The podcast to listen to
LeVar Burton Reads, “Graham Greene” by Percival Everett
“Reading Rainbow is back, baby! Or rather, not exactly: More like the guy from Reading Rainbow is hosting an eponymous podcast where he reads short stories with mild cursing and adult themes. Yes, LeVar Burton Reads is the rare podcast that can be described in full by its three-word title. Each episode Burton retells a different work, drawing on his well-(La)forged skills in narration to evoke the layered moods etched into the prose. He does voices, there’s background music—the whole effect is quite atmospheric and captivating. The readings are bookended by bits of context and author analysis from Burton. In ‘Graham Greene’ by Percival Everett, he tells listeners that the author has a habit of keeping readers off-kilter and throwing them at the conclusion. The story is a mystery of sorts, which kicks off when a 102-year-old woman, in the last week she has to live, tasks a man she barely knows with tracking down the 82-year-old son she hasn’t seen for 30 years. All the man has to go on is a name, Davey Cloud, and a youthful photograph of a man resembling Graham Greene. Not the author, but the Native American actor.”
Read about the rest of the week’s best podcasts here.
The album to listen to
Tyler, The Creator, Flower Boy
“[Tyler, The Creator’s] flow has tightened up, and for a man whose voice basically destined him for rap stardom, he’s become even better at stretching his booming baritone into novel shapes, employing a plethora of flows (his knotty, dense cadence on ‘November’ mimics the tight corners he raps about navigating in his vehicle). His production, too, has further blossomed out of hagiographic dedication to replicating N.E.R.D.-era Neptunes sounds and into Tyler’s own singular aesthetic. The plush orchestration of ‘See You Again’ gives way to a massive crunch before finding a symbiosis later in the song, balancing the delicate and the heavy. His clobberers still pack a punch, too: ‘Who Dat Boy,’ which features a particularly locked-in ASAP Rocky, lurches with menace, managing to transform the flute into the nightmarish; later on ‘I Ain’t Got Time!’ he turns the accordion into a fun-house mirror, warped and disorienting.”
Read the rest of our review here.
The book to read
Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face Of War: An Oral History Of Women In World War II
“Gang rapes, limbs amputated with carpenter’s saws and no anesthetic, partisans drowning their own bawling babies, prisoners of war being stabbed and brained to death, suicides dangling from village trees—the revised edition of the Nobel Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich’s landmark book about the experiences of Soviet women during World War II, newly translated as The Unwomanly Face Of War, is as much an oratorio of horror as an oral history. It begins, more or less, with a cacophony of nameless, faceless voices: pages and pages of out-of-context interview material, the worst of the worst, censored from the original Soviet edition or cut by Alexievich herself. Who are these people? Are they interviewed elsewhere in the book? Did she make them up as some kind of rhetorical device? Before this comes a very brief history of women in the military—from ancient Greece to World War II—and a few diary entries. But it’s the stomach-churning danse macabre of anonymous story fragments that makes the point. Then, the first proper chapter, a morbid duet: two long interviews with female snipers. By the time The Unwomanly Face Of War gets to the place where one might expect an oral history to begin—that is, a chapter where dozens of interviewees recall enlisting in the Soviet war effort in paragraph-sized chunks—the reader has already been led deep into the dark regions of the war, its psychological and social aftermath, and the Soviet psyche.”
Read the rest of our review here.