Virgi...
Season 4, Episode 10 - The Stars Have Anemia
17 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“There's a sort of romance in riding a bicycle across the country. It's something that some people would fantasize about, and when they saw me ride ...
Season 4, Episode 9 - Semper Fido
10 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"We move through a human-centric world as if that is reality, but we're surrounded by other species, and their species is centric to their world. I'm ...
Season 4, Episode 8 - The Slippery Animal
04 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Virtual Memories – season 4 episode 8 - The Slippery Animal "I'm always in the middle of a struggle with a short story. You'd think I'd have the ...
Season 4, Episode 6 - The Realm of the Possible
10 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"Being an artist and talking about being an artist is a lot about trying to suss out your audience: how much do they know about art, how much do they ...
Season 4, Episode 5 - Feeling Gravett's Pull
03 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
"Comics is a medium that isn't going to go away. It may just now finally be coming into its own in the 21st century. In this internet era, there's som...
Season 4, Episode 4 - Crackers and Bagels
28 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Josh Alan Friedman, author of Black Cracker, is the third Friedman brother I've interviewed, as part of my "Capturing the (Other) Friedmans" series of...
Season 4, Episode 3 - The Consolation of Poetry
19 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel Hadas, poet, essayist, translator and professor, discusses her recent memoir, Strange Relation, about losing her husband to early-onset dementi...
Season 4, Episode 2 - A Place To Rest
14 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Emily Raboteau, author of Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (Atlantic Monthly Press), joins the Virtual Memories Show to...
Season 4, Episode 1 - Changing Channels
07 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
We kick off 2014 with a conversation with Brett Martin, author of Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The...
Season 3, Episode 32 - The Guest List
31 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
It's the last episode of 2013! Let's ask two dozen of our pod-guests for the favorite books that they read in the last year! (Here's the cheat-sheet, ...
Season 3, Episode 31 - The Whimsical Barracuda
17 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
"With my brothers, it was like ‘Resistance is futile! You will enjoy horror movies! You will go to comic book conventions! You will learn to love B-...
Season 3, Episode 30 - On Cats and Calamities
10 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What does the search for a lost cat have to tell us about the nature of love and marriage? Peter Trachtenberg joins The Virtual Memories Show to try t...
Season 3, Episode 29 - War is a Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
03 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Zach Martin recently retired from the U.S. Marine Corps after 16 years in the service. But 25 years ago, he and your host were hyperliterate misfit hi...