Love and Death in the American Novel

This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast.

I'm your host, Jarrett Earnest, and this episode is a reading following up on last week's conversation with Edwin Frank, in which we discuss Leslie Fiedler's 1960 book of literary criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel, which was reissued earlier this year by NYRB.

This is from a chapter about Mark Twain's 1884 novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and it is read by the novelist Rachel Kushner.

Indeed, to turn from Huckleberry Finn to the rest of Twain's work is disheartening, for there are only portions of other books which approach it.

He's this critic.

He wrote, basically he wrote this book, um, what was it called? Love and Death in the American Novel.

I was thinking about it too.

It's kind of a like neglected, maybe it's one for the lost shelf.