#185: The Devils Books
There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neapolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won\u2019t ever want to read, like Leonid Brezhnev\u2019s memoirs, Saddam Hussein\u2019s hackneyed romance novels, or the Kim family\u2019s film theory. This show is about that kind of very long book, and the man who decided to read all of them: Daniel Kalder, who joins us on the show to talk about his journey through The Infernal Library and what these books tell us about the dictatorial soul, assuming there is one. This episode originally aired in 2018.
Go beyond the episode:
- Daniel Kalder\u2019s The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy
- Dive into Turkmenbashi\u2019s Ruhnama, if you dare.
- Daniel Kalder reviews Saddam Hussein\u2019s prose\u2014he \u201ctortured metaphors, too\u201d\u2014or you can read it yourself
- Or check out Kalder\u2019s dispatches from The Guardian\u2019s \u201cDictator-lit\u201d archives
- While we couldn\u2019t find a video of Fidel Castro\u2019s four-hour-and-29-minute address to the United Nations in 1960, you can read it here
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