“I think we live in an era that is so deprived of authenticity, where people can’t live the lives Peter and Paul did, and so many young people are desperate to do that: to live in a cheap neighborhood and make art.”

With THE WONDERFUL WORLD THAT ALMOST WAS: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (FSG), Andrew Durbin brings us a masterful biography of a pair of artists, their art, gay life pre- and post-Stonewall, and more. We talk about his first exposure to each of their art, why he restricted the biography to the years Paul and Peter were together/around each other (1956-1975), how queer lives are often oriented around death and why he wanted to affirm life with this book, when a biographer can let his subjects go, and why he prefers Thek over Hujar. We get into the ephemerality of much of Thek’s art installations, Hujar’s dissatisfaction with commercial photography and the struggles with getting photos taken seriously as art, the triangle they formed with Andrew’s hero, Susan Sontag, Thek’s belief that marrying the right woman (Sontag, at one point) would have “fixed” him, his regret at not getting to interview Joseph Raffael for the book, and how meeting Ann Wilson changed the course of the book. We also discuss how Andrew became an art-writer/-editor by accident, how NYC has changed since he left 6 years ago, why young people are enthusiastic about his Thek and Hujar, why he needs to decompress from writing about history, how art criticism feeds his fiction and poetry, and more. Give it a listen! And go read The Wonderful World That Almost Was!

“You can’t bring people back from the dead, but you can build a bridge.”

“My entire education in contemporary art happened because every time someone would ask me to write something, I would say yes and have to immediately have to learn all about it.”

“I live with a Polaroid of Susan Sontag next to my bed. . . . I really enjoyed writing Paul Thek’s crush on Susan.”

“All art writing is about trying to figure out why an arbitrary thing is in the room at any given moment. And that’s what fiction is, and that’s what poetry is, too.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Andrew Durbin is the editor in chief of frieze magazine. He is the author of the novels MacArthur Park, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and Skyland, and served as the editor for Kevin Killian’s posthumous work Fascination. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Paris Review online, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in London. His new book is The Wonderful World That Almost Was.

Follow Andrew on Bluesky and Instagram

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Nice photo of Andrew by Suzannah Pettigrew; selfie in subway by me; photos of Paul Thek (contact sheet) and in studio by Peter Hujar. Some of it’s on my instagram.

With REAL LIFE COMIX: ONLY IN NEW YORK (Cosmic Lion Productions), editors Dean Haspiel and Doug Latino bring together 66 fantastic cartoonists and writers to tell 51 autobiographical comic stories about NYC . . . and I’m among them! We got together to talk about the book & its publishing history, the incredible lineup Dean and Doug have assembled (including ~20 of my past pod-guests — like Roz Chast, Drew Friedman, Jonathan Ames, Karl Stevens, Jennifer Hayden, Ben Katchor, and Moby — and a ton of other great cartoonists!), why no one’s made a New York City-centric autobio-comics anthology before, what makes for an “Only In New York” story & why I went with a tough one for my 2-page comic, and why YOU NEED TO SUPPORT THE KICKSTARTER (ending May 8, 2026) to help bring it all into print! (Yes, we talk about other stuff, like My Joe Franklin Story, what I’ve learned on hiatus, what Doug & Dean have learned about editing, the challenges of bringing non-comics-writers into the book, why I don’t ‘think’ comics, my favorite Deadly Sin, and more.) Give it a listen! And go support REAL LIFE COMIX: ONLY IN NEW YORK!

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guests

Dean Haspiel is an Emmy & Ringo Award-winning NYC cartoonist, playwright + Yaddo fellow. He is the creator of Billy Dogma, The Red Hook, Covid Cop & Chest Face. Dean has worked for Marvel, DC, Archie, Image, Webtoon, etc., and is currently making the one-man comics anthology, ANTIMATTER.

Doug Latino is a short story writer, visual artist, and photographer, based in Brooklyn, NY.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Dean’s studio in Brooklyn on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones and a Shure Beta 58A feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Doug & Dean by me. It’s on my instagram.

“Persephone lives in the land of the dead for half a year, every year. Emotionally, psychologically, how does a living girl end up in the land of the dead? And that’s what depression feels like.”

