Three Percent #89: Don't Laugh So Loud

This week’s podcast is all about Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters, which came out last year and is “a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.”

Writer, critic, and Johnson fan Patrick Smith (here’s a recent review of his in 3:AM and one about Liminov in Music & Literature) joined us for this book club discussion, which goes off in a few different directions—how everyone’s untrustworthy and willing to sell each other out, how Johnson got all this detail about Africa, etc.—with the general consensus that this is a pretty great book and one that fans of Graham Greene and/or spy novels and/or well-crafted fiction in general would like.

(For another analysis/conversation of the book, I highly recommend this discussion between Paul Maliszewski and Jesse Pearson.)

We’ll update you in the future when we have a specific date set, but the next book we’ll be discussing in this “book club” format is Apocalypse Baby by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Sian Reynolds and available from Feminist Press. (Then I think we’ll be doing Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers, and may even have her on that podcast.)

This week’s music—and I apologize for bludgeoning your ears with this, but it will make sense by the end—is Fall Out Boy’s Centuries. (I literally cringed writing that sentence. Again, so sorry. We’ll make up for it next week with our annual music podcast.)

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