It's a classic of theater that continues to be taken on by top actors and still resonates with audiences. “Waiting for Godot” mixes despair and comedy to raise questions about the meaning of life. Now, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, two actors who are great friends, are doing their waiting on Broadway. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
John R. Davis's Keep Your Ear to the Ground(Georgetown University Press, 2025) is the first history of the fanzines that emerged from Washington, DC's highly influential punk community DIY culture has always been at the heart of DC's thriving punk community. As Washington, DC's punk scene emerged in the mid-1970s, so did the periodicals--"fanzines"--that celebrated it. Before the rise of the internet, fanzines were a potent way for fans to communicate and to revel in the joy of fandom. These zines were more than just publications; they were a distillation of punk's allure, connecting the city to the broader punk community. Fanzines remain a meaningful, tactile, creative medium for punk fans to connect with like-minded people outside the corporate-controlled world. In Keep Your Ear to the Ground, the archivist and musician John R. Davis unveils the development of punk fanzines and their role in supporting DC's hardcore and punk scene from the 1970s into the twenty-first century. He sheds new light on DC's scene and highlights some of its key personalities, including many who are often left out of punk history, with high-quality images of rare zines and insights from numerous interviews with zine creators and musicians. This book vividly weaves together the origin of zines and their importance in underground communities. For punk enthusiasts, zine creators, American studies scholars, and anyone who has ever felt like an outsider, Keep Your Ear to the Ground traces how the unique environment of Washington, DC, helped zines thrive.
Today’s episode features two mystery novels with special twists. First, The Killer Question is a story told via emails, WhatsApp messages and texts. When a new trivia team becomes suspiciously successful, egos are hurt and a body is found in the river. In today’s episode, author Janice Hallett joins NPR’s Scott Simon for a conversation about the mystery that unfolds. Then, Kill Your Darlings is a novel written in reverse: The murderer is revealed in the first chapter. In today’s episode, author Peter Swanson talks with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly about the marriage at the center of the story.
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A remarkable literary discovery has thrilled readers of the late, great British writer Virginia Woolf. More than 80 years after her death, a new book has been published this week. It's a collection of three comic stories written eight years before her first novel appeared. Malcolm Brabant reports from England for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
Maria Fedorova challenges the perception of the Soviet Union as a passive recipient of American technology and expertise. She reveals the circular nature of this exchange through official government bureaus, amid anxious farmers in crowded auditoriums, in cramped cars across North Dakota and Montana, and by train over the once fertile steppes of the Volga.
Amid the post–World War I food insecurity, Soviet and American agricultural experts relied on transnational networks, bridging ideological differences. As Soviets traveled across the US agricultural regions and Americans plowed steppes in the southern Urals and the lower Volga, both groups believed that innovative solutions could be found beyond their own national borders. Soviets were avidly interested in American technology and American agricultural experts perceived the Soviet Union to be an ideal setting for experimenting with and refining modern farm systems and organizational practices. As Seeds of Exchange shows, agricultural modernization was not the exclusive domain of Western countries.
Guest: Maria Fedorova (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College. She received her PhD in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the history of agriculture, food insecurity, US-Russia/Soviet relations, and transnational history.
Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.
Over the past 20 years, the number of college applications filed to top schools has exploded. And while most American colleges accept most applicants, many parents and students hold tightly to the idea that prestige matters. In his new book Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right For You, journalist and higher education expert Jeff Selingo argues elite schools aren’t always the best. In today’s episode, Selingo speaks with NPR’s Michel Martin about why he wants to give parents permission to think more broadly about higher education.
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Imagine the impact of climate change is irreversible, and decades of flooding, famine, pandemics and war have upended life on earth. That world is explored in Ian McEwan's new novel, “What We Can Know.” Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown sat down with the Booker Prize-winning novelist for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
In Patricia Lockwood’s latest novel, the protagonist is an author named Patricia. Will There Ever Be Another You documents a four-year period of disorientation, disassociation and confusion after Patricia becomes severely ill. The story is based on Lockwood’s own experience with brain fog and other symptoms after becoming sick with Covid-19 in March 2020. In today’s episode, the real-life author talks with NPR’s Ari Shapiro about embodying confusion as she wrote about it.
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Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories through which the field is defined: ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone. Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (Columbia UP, 2025) considers major contemporary authors who disavow identity even as their works and public personas respond in varied ways to the imperatives of being “Indian.” Chapters examine Bharati Mukherjee’s rejection of “ethnic” Americanness; Chetan Bhagat’s “bad English”; Amit Chaudhuri’s autofictional literary project; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s decision to write in Italian, interspersed with meditations on the iconicity of the theorists Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said. Through an innovative method of accented reading and sharing stories and syllabi from her teaching, Srinivasan relates the burdens of representation faced by ethnic and postcolonial writers to the institutional and disciplinary pressures that affect the scholars who study their works. Engaging and self-reflexive, Overdetermined offers new insight into the dynamics that shape contemporary Indian English literature, the politics of identity in literary studies, and the complexities of teaching minoritized literatures in the West.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is assistant professor of English at Rice University. Her books include the essays What is We? (2025) and the coedited Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (2023), and her public writing has appeared in numerous venues.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
