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September 1, 2021 58 mins

Prepare for what might be Marlon & Jake’s most controversial hot takes yet, as they travel back through the last four hundred years to decide which dead authors from each century stand the test of time and which can be left to gather dust on the shelf.  Where do they fall on Paradise Lost?  Who triumphs in the battle of the poets v. novelists of the 18th century? How much has the 1930s Hollywood studio system shaped classic stories?  Which of them stans Huckleberry Finn, and who thinks it might be overrated?  Marlon & Jake answer these questions and more as they discuss the timeless work of the freaky, the rebellious and the groundbreaking. From Mary Shelley to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Paul Laurence Dunbar to Daphne du Maurier—with a healthy dose of Alexander Pope-dissing—tune in to find out where you stand with their picks. 

  • The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
  • The Adventures of Amir Hamza by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami
  • Paradise Lost by John Milton
  • The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
  • The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer 
  • The Provoked Wife by John Vanbrugh
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  • Mathilda by Mary Shelley
  • The Last Man by Mary Shelley
  • The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
  • Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
  • The Complete Poems of William Blake
  • Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
  • Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
  • Pamela by Samuel Richardson
  • Bleak House by Charles Dickens
  • Nana by Émile Zola
  • Germinal by Émile Zola
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
  • The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar
  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
  • The Awakening by Kate Chopin
  • “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
  • A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Forest of A Thousand Daemons by D.O. Fagunwa
  • Cane by Jean Toomer
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
  • The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez
  • Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  • Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe
  • No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
  • The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  • Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  • A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
  • The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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