S7 Ep. 9: American Farce: Timothy Schaffert on the Literary Parallels for the House GOP Clusterf**k

fiction/non/fiction

Novelist Timothy Schaffert joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how the concept of farce relates to today’s GOP-controlled House of Representatives. Schaffert describes the lack of self-awareness in both fictional and real-life characters, including politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, and analyzes how it renders them comical, absurd, and maddening to watch. He talks about what observers can learn from those behaviors, and also reads from his forthcoming book, The Titanic Survivors Book Club.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Timothy Schaffert

• The Titanic Survivors Book Club
• The Perfume Thief
• The Swan Gondola
• The Coffins of Little Hope
• Devils in the Sugar Shop
• The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God
• The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

Others:

• The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey
• Fiction/Non/Fiction Season One, Episode Three: “The Power of Facebook: How Big is Too Big?”
• “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges
• Fiction/Non/Fiction Season Three, Episode Nine: “All the President’s Henchmen: Susan Choi and Garrett Graff on the Citizens of the Swamp”
• Tartuffe by Molière
• Beetlejuice
• Airplane!
• Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco
• “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” by Karl Marx
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• Jean Cocteau

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