The UK had a power outage when we were recording the 15th episode and lost Gerald mid recording. Because we didn’t realize it was a power outage, Anais and I kept talking and ended having an interesting discussion about ourselves as readers. We thought you would enjoy this extra episode as we edit To Build a Fire – Jack London Episode 15. You can expect your normal Literary Roadhouse episode by Thursday morning at the latest. We reference several books in this episode including:
Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney in January, 1876, in San Francisco, California to Flora Wellman. Although records were destroyed in fires that followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, it is widely believed that his father was the astrologer, William Chaney. When Flora was pregnant, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion. She refused; as a result, Chaney said that he wanted nothing to do with the unborn child. Wellman then attempted suicide by shooting herself, but escaped without seriously injury.
She carried the child to full term, and a year after his birth, she married a civil war veteran, John London, and Jack took his stepfather’s name.
His interest in literature was initially sparked by the Victorian novel Signa by Maria Louise Lamé (writing under the pseudonym Ouida), and by a friendly local librarian at Oakland Public Library who encouraged him. However, his first job, at age 13, was at a cannery. Desperate for a way out of 12 to 18 hour days, he borrowed money to buy a boat and became an oyster pirate. [Ed. Note: Emphasis mine – Anais]
After his boat was damaged, he signed on as a member of the California Fish Patrol, and then on to a seal-hunting schooner bound for Japan. Following even more gruelling jobs at a jute mill and power plant, he joined the Coxey’s Army’s protest march in 1894, specifically the Kelly’s Army subdivision, and marched on Washington D.C. to protest unemployment that resulted from the panic of 1893. He then led a vagrent life, and even spent some time in jail. Eventually, he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School.
Professing a desire to become a writer, he borrowed some money from a bar owner in Oakland, and began studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1896 at the age of 20. However, lack of money meant that he left college the next year without graduating.
In 1897, London and his brother-in-law sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush, and despite returning the next year, his experiences of hardship during that time greatly influenced some of his work, especially this week’s story, “To Build a Fire”.
On his return to Oakland, he was determined to further his writing career. Fortunately, this coincided with the arrival of new printing technologies which enabled lower-cost production of books and magazines. His first writing to pay any money was for “A Thousand Deaths”, printed in 1899 in the literary magazine The Black Cat, from which he earned $40.
Between 1900 and 1904, London was married to Elizabeth “Bessie” Maddern, and they had two children. It was during this time that London wrote and sold his novel The Call Of The Wild, perhaps one of his most famous works.
In January 1904, London agreed to work for the San Francisco Examiner as a war correspondent, covering the Russo-Japanese war from Yokohama. However, whilst he was there, London was arrested three times, the last time only being released through the personal intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt. London returned to the United States in June. The following year he married Charmian Kittredge.
London died in November 1916, aged 40, at his ranch in Sonoma County, California. Despite being a robust man, at the time of his death he was suffering from dysentery, uremia, and late stage alcoholism. He was in great pain, and was taking morphine. There are suggestions that his death may have been suicide through morphine overdose.
During his eighteen-year professional writing career, London was prolific – producing 23 novels, 119 short stories, 45 pieces of poetry, as well as plays, autobiographical memoirs and essays. His phenomenal output raised occasional accusations of plagiarism, which he never quite denied outright, instead accepting that there were common areas between his work and that of other writers, particularly Frank Harris, a journalist and biographer.
During his life, he had strong views on race and immigration, on atheism and socialism, and on animal activism. He lived life to the full, wrote well and successfully.
This podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spreaker. Please take a few moments to leave a review ( for Spreaker follow & heart us). Those reviews encourage us and help us be found by new listeners.
This week we say goodbye to Kenechi as he moves toward graduation and the great job search. We all wish him luck, his voice will be missed on the podcast.
So, we finally read a story by the very catalyst of our rating system. The Veldt is an interesting story that crosses horror, sci-fi and literary fiction. Because of the depth of meaning, we had a wonderful discussion crossing many topics. We all seemed to really enjoy the story, but we also read the story very differently from one another.
Yes, we do have a rating scale based on Bradberries! For the history of this goofy system, see Anais’ post “Read Short Stories or Ray Bradbury Cries.” If you want to design a Bradberry, we’d love to see it. Anais has the urge to create a Bradberry collage… Imagine, Bradberries on your desktop! You gave last week’s story, Constance’s Law by Bridget Hardy, 3.75 Bradberries.
On a scale of 1-6 Bradberries, how do you rate ‘The Veldt‘? Tell us in the comments below or via voicemail, and we will give you the final tally on the next episode.
