It's Lit!

1. When the Book is Better than the Movie

Air Date: 2018-06-04

Which is better, the book or the movie? Explore the question with host Lindsay Ellis.

2. The Evolution of YA

Air Date: 2018-06-26

Young Adult Fiction (YA) is dominating literature, and more young people are reading now than ever before. Lindsay Ellis explores how YA carved a place in publishing.

3. Why Sci Fi is a Mirror on Society

Air Date: 2018-07-13

While science fiction is associated with Mars, robots, and cyberpunk, its origin story is shaped throughout several centuries. Check out the origin of science fiction with Lindsay Ellis!

4. An Ode to the Romance Novel

Air Date: 2018-07-30

Love it or hate it, the romance novel is the highest grossing literary genre. Its history is long and winding (like your favorite romance novel), and romance novels are full of tropes reflected upon its history. It has been the subject of intrigue, derision, and shame in literary discourse long before the modern genre as we know it existed.

5. How Fantasy Reflects Our World

Air Date: 2018-08-21

Fantasy novels are more than just hundreds of pages worth of swords and magic! Okay, there's some of that. But it's also a lens to what our society finds important to our pasts, our presents, and future.

6. Why did they make me read this in High School?

Air Date: 2018-08-30

What makes a book important? Why are some books required reading in high school, while others are lost to history?

7. Can You Judge a Book by Its Cover?

Air Date: 2018-11-21

Despite the adage of not judging a book by its cover, there’s a lot of time, intent, and money spent creating memorable book covers. Get to know the story behind some of literature’s most iconic book covers.

8. Fear of Ghost...Writing!

Air Date: 2018-12-07

You might being asking yourself-- Why do ghostwriters even exist? Isn’t that cheating? Isn’t literature supposed to be the result of one person’s agonizing need to create? Aren’t books supposed to be the blood, sweat, and tears of the tortured auteur? Well, the answer is more complicated than you think!

9. Unreliable Narrators

Air Date: 2018-12-17

Who is the most powerful character in fiction? Villains may doom the world, heroes may save it, but no one has more control over the plot than the narrator - expositing the who, what, where, when and how directly into the reader’s mind. But how can you tell that the person telling you the story is telling you the whole story?

10. Food & Fiction: Memorable Meals in Literature

Air Date: 2019-01-11

Food varies wildly from place to place and from culture to culture; since humans are such sensory creatures, using words to evoke the experience of eating is an excellent way to bring a text to life.

11. Death, Personified

Air Date: 2019-01-24

Death as a character reveals how we process one of life’s greatest mysteries, and there’s a lot more breadth to how the grim reaper is depicted than you might think.

12. How Greek Mythology Inspires Us

Air Date: 2019-02-07

Ancient Greek Mythology has worked its way into modern pop culture so deeply that it would be an almost Sisyphean task to compile every way it’s manifested!

13. The Beauty and Anguish of Les Misérables!

Air Date: 2019-04-18

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is one of history’s most famous novels and one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history. On this special episode of It’s Lit! we explore how Les Miserable became both a national and revolutionary anthem, and so publicly adored that all 1,900 pages never went out of print.

1. The Case for Fan Fiction

Air Date: 2020-02-27

For years writers of fan fiction were shamed, the butt of jokes, and even subject to copyright litigation. However, in the past few years, with the fan fiction writers of today becoming the published mainstream authors of today the past time is a celebrated benchmark of one’s climb to publication.

2. Afrofuturism From Books to Blockbusters

Air Date: 2020-03-19

With the success of Black Panther, the term Afro-Futurism got pushed into the mainstream. But what is Afro-Futurism and what is its place in Black storytelling? In this episode we give you the starter pack on answering that question.

3. How Fictional Pandemics Reflect the Real Thing

Air Date: 2020-04-29

Although we are currently living through a pandemic that has disrupted our lives and will shape the course of humanity, pandemics have been around since the dawn of civilization, as have stories about fictional pandemics. So now seems like as good a time as any to explore how fictional pandemics have evolved over time, and what they say about their own time.

4. Why We Still Love Little Women, 150 Years Later

Air Date: 2020-05-27

Before women were asking “Am I a Carrie or a Samantha?”, they were asking “Am I a Jo or an Amy?” Before there was Edward vs Jacob, there was Laurie vs Professor Bhaer. And over the more than 150 years since Little Women was originally published, there have been (deep breath) dozens of adaptations, feature films, television adaptations, plays, ballets, operas and at least two animes based on it.

