Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin · Jessa Crispin

"Daphne Award 2018" (w/ Margaret Howie)

January 17, 2019·47 min·4 clips

Jessa Crispin reveals why literary awards often miss the art that lasts, focusing on 1967's overlooked books.

Forever is the first joke. The episode swerves from mattress-ad patter into Patreon housekeeping, then uses that loose, self-aware setup to get to the award premise. Major prizes look solid until someone starts tapping on them. Crispin explains that the project goes back to literary awards from 50 years ago because the books praised in the moment are not always the ones that hang around. The target is plain enough. The old committees, as she frames it, kept circling names like John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer while missing women, writers of color, and books that were formally harder to place. From there, the shortlist turns into a literary knife fight. Samuel Delaney's fable-playing Einstein Intersection gets weighed against Angela's The Magic Toyshop and the other finalists. Then availability sneaks in as criticism, because of course it does. The pair joke about out-of-print books, hard-to-source Bartlemy, and Brexit already messing with the book supply line at a local Forbidden Planet. The riff is silly, but it earns its keep. The canon starts to look less like pure taste and more like committees, reprints, stock problems, and whoever is still easy to buy. By the middle, almost everyone has been cleared away. Anna Kavan, Simone de Beauvoir, and Milan Kundera land as the final three, each treated as strong enough that picking any one of them would not be embarrassing. Kavan gets the hottest attention. Crispin says she seems to be having a moment, maybe helped along by Kate Zambrino, which folds the episode's revival game back into the present. Deadpan disrespect keeps the whole thing from turning reverent. Kundera and Samuel Delaney are imagined ignoring invitations, old literary bitterness gets laughed at, and ceremony keeps getting punctured before it can sit up straight. The ending slips into production chatter, but even that fits. The joke becomes literary afterlife as merch, money, and personalized mythmaking, which is the shabby machinery the episode has been circling the whole time.

As heard by us

A sharp, funny case for looking past the prize list to the books awards left out.

Public Intellectual revisits Jessa Crispin's annual sweep of literary awards to ask why the same names keep surfacing if prizes really tracked lasting art.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want literary awards treated like a brawl, not a plaque.

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