The Virtual Memories Show

With his amazing new book The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York (Black Sparrow Press), Peter Trachtenberg explores the 50+ years of history for Westbeth Artists Housing i…

Author David Shields returns to the show for a conversation about his new documentary, HOW WE GOT HERE, and the companion book, HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of …

Uh-oh! Gil doesn't have a guest this week, so he recorded a monologue from a hotel room in Weehawken, NJ during a business conference for his day job! He talks mental health, oblique mythology, Charl…

With THE MAN NOBODY KILLED: Life, Death, and Art In Michael Stewart's New York (Celadon Books), author Elon Green brings us an investigation into a terrible episode of police brutality and its afterm…

Biographer Vanda Krefft returns to the show to celebrate her wonderful & illuminating new book: EXPECT GREAT THINGS!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women (A…

With DEATH TRIP: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir (Spiral Path Collective Press), Seth Lorinczi explores how trauma can be transmitted over generations, and how an ancient (& new) form of treatmen…

With NAPLES 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory (Yale University Press, tr. Shelley Frisch), Martin Mittelmeier traces the roots of the Frankfurt School in southern Italy…

Can LA private detective Happy Doll live up to the Four Noble Truths and escape the cycle of Samsara? Jonathan Ames returns to the show to help answer that question and celebrate his new novel, KARMA…

With his latest book, THE DRIVING MACHINE: A Design History of the Car (Norton), architect and architecture & design writer Witold Rybczynski explores how cars evolved from their earliest days throug…

Cartoonist Matt Madden rejoins the show to celebrate his new collection, SIX TREASURES OF THE SPIRAL: Comics Formed Under Pressure (Uncivilized Books). We talk about the liberation to be found in for…

After 4+ decades as a reporter and with a half-dozen nonfiction books under his belt, Fred Kaplan rejoins the show to celebrate his first foray into fiction, A CAPITAL CALAMITY (Miniver Press)! We ta…

With THE EMPTY LOT (Fantagraphics Underground), artist Mia Wolff brings together 100 paintings from more than 40 years of her oeuvre. We talk about how she found the thread & structure for the book, …

Translator & author Damion Searls kicks off our 2025 season with a talk about his amazing new book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRANSLATION (Yale University Press). We talk about how all writing — translation …

It's the end of the year, so let's take stock of 2024 with a big ol' year-in-review monologue! Your intrepid/decrepit host, Gil Roth, gets personal while talking about what he's learned from the podc…

Twenty-two of this year's Virtual Memories Show guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2024 and the books they hope to get to in 2025! Guests include Roland Allen, Shalom Auslander, Lau…

With The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography (NYRB), Benjamin Swett brings us a subtly beautiful series of essays that explore memory and identity and what we really see in the viewfinder. We …

LIVE from Labyrinth Books, artist and vulgarizer of history (in the French sense) Ken Krimstein returns to the show to celebrate his new book, EINSTEIN IN KAFKALAND (Bloomsbury)! We talk about the my…

Cartoonist & historian Eddie Campbell returns to the show with his fantastic new book, KATE CAREW: America's First Great Woman Cartoonist (Fantagraphics Underground), which explores turn-of-the-(20th…

Comics librarian and curator Caitlin McGurk returns to the show to celebrate her amazing new book, TELL ME A STORY WHERE THE BAD GIRL WINS: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund (Fantagraphics). We ta…

Artist Frances Jetter joins the show to talk about her amazing new book, AMALGAM: An Immigrant, His Labor Union, and His American Family in Brooklyn (Fantagraphics Underground). We talk about how the…