Ray Bradbury circa 1980. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
Ray Douglas Bradbury started writing at the age of 12. Throughout his life, he liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician and sword performer, Mr. Electrico. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, “Live forever!” Bradbury later said to The Paris Review:
When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio,” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped.
Bradbury was born in 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a lineman for power and telephone utilities, and Ester Moberg Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant. He had an older brother named Leonard, and a younger brother and sister who died during childhood. The Bradburies moved to Los Angeles, California when Ray was 14. His childhood formed the basis for many of his short stories and early works, such as “Dandelion Wine” and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury recounted his early influences in an autobiographical essay published by the New Yorker in 2012.
After graduation from high school in 1938, Bradbury couldn’t afford to go to college, so he went to the local library instead. “Libraries raised me,” he told the New York Times during an interview profiling his campaign to save Ventura County public libraries . “I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression, and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.” He told The Paris Review, “You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t.”
He celebrated high school graduation in 1938 by publishing his first short story in a fan magazine. The following year he published a fan magazine of his own, Futuria Fantasia. He wrote nearly every piece in the magazine under different pseudonyms to disguise the fact that the magazine was a virtual one-man show. You can revisit Futuria Fantasia at Project Gutenberg for free.
His first big success didn’t come until 1947, when his short story “Homecoming” (narrated by a boy who feels like an outsider at a family reunion of witches, vampires and werewolves because he lacks supernatural powers) was discovered in a pile of unsolicited manuscripts at Mademoiselle by a young editor named Truman Capote. “Homecoming” won an O. Henry Award as one of the best American short stories of the year.
Along with 26 other stories in a similar vein, “Homecoming” appeared in Mr. Bradbury’s first book Dark Carnival, which was published in 1947. That same year he married Marguerite Susan McClure, whom he had met in a Los Angeles bookstore. McClure was the breadwinner in the early days of their marriage, supporting Bradbury as he worked on his writing for little to no pay. The couple had four daughters, Susan, Ramona, Bettina, and Alexandra.
In 1950, Bradbury published his first major work, The Martian Chronicles, which detailed the conflict between humans colonizing the red planet and the native Martians they encountered there. While taken by many to be a work of science fiction, Bradbury himself considered it to be fantasy.
First of all, I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. It was named so to represent the temperature at which paper ignites. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. It couldn’t happen, you see?
Bradbury’s best-known work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, became an instant classic in the era of McCarthyism for its exploration of themes of censorship and conformity. In 2007, Bradbury himself disputed that censorship was the main theme of Fahrenheit 451, as we’ve examined in a past blogpost.
Farenheit 451 like many of Bradbury’s other works was critical of mass media consumption and creature comforts, in particular television. Bradbury opined that “Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was.” Despite this aversion to television, Bradbury developed his own HBO series, allowing him to produce adaptations of his short stories. The Ray Bradbury Theater is an anthology series that ran for six seasons on HBO and USA Network. All 65 episodes were written by Bradbury and many were based on short stories or novels he had written, including “The Veldt.”
Bradbury’s career spanned 70 years, and during that time he wrote more than 30 books, over 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, screenplays and plays. More than eight million copies of his books have been sold in 36 languages. He also earned many honors and awards along the way. His favorite was perhaps being named “ideas consultant” for the United States Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. “Can you imagine how excited I was?” he later said about the honor. “‘Cause I’m changing lives, and that’s the thing. […] That’s my function, and it should be the function of every science fiction writer around. To offer hope. To name the problem and then offer the solution. And I do, all the time.”
Though none of his works won a Pulitzer, in 2007 Bradbury received a special citation from the Pulitzer board for his “distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.” In his final years, Bradbury felt content about his place in the annals of science fiction history, having achieved his childhood ambition of living forever through his work. Bradbury died in Los Angeles on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91.
This podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spreaker. Please take a few moments to leave a review ( for Spreaker follow & heart us). Those reviews encourage us and help us be found by new listeners.
There are few things as wonderful as discovering a fabulous new author. Who would have thought this weeks episode would turn into a love fest but Bridget Hardy charmed us all. Constance’s Law is a story with many themes as we explore a young woman’s life in a small town after a brutal assault, and the qualities of victimhood and survival. Join us as we discuss just what it was about Constance’s Law that works for all three of us.
Yes, we do have a rating scale based on Bradberries! For the history of this goofy system, see Anais’ post “Read Short Stories or Ray Bradbury Cries.” If you want to design a Bradberry, we’d love to see it. Anais has the urge to create a Bradberry collage… Imagine, Bradberries on your desktop! You gave last week’s story, Tony Takitani by Haruki Murakami, 4.25 Bradberries.
