Podcasting
The AMERICAN NOVEL site's monthly podcast will feature authors, scholars and critics discussing important novels, historic and contemporary. New podcast interviews will be available each month. You can subscribe to the podcast using this link: feeds.feedburner.com/AmericanNovel or by importing the below url to your favorite news reader: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/rss/podcast.xml.

PASSING and Nella Larsen:
In this interview, Scholar Dr. Thadious M. Davis addresses the topic of the American Dream and discusses the work and life of Harlem Renaissance author, Nella Larsen. Davis reveals how the events in Larsen's life would influence her work, most notably, her 1929 novel PASSING. The novel takes a brutally hard look at the issues of race, shades of skin color and "passing for white." Davis explains how the lives of the novel's characters reflect the aspirations of many African Americans at the time and the lengths some felt they had to go in order to obtain the promise of the American Dream. Listen

Gish Jen and the American Dream:
In this interview, author Gish Jen discusses the paradox of the American Dream, and the ways in which its promise of social mobility has been both true and untrue for different groups of Americans. Jen offers her opinion of the ways in which various American writers -- among them Ben Franklin, Ann Petry, and Edith Wharton -- have addressed this theme, and also elaborates on her own sources of inspiration for her work. Listen

Check back in June for another AMERICAN NOVEL interview.