With The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir (Wesleyan University Press), poet-translator-professor Rachel Tzvia Back explores her life with high-functioning depression, weaving Ancient Greek myth, poetry, family history, interviews, and more into an amazing tapestry of life in the dark forest. We talk about the challenge of structuring the arc-less nature of depression, the shame of not being completely debilitated by her illness, how the myth of Demeter and Persephone helped her translate and understand her experience as a mother and a daughter, what it means to be the mother who fails and why she included interviews with her adult children in the book, whether there’s a therapeutic aspect to writing a memoir like this, and how much of a departure this book was from her poet-roots. We also get into how she found herself in Greek and Roman myths in contrast to her orthodox Jewish upbringing, how she manages to bridge the Athens and Jerusalem divide as a teacher, her family’s roots in Israel and what the country has become since she moved back 40+ years ago, what it’s like to live life under rockets and how normalizing it affects us, our takes on Achilles and Odysseus, and more. Give it a listen! And go read The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir!

“Depression has no real narrative arc, no rising action, no climax, no resolution. It just is.”

“The Israel I moved back to in 1982 is radically different than the Israel of today.”

“My children remind me how bizarre it is and how we have normalized that which is abnormal, these rockets, and we can’t begin to understand the long-term impact of it.”

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Rachel Tzvia Back is a poet, translator and professor of literature. The author of 12 books, her poems and verse translations have received awards and recognitions, including the Times Literary Supplement Award, PEN Translation Prize, and Finalist for the National Poetry Award in Translation.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Rachel by someone else. It’s on my instagram.

Essayist Sven Birkerts, one of my favorite past pod-guests, welcomes me back to the mic for a conversation about writing, art, mortality, resistance, technology, and selling rare books! We talk about what he’s learned about writing from his Substack essay-experiment, how he rediscovered his bookselling persona with his daughter, what he gets from audiobooks, the pros and cons of knowing your audience, and more. Plus, I talk about my book-in-progress, what I’ve learned from stepping back from the weekly podcast routine, why I’d like to see Dylan play one more time before one or the other of us is gone, and where this podcast might be going, among other stuff. Give it a listen! And go subscribe to his Substack and read The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing (along with his other essays and books)!

(And go listen to our 2017, 2020, 2021, and 2024 conversations!)

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Sven Birkerts is the author of eleven books of essay and memoir, including The Gutenberg Elegies and Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age. He is the former Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the co-editor of the journal AGNI. He lives in Amherst with his wife Lynn.

Follow Sven on Instagram, subscribe to his Substack, and check out his and his daughter’s rare bookstore, Birkbooks, at eBay and Instagram.

Here’s me & Sven, back in 2024:

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos by Sven. They’re on his instagram.

For his 2025 year-end wrap-up, Gil’s putting The Virtual Memories Show podcast & newsletter on hiatus (!): talk about your crazy New Year’s resolutions! He talks about how he recognized It Was Time For A Break, whether or not this podcast is what gives his life meaning, what he might get up to (HINT: it’s WAY past time he finishes writing his Instax book), and how months of depression after his dad’s death left him feeling like he was out of options. He gets into his 2025 highlights and why he needed to visit his photo library to overcome his amnesia, the hairiness of his professional life, the thrill of receiving holiday cards from his arts-heroes, the blessings of this world, and a lot more. It’s the last episode for a while, so GIVE IT A LISTEN!

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Gil Roth has been making The Virtual Memories Show since 2012, and is taking a break in 2026. You can find out more about him at his About page. You can drop him an email or leave a comment on this post if you want to reach him.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The episode was recorded at Virtual Memories Headquarters on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos generally by me. It’s on my instagram.

It’s time for our year-end Virtual Memories Show tradition, now celebrating its thirteenth anniversary: The Guest List! I reached out to 2025’s pod-guests and asked them about the favorite book(s) they read in the past year, as well as the books or authors they’re hoping to read in 2026! Twenty-six guests responded with wonderful, idiosyncratic, and illuminating book recommendations: Jonathan Ames, Kayla E., Dan Goldman, Dean Haspiel, Jennifer Hayden, Rian Hughes, Paul Karasik, Glenn Kurtz, David Leopold, Seth Lorinczi, Sacha Mardou, Kate Maruyama, Whitney Matheson, Josh Neufeld, Lance Richardson, Ari Richter, ML Rio, Dmitry Samarov, Jonathan Sandler, Damion Searls, David Shields, Peter Stothard, Tom Tomorrow, Peter Trachtenberg, Cecile Wajsbrot, and Mia Wolff (and me)! This great episode of The Virtual Memories Show offers up a huge list of books that you’re going to want to read in the new year, so give it a listen, and get ready to update your reading lists!