5. The Byronic Hero: Isn’t it Byronic?

Air Date: 2020-06-24

Edward Cullen. Han Solo. Killmoklknger. Lestat. What do all these characters have in common besides being heartthrobs? They share a common ancestor: the Byronic Hero. Brooding, sensual, violent, intelligent, and single-minded, the Byronic hero has been a staple in literature dating back to the 19th century, but the archetype is all over film, TV and even video games. I see you Cloud Strife, all sad and angsty with your giant sword.

6. The Constructed Languages of JRR Tolkien

Air Date: 2020-07-16

Tolkien is widely regarded as the most influential author on the fantasy genre… period. But one of the less-discussed aspects of his work is the way Tolkien used constructed language in his writing. Nowadays authors are constantly making up words and languages for the worlds they build, but Tolkien was unique in that he constructed languages first, and then created worlds so his fictional languages would have somewhere to live.

7. War and Peace and Everything Else

Air Date: 2020-08-07

According to Tolstoy himself, War and Peace was "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." And in this day and age of publishing, where word count, “readability”, and topical relevance are the lifeline of getting a novel to print, we look at books like War & Peace as something of a relic.

8. The It’s Lit! Musical Episode

Air Date: 2020-08-27

Some say that theater is dead, and that’s probably because most playhouses the world over are closed at the moment owing to a worldwide pandemic. and yet the musical lives on… on Disney plus -- as the nation has been rapt with a filmed version of the Broadway smash hit, Hamilton. This had us come to the realization that a lot of the bread and butter of musical theater is built off of books! And so, like every television program that starts looking for new ideas, it has finally come to this: The It’s Lit! Musical episode

9. The Fiery History of Banned Books

Air Date: 2020-09-21

Since at least 213 BCE, book burnings have been a reaction to the power of the written word. When roasting paper in a giant circle went out of style (at least in the intellectual sphere), the governments would take it upon itself to ban books. However, when we talk about book bannings today, we are usually discussing a specific choice made by individual schools, school districts, and libraries made in response to the moralistic outrage of some group. This, while still hotly-contested and controversial, is still nothing in comparison to the ways books have been removed, censored, and outright destroyed in the past. So on that happy note, let’s … explore how the seemingly innocuous book has survived centuries of the ban hammer.

10. The (Stephen) King of Horror

Air Date: 2020-11-05

Few writers have had the sheer staying power, popularity, and prolific output as Stephen King. From insatiably flesh-hungry clowns and sentient cars to telekinetic teenagers and mystical gunslingers, if there’s one author who has taken up valuable real estate in that part of our imaginations, it’s Stephen King. But it’s not just his monsters that have lasting power—it’s also the very human and very psychological elements in his work that linger.

11. Are Graphic Novels... Novels?

Air Date: 2020-11-25

In the past few decades, literature has expanded to not only mean the “novel” but “graphic novels” as well. Today we are gonna break down how the graphic novel went from the comic book store to the classroom.

12. Dune, The Most Important Sci Fi Series Ever?

Air Date: 2020-12-17

The planet is Arrakis. Also known as Dune. And y’all, it’s a mess. December of this year, we were supposed to see the arrival of director Denis Villeneuve’s interpretation of the 1965 novel Dune, which had been previously (and rather infamously) brought to life by David Lynch in 1984, and again in a three-part miniseries on the SyFy channel in the early 2000s. Now many sci-fi nerds were both excited and nervous about the new adaptation directed by Villeneuve, but owing to the ongoing plague of eternity, the release has been pushed back to next year. So in lieu of that, y’all have to use this video to tide you over. What is Dune? Why must the spice flow? And what is with all the sand?

13. Anne Rice, The Queen of Literary Monsters

Air Date: 2021-01-06

Forbes once called her “The Warren Buffett of vampires,” but American author, Anne Rice has established herself as the literary queen of monsters of ALL kinds over her four-and-a-half decade career. Besides her 15 novels of the world-famous Vampire Chronicles series, she’s also written 21 other books featuring all your favorite dark, supernatural, and undead beings: witches, ghosts, mummies, werewolves, aliens, demons, angels, Jesus. But the works of Anne Rice aren't just light, pulpy fun monster books--her vampires changed the landscape of genre fiction as we know it?

14. Literary Icons You NEED to Know From the Harlem Renaissance

Air Date: 2021-02-26

One of the most influential periods in Black American History post-slavery is the Harlem Renaissance, an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City. Novels like Passing by Nella Larsen, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and the poetry of Langston Hughes were all written during this period and have become important pieces of the American literary canon. Still, when discussing this topic we tend to flatten the dynamic personalities and identities of the Black folