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The Big Book Project

The Big Book Project

De: Lori Feathers
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The Big Book Project is a multi-venue reading experience for bibliophiles fascinated by long or dense works of fiction and interested in discussing them with others, one novel at a time.

The works selected will be capacious novels from the mid-nineteenth century through today that possess an abundant writing style or complexity in structure and themes.

The notion that reading need not be a solitary activity has special resonance with these novels given that there is much to discuss, elaborate upon and question in the authors’ expression of ideas. I like to think of these novels as abundant because I appreciate their richness and volume, characteristics bestow a sort of grace to luxuriate with the text.

The critic and scholar Alexander Nehamas writes that when a work of art beckons, it is because we do not fully understand it but feel the strong desire to do so. And it is this deliberative process, the journey, of trying to understand why a novel is extraordinary that I want to explore with fellow readers at The Big Book Project.

We discuss books like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

© 2025 The Big Book Project
Arte Historia y Crítica Literaria
Episodios
  • Translating the Impossible: Ursula Phillips on Ice by Jacek Dukaj
    Jan 22 2026

    https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject
    In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori Feathers is joined by translator Ursula Phillips to discuss her extraordinary translation of Ice, the monumental, genre-defying novel by Polish author Jacek Dukaj.

    Clocking in at nearly 1,200 pages, Ice is both an alternate-history epic and a philosophical meditation on truth, language, power, and perception. Phillips guides us through the novel’s vast imaginative scope—from its reimagining of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, and its complex political, religious, and commercial entanglements in a world frozen by ice, to the deeply personal story of its hero, the Polish mathematician Benedykt Gierosławski, who travels to Siberia in search of his exiled father. Along the way, Phillips offers insight into the intellectual and technical challenges of translating such a singular work.

    This conversation moves fluidly between plot, prose, and process, exploring how Ice engages with 19th-century novelistic traditions while pushing the boundaries of science fiction, historical fiction, and metaphysical inquiry. Phillips also reflects on narrative voice, linguistic instability, and the role of the translator as both craftsman and interpreter.



    What We Discuss in This Episode





    An overview of Ice’s alternate-history premise and frozen world after the Impact



    The novel’s protagonist, Benedykt Gierosławski, and his search for his exiled father, who has become a cult figure in the Land of Winter



    Political theories, religious movements, and commercial interests shaped by the Ice



    The historical and speculative roles that the Russian Empire and the Trans-Siberian Railway serve in the novel’s plot.



    The unusual shifts in narrative voice and perspective and how this is executed. The translator’s postscript and the philosophical problems of language and meaning



    The technical and conceptual challenges of translating a 1,200-page novel



    Dukaj’s lush, sensory language



    Connections to Kafka, Dostoevsky, and the 19th-century “big novel” tradition



    Recommendations on other Polish literature for readers to explore



    Notable Moment

    Lori reads a striking passage describing Benedykt’s first experience wearing frosto-glaze glasses—a scene that transforms the world into a riot of color and movement, highlighting the novel’s extraordinary visual imagination and the precision of Phillips’s translation.



    About the Guest

    Ursula Phillips is an acclaimed literary translator specializing in Polish literature. Her translation of Ice has been widely praised for preserving the novel’s philosophical depth, linguistic complexity, and stylistic ambition.



    About the Book

    Ice by Jacek Dukaj is an alternate-history novel set in a world reshaped by a mysterious climate-altering event. Blending science fiction, political theory, metaphysics, and historical fiction, the novel interrogates how truth, logic, and power shift under radically altered conditions.



    Listener Tip

    Ice includes a Glossary and Dramatis Personae to help readers navigate its neologisms and cast of characters.

    Links and Resources:
    📚 The Big Book Project on Substack
    🎙️ Follow The Big Book Project on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube
    ➡️ Follow on Instagram

    Más Menos
    1 h y 20 m
  • Mark de Silva Discusses "The Logos"
    Nov 17 2025

    In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori sits down with novelist and philosopher Mark de Silva to explore his monumental 2022 novel The Logos — a thousand-page meditation on art, perception, capitalism, and the visual texture of contemporary life.

    A writer steeped in philosophy and the visual arts, Mark reveals how The Logos emerged from nearly a decade of research into advertising theory, image culture, and the psychological forces that shape our desires. Lori and Mark’s conversation ranges from the phenomenology of seeing, to the dark glamour of New York City, drawing versus painting, and the strange seductions of stealth marketing.

    Together, Lori and Mark dive deep into:

    • The narrator’s crisis of art and identity — and how success in the gallery world becomes a trap
    • Drawing vs. painting as competing ways of capturing truth
    • The philosophy of visual perception and why looking too closely can dissolve the world
    • Advertising as the new public art, and the blurred lines between art, manipulation, and influence
    • Daphne and Duke, the quasi-celebrities at the center of a massive, ambiguous ad campaign
    • New York City as a psychological landscape — its light, darkness, and peripheries
    • Emotional stuntedness, knowledge as alienation, and the costs of obsessive perception
    • The Logos as a portrait of contemporary capitalist culture — the beauty and the rot
    • Mark’s new work-in-progress: a sweeping novel about psychiatry, objectivity, homelessness, and agricultural labor in California

    Mark also recommends some of the big books currently on his mind, including:

    • Hermann BrochThe Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil
    • Solvej Balle -- On the Calculation of Volume series

    This is a rich, layered conversation about what it means to see, what it means to make art, and what it means to capture the truth of a world defined by images.


    CHAPTERS



    00:00 — The twin crises at the heart of The Logos
    00:40 — Introducing Mark de Silva
    02:00 — Nine years of research and writing
    04:20 — An artist losing faith in the art world
    06:15 — Advertising as the new public art
    08:10 — Portraiture, obsession, and the essence of a person
    10:00 — Seeing too closely and dissolving boundaries
    12:00 — Drawing vs. painting: form vs. sensory seduction
    15:15 — The sensory trap of consumer culture
    17:30 — Ubiquity vs. usefulness in advertising theory
    20:00 — Stealth campaigns, non-celebrities, and identity
    23:00 — Art or capital? Garrett’s mysterious motives
    25:30 — The darkness underneath Daphne and Duke
    29:00 — New York City as a living organism
    33:00 — Emotional stuntedness and the alienation of knowledge
    37:00 — Writing through the eye — the book’s visual intensity
    40:45 — Art after capitalism: what still matters?
    45:00 — Is commercial art “real art”?
    47:20 — Mark’s next novel: psychiatry, mind, and California
    51:00 — Big book recommendations
    55:00 — Closing reflections


    Más Menos
    58 m
  • Absalom, Absalom! Final Thoughts with Dr. Larry Allums
    Nov 7 2025

    In this final discussion of Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, Lori is joined once again by Dr. Larry Allums to close out one of the most haunting and inexhaustible novels in American literature.

    Together, they trace Faulkner’s labyrinth of narration—Quentin and Shreve’s imaginative reconstruction of the Sutpen story—and explore what it reveals about truth, storytelling, and the South’s enduring obsession with its past. Lori and Larry discuss themes of fatalism, love, terror, and the moral weight of history, examining how characters like Judith and Charles embody both the inescapability of inheritance and moments of grace within it.

    They also reflect on Faulkner’s ambivalence toward the South—his simultaneous hatred and love for it—and how that tension gives the novel its tragic depth. From the image of the blackbird referring to Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the conversation concludes by considering what it means, as readers, to seek truth in a story that resists any single interpretation.

    A fitting end to The Big Book Project’s journey through Absalom, Absalom!—and a reminder that the most profound books never truly end; they continue to reverberate in the imagination long after the final page.

    Chapters:00:00 — Introduction02:00 — The unreliable narrators: Quentin and Shreve15:30 — Judith and Charles: love, fate, and moral choice35:00 — The curse and fatalism of the Sutpen legacy50:00 — Faulkner’s ambivalence toward the South1:02:00 — Wallace Stevens and the search for truth1:04:30 — Closing reflections

    📚 Subscribe to The Big Book Project for more deep dives into literature’s boldest novels.🎧 Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

    Más Menos
    1 h y 4 m
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