On a scale of 1-6 Bradberries, how do you rate ‘Constance’s Law‘? Tell us in the comments below or via voicemail, and we will give you the final tally on the next episode.
Next week we are reading The Veldt by Ray Bradbury.
This podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spreaker. Please take a few moments to leave a review ( for Spreaker follow & heart us). Those reviews encourage us and help us be found by new listeners.
This week both Gerald and Maya both found the story difficult to enjoy, while Anais loved the story enough to give it 5 Bradberries. Despite Kenechi’s absence due to exams, this weeks podcast prompted a great discussion about what it is that lets a reader to get close to a story. You can find the Author Spotlight for Haruki Murakami.
Yes, we do have a rating scale based on Bradberries! For the history of this goofy system, see Anais’ post “Read Short Stories or Ray Bradbury Cries.” If you want to design a Bradberry, we’d love to see it. Anais has the urge to create a Bradberry collage… Imagine, Bradberries on your desktop! You gave last week’s story, Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor, 3.75 Bradberries.
On a scale of 1-6 Bradberries, how do you rate ‘Tony Takitani‘? Tell us in the comments below or via voicemail, and we will give you the final tally on the next episode.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami, like his protagonists, is not drawn to crowds or fame. When asked by the Paris Review if he has any literary friends, he responded with “No, I don’t think so.” When pressed, he elaborated
I’m a loner. I don’t like groups, schools, literary circles. At Princeton, there was a luncheonette, or something like that, and I was invited to eat there. Joyce Carol Oates was there and Toni Morrison was there and I was so afraid, I couldn’t eat anything at all! […] I just want to have . . . distance.
Murakami’s preference for distance has left an impression on his writing, which features recurring themes of alienation and loneliness. His work is frequently melancholy, marked by fatalism, and tends to the surreal. His fiction is heavily influenced by Kafka, but it is not bereft of humor. Quite on the contrary, Murakami’s dry humor shines through the melancholia, in part due to his admiration of the American satirist Richard Brautigan.
In addition to Kafka and Brautigan, Murakami names Chandler, Vonnegut, Salinger, and Kerouac as early influencers, as well as Western classical and jazz music. His taste for Western culture falls out of step with his parents’ profession. He was born in 1949 to two professors of traditional Japanese literature.
Their love of both traditional culture and writing did not immediately pass down to their son. Murakami began writing fairly late, at the age of 29, but his appreciation of the arts was fostered early. He studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife Yoko whom he married at age 23. Although Murakami does not claim any writers in his social circle, he compares Yoko as the Zelda to his F. Scott Fitzgerald — his first reader, trusted advisor, and confidante.
By age 29 he was running a jazz club in Tokyo named Peter Cat, much like the protagonist of his later novel South of the Border, West of the Sun. According to an oft-repeated story, he was inspired to write his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979) in 1978 while watching a baseball game in Jingu Stadium between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp. When American Dave Hilton hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized that he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night, and completed Hear the Wind Sing in ten months. He sent it off to the only literary contest that accepted a work of that length, the Gunzo Award, and, naturally, won Best First Novel.
Several of his works have been adapted for film or stage, including a 75 minute film adaptation of this week’s story “Tony Takitani”. The film played at various film festivals and was released in New York and Los Angeles on July 29, 2005.
As Murakami tells it, he was intrigued by the name Tony Takitani when at a garage sale in Hawaii he found a yellow T-shirt that said, “Tony Takitani, House (D).” At the time, Takitani was running for office. Murakami decided to write the man’s life story.
Early in his career, Murakami maintained a position of social detachment, refraining from commenting on social or political issues. But he credits a stay in the United States in 1991 as changing his position from one of detachment to commitment. His early books, he said, originated in an individual darkness, while his later works tap into the darkness found in society and history.
This shift is reflected in both his work and his public life. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995) is considered his first socially conscious book, dealing in part with war crimes committed by the Japanese in Manchuria. This is a topic which stays with Murakami to this day, as evidenced by his April 2015 call for Japan to apologize for the atrocities committed against China, Korea, and other countries during WWII.
His social consciousness extends beyond socio-political awareness to individual intimacy and care. In interviews, Murakami stresses the importance of being kind to his readers and serving their needs in his writing. In 2014 he launched an advice column where he personally answers fans questions about their everyday lives, from how to navigate sticky social situations to, of course, love.
Image taken from Mr. Murakami’s Place.
“I can’t think of another writer alive today with the kind of intimacy he has with his readers — and he takes it very very seriously,” says Roland Kelts, a journalist who has previously written about Murakami for The New Yorker.
