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Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood with William Flesch, professor at Brandeis University and author of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. They discuss Jos\\xe9 Saramago\'s way with obscure Biblical episodes; literary Darwinism and its discontents; why and how we get concerned with what happens to fictional characters at all; the difference between stories we care about versus stories we don\'t; how we recommend books, films, and shows to friends, thus caring about how they care about how characters care about one another; Michael Haneke\'s scary Funny Games viewed with an audience and Michael Haneke\'s ludicrous Funny Games viewed at home; what\'s so great about Wittgenstein; the trade-off between humanizing and monsterizing your viliains, as with Hitler in Max and The Boys from Brazil; the perfect biological pitching of Onion\'s 9/11 headline "Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell"; what makes the 19th-century novels of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray so gripping; our desire to feel we\'ve misjudged characters; Buffy, Angel, and our bets about liking them; and characterization and reversion to type all the way from Shylock to Stewie Griffin.

Download the interview from Notebook on Cities and Culture\\u2019s feed here or on iTunes here.