Episode 79: Seth Rogoff Returns

Here at the podcast factory, we’re thrilled to welcome back novelist, translator, collaborator and cultural critic Seth Rogoff to talk about his new novel—a thrilling and unsettling coda to Franz Kafka’s unfinished masterwork The Castle.

Seth joined us in Season 2 (Ep. #35) to talk about the also thrilling and decidedly unconventional memoir he helped to write with ESPN basketball analyst and former NBA star Kendrick Perkins, The Education of Kendrick Perkins, which took a critical look at racism in America, and in professional sports, and sounded a call for justice and social change—a book hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “a well-balanced blend of activism and memoir.” 

In that first interview, we talked a little bit about Seth’s work as a noted Kafka translator, and we’re picking up that conversation here, as Seth celebrates the publication of The Castle—“a palimpsestic fever dream” of a novel, according to another noted Kafka translator, Ross Benjamin. 

(Go ahead and look up palimpsestic—we’ll wait.) 

In this follow-up conversation, we talk with Seth about the collaborative nature of translation, the state of contemporary memoir, and the never-ending search to find meaningful stories in the life and work of others. 

Learn more about Seth Rogoff:

• Website
• BlueSky
• Threads
• Twitter

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