Although his advice column is written exclusively in Japanese, the Washington Post has written a piece with translated excerpts that capture the quaintness and sincerity well.
He is a writer of great imagination and human sympathy, one who has enthralled millions of readers by building fictional worlds that are uniquely his. Murakami-san has a singular vision, as informed by pop culture as it is by deep channels of Japanese tradition.
A list of short stories by Murakami and published by the New York can be found here.
This podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spreaker. Please take a few moments to leave a review ( for Spreaker follow & heart us). Those reviews encourage us and help us be found by new listeners.
I am glad we had Jocelyn Johnson as our first guest. The sound quality is lower than usual, but she was a wonderful guest and added a lot to the discussion. Jocelyn and Maya found the story well crafted with a few key places where something felt off. Gerald enjoyed it as well and we had an interesting exchange on Class in the US verses the UK. As usual, Kenechi did not disappoint with a strong divergence of opinion. I hope you enjoy the episode. You can find the Author Spotlight for Flannery O’Connor here.
Yes, we do have a rating scale based on Bradberries! For the history of this goofy system, see Anais’ post “Read Short Stories or Ray Bradbury Cries.” If you want to design a Bradberry, we’d love to see it. Anais has the urge to create a Bradberry collage… Imagine, Bradberries on your desktop! You gave last week’s story, “The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” by Gabriel García Márquez, 5.5 Bradberries.
On a scale of 1-6 Bradberries, how do you rate ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge‘? Tell us in the comments below or via voicemail, and we will give you the final tally on the next episode.
Next week we are reading be reading Tony Takitani by Haruki Murakami. I hope you enjoy it!
Between Mary Flannery O’Connor’s diagnosis with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus in 1951 and her eventual death in 1964, Flannery O’Connor wrote more than two dozen short stories and two novels. Born on March 25th, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia (USA), she died on August 3rd, 1964 (aged 39) in Milledgeville, Georgia, from complications of the disease, which had also killed her father.
After a strange episode when she was a young girl, being featured on Pathé News for having a trained chicken that could walk backwards, she graduated from Peabody Laboratory School and Georgia State College for Women with a social sciences degree. Whilst she attended GSCW, she served as editor for the college literary magazine, The Corinthian, and contributed many cartoons and written pieces including essays, fiction and occasional poems.
She won a scholarship to the State University of Iowa to study journalism, but after one term she decided that journalism wasn’t for her, and asked to be transferred to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop to study for a masters in Creative Writing.
Her style has been described as ‘Southern Gothic’, filled with black humour and her characters are often morally flawed. Despite being a devout Catholic, her stories often feature fundamental Protestants. The writing is underpinned by her characters’ struggle with human sinfulness and a desire for divine grace. She wrote: “Grace changes us and change is painful.”
She also weaves dark humour through her stories, often based on the disparity between her characters’ limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another source of humour is frequently found in her portrayal of well-meaning liberals trying to cope with the rural South.
O’Connor was hard-working, spending each morning writing even as she struggled in her later years with lupus. She never married, relying for companionship on her close relationship with her mother and her vast correspondence. Writer Betty Hester received a weekly letter from O’Connor for over nine years.
For her work, she received many honours, including an O. Henry Award in 1957 and the National Book Award in 1972, and she was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America.
This podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spreaker. Please take a few moments to leave a review ( for Spreaker follow & heart us). Those reviews encourage us and help us be found by new listeners.
Wow, we found a Magical realism story Gerald liked! I was over the moon with excitement and the podcast doth bubble over. The messy video is on our Youtube page, and the glistening audio podcast is above. Check out the great article Kenechi wrote for the Author Spotlight on Gabriel García Márquez. You can feel the passion he has for this author and it’s a wonderful read.
Yes, we do have a rating scale based on Bradberries! For the history of this goofy system, see Anais’ post “Read Short Stories or Ray Bradbury Cries.” If you want to design a Bradberry, we’d love to see it. Anais has the urge to create a Bradberry collage… Imagine, Bradberries on your desktop! You gave last week’s story, “The Old Man at the Bridge” by Ernest Hemingway, 4 Bradberries.
On a scale of 1-6 Bradberries, how do you rate “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World“? Tell us in the comments below or via voicemail, and we will give you the final tally on the next episode.
Our Special Guest Host for next week, Jocelyn Johnson chose the next story! We’ll be reading Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor. I hope you enjoy it!
Reading along with us and have comments of your own? You are welcome to leave them on this website, our join our closed Facebook group for story discussion, The Literary Roadhouse Readers.
Ray Bradbury circa 1980. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
Image taken from Mr. Murakami’s Place.
