In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” a story about beauty, sacrifice, holiness, and the demanding vocation of the artist. In a quiet Norwegian religious community shaped by austerity, Babette arrives as a refugee and spends twelve years serving two aging sisters before…

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” a story about two brothers trying to understand one another across the distance created by responsibility, suffering, addiction, and art. They discuss Baldwin’s lyrical prose, his Harlem upbringing and life in Paris, the tension between the older…

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story in which the most important subject is never named. At a Spanish train station, an American man and a young woman called Jig wait for a train to Madrid while circling around a…

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a story of young adulthood, race, pride, dependence, and painful moral awakening. Set largely on a city bus, the story brings Julian, a self-consciously progressive college graduate, into collision with his cheerful but deeply prejudiced mother…

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem that captures the uncertainty and self-consciousness of adolescence and early adulthood. They consider Prufrock’s anxious journey through the modern city, his inability to act or speak decisively, and Eliot’s use of…

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Jon Fosse’s Trilogy, the work of a Norwegian novelist and playwright whose spare, musical prose gives voice to experiences that resist ordinary explanation. Focusing primarily on “Wakefulness,” they follow the young lovers Asle and Alida as they wander through cold and rain…

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda enter the teen years with Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?,” a terrifying story in which almost nothing violent happens on the page. They follow fifteen-year-old Connie from a restless family life and flirtation at a…

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda close their exploration of childhood with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Part children’s story, part fairy tale, and part philosophical meditation, the book asks readers to recover a childlike capacity for wonder without confusing innocence with naïveté. From the Little Prince’s…

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh begin their exploration of adolescence with James Joyce’s “Araby”, a story of youthful longing set against the drab, paralyzed world of Dublin. Tim and Emily discuss the unnamed boy’s intense attraction to Mangan’s sister, the religious and chivalric language through which…

In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Emily Maeda and Tim McIntosh explore Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, a psychologically complex ghost story that challenges idealized visions of childhood innocence. They discuss James’s elaborate prose, the governess’s uncertain perceptions, the sinister influence surrounding Miles and Flora, and the story’s unresolved tension…