You can listen to The Guest List episode here, but if you visit our special Guest List 2025 page, you’ll find the list of all our respondents and all the books they cited (w/links!).

Also, go check out The Guest List archive page, which has links to all of the previous annual editions of The Guest List, dating back to 2013!

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Instagram, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guests

The guests who participated in this year’s Guest List are Jonathan Ames, Kayla E., Dan Goldman, Dean Haspiel, Jennifer Hayden, Rian Hughes, Paul Karasik, Glenn Kurtz, David Leopold, Seth Lorinczi, Sacha Mardou, Kate Maruyama, Whitney Matheson, Josh Neufeld, Lance Richardson, Ari Richter, ML Rio, Dmitry Samarov, Jonathan Sandler, Damion Searls, David Shields, Peter Stothard, Tom Tomorrow, Peter Trachtenberg, Cecile Wajsbrot, and Mia Wolff and me, Gil Roth!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The episode was recorded at stately Virtual Memories Manor on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of my 2025 reads by me. It’s on my instagram.

Let’s close out 2025 with graphic memoirist and comics journalist Jonathan Sandler! We talk about his childhood secret origin in comics, the comics course in 2017 that brought him back to the form, the process of turning his grandfather’s WWII memoir into a comic, THE ENGLISH GI (with art by Brian Bicknell), and how he really became a comics aficionado after publishing his first graphic novel. We get into how he started the Graphic Memoir blog and began reviewing comics, interviewing cartoonists, visiting exhibitions, and spreading the comics gospel, and why this very podcast has provided him with a ton of inspiration. We also discuss what he’s learned from and about interviewing, why he’s started drawing his own comics, why he’s glad he dived into making The English GI instead of researching all the other WWII graphic novels out there, what the late Tom Spurgeon meant to me and everyone else he met, why the most difficult thing about making comics is choosing what to put in the panels, and more. Give it a listen! And go subscribe to Graphic Memoir and read THE ENGLISH GI!

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Jonathan Sandler runs a blog dedicated to exploring the latest in comics, graphic novels, and exhibitions, blending his passion for storytelling with his deep interest in visual art. He studied Politics at Leicester University and has spent much of his career in the software industry, leading and managing complex projects. In 2020, Jonathan combined his lifelong love of World War II history and graphic novels to create The English GI, a World War II graphic memoir published by graphicmemoir.co.uk in 2022. A keen sketcher, Jonathan draws inspiration from the intersection of history and art. He lives in North West London with his wife and three children.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded in a hotel room at The Westin London City on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Jonathan & me by me; photo of him at signing by someone else. It’s on my instagram.

“Part of what The Magic Mountain is about is the sense of having lived through a really major rupture in time, of living through a moment in which an old order is falling apart. And that’s the way in which it most speaks to our time.”

With THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale University Press), Morten Høi Jensen brings us a masterful biography of one of the great novels of the 20th century and shows how it and its author speak to our present moment. We talk about Morten’s history with Mann’s novel, his weeks of research in the sanatoria of Davos and his discovery of how much of The Magic Mountain‘s world is intact a century later, and how Mann’s novel changed for him in the process of writing this book. We get into Mann’s political transformation from a nationalist into an antifascist, how art & politics can make for a disastrous mix, Mann’s rivalry with his novelist brother Heinrich, and what it was like to write about a novel about life in a TB clinic while in the middle of a pandemic. We also discuss the weird connection I draw between Mann and Thomas Pynchon, how Morten became a literary biographer via the biography of another novel, spiritualism before and after WWI, how he came around on the chapter of The Magic Mountain that bored him in his earlier readings, why Robert Musil resented Mann, whether it’s okay to write margin notes and never look at them, and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS!

“Mann doesn’t come at politics in a straight and narrow way. Nothing is ever really straightforward for him, but the more I researched his later antifascism, the deeper my admiration for his courage became.”

“Approaching a novelist through their creation feels to me a more fruitful way of approaching questions of biography.”

“In some respects, Mann may not have realized how much this novel is about the years in which it’s written.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Morten Høi Jensen is the author of The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain, and A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, and Commonweal, among other publications. He currently works as the European Liaison for Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Morten by Darren Gerrish. It’s on my instagram.

