Buntzcast 25: Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky (Featuring Phil Klay)
Phil Klay, National Book award-winning author and newly elected President of PEN America, pops into the Buntzcast to compare the merits of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I’m Team Tolstoy, Phil’s Team Dostoevsky—though we find a lot to like about both authors. Nothing seems to stimulate the literary world to paroxysms of rage and ecstasies of appreciation like placing these two Russian authors in tension, so I think you’ll enjoy our conversation (though you’ll have to supply your own paroxysms of rage). You can find Phil’s books—Redeployment, Missionaries, and Uncertain Ground—wherever fine literature is sold.
11 Aug 2026
Buntzcast 24. Grace Morgan (The Media Training Episode)
Foreign policy expert, frequent CSPAN viewer, radical feminist, fiction writer, and future Chicago mayoral hopeful Grace Morgan pops into the Buntzcast to engage in media training for her political career and air her nuanced and often surprising views. This is a conversation that can justly be described as "wide-ranging": we cover the Sunni-Shia split, contemporary feminism, the curious habits of Germans, the shorter works of Tolstoy, and more. (I also probably share more autobiographical information than I have on previous podcasts.)
26 May 2026
Buntzcast 24. The Magic Mountain (Feat. Boschian Belle)
Switching things up. Normally, the Buntzcast is a Marc Maron/Terry Gross style podcast, in which the guest distills his or her essence for the audience. We’re doing it a little different this time: this is the first installment of the Buntzcast Book Club.
Boschian Belle (https://x.com/boschianbelle) pops into The Buntzcast to discuss Thomas Mann’s epochal novel of ideas, The Magic Mountain, in which the protagonist, Hans Castorp, experiences “the intoxication of ideas and the lure of eros.” You don’t want to miss this one.
(If you plan on reading the novel, I’d recommend only listening to the first half though because we do give a lot away.)
The next installment of the Buntzcast Book Club will be on Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Read it with us.
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