“I felt again incredulity that one person could have produced this poem.”

With her amazing new book, DANTE: THE ESSENTIAL COMMEDIA (Liveright), scholar Prue Shaw brings us a canto-by-canto journey through Dante’s masterwork, interweaving translated verses with her commentary, and serving as a Virgil-like guide to the poem. We talk about how she was inspired by John Carey’s The Essential Paradise Lost, why the Paradiso was her biggest challenge, how the poem has changed for her over the course of her life, and why she went with prose translations of Dante rather than verse. We get into Dante’s balance of pride in his art and his humility before God, the modern sound of Dante’s verse and the challenge of translating Italian into English, what she’s learning from helping translate Shelley into Italian, why she wants The Essential Commedia to serve as a gateway drug into Dante, and the nature of language & why the Tower of Babel plays a big role in the Commedia. We also discuss her incredible work on third edition of the Digital Commedia, life after the death of her husband, Clive James, and putting a collection of his final poems together, how an issue of the X-Men turned me on to Dante as a kid, my changing views on Ulysses in the Commedia, why sloth is my fave of the deadly sins, and more. Give it a listen! And go read DANTE: THE ESSENTIAL COMMEDIA!

“I wonder about some basic aspects of Dante writing the Commedia in exile, from court to court: How did he get his parchment? Where did he stash it?”

“Clive was a poet, not a TV celebrity. He got totally involved with TV, and may have lost his sense of direction. But in the last years, because he was ill and couldn’t leave the house, all he did was write poems.”

“I wanted the reader who has some Italian or wants to learn it to feel that they could read the English than look to the left and see how the Italian works.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Prue Shaw is an emeritus reader in Italian at University College London. She is the editor of the edizione nazionale of Dante’s medieval Latin treatise Monarchia and of a groundbreaking digital edition of the Commedia. She lives in Cambridge, England. Her new book is Dante: The Essential Commedia.

Listen to our 2015 conversation about Reading Dante: From Here To Eternity.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Prue’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Portrait photo of Prue by someone else; other ones by me, including ALL THE BOOKS. It’s on my instagram.

“It’s a profound question: What are we looking at? If you keep asking that question in a naive and cunning way, it will draw out the history of the world.”

Who were the men who built the Empire State Building? Glenn Kurtz returns to the show to tell their story with MEN AT WORK: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen who Built It (Seven Stories Press). We talk about how he accidentally fell into this project, how “turn every page” led him to a key discovery about Lewis Hine‘s photos of the Empire State construction, how his experience researching and writing THREE MINUTES IN POLAND helped him with this book, his childhood connection with the Empire State, and how identifying their subjects affects the mythic aura of Hine’s photographs. We get into the corporate perspective of the building and how it dehumanizes the workers who built it, and similarly how that heroic collectivist notion of The Worker devalues workers as people, whether craftsmanship and artisanship survived the transition into mass production during the skyscraper era, Hine’s authorial fallacy and the genius of his portraits, and what the Empire State says about the immigration-dynamics of the workforce and the role of unions, We also discuss the question of context and how the question, “What are we looking at?” can reveal the world, the resonance of Hine’s Icarus/Sky Boy pic, the messiness of history, the joy of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, why Glenn just wants to write a novel without it inspiring a nonfiction project, and more. Give it a listen! And go read MEN AT WORK!

“We have this idea that we want to be remembered, but one of the first things that goes away in family histories is the specificity of personalities.”

“I was surprised by how completely the idea of Worker overtakes the actual person.”

“Hine didn’t have a language precise enough to define what he was trying to do.”

“The closer you look at some of these sources, the fuzzier things get.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Glenn Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, which was named a “Best Book of 2014” by the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. A documentary film, Three Minutes—A Lengthening, based on the book, was directed by Bianca Stigter, co-produced by Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen, and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. After premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, the film was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and received the inaugural Yad Vashem Award for Outstanding Holocaust Documentary. Glenn’s first book, Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music, garnered enthusiastic reviews from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016-2017 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Glenn is a graduate of Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His new book is MEN AT WORK: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen who Built It.

Follow Glenn on Instagram and Facebook, and listen to our 2022 conversation.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Virtual Memories HQ on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Glenn by Beowulf Sheehan; photo Icarus by Lewis Hine; photo of me & Glenn by me. It’s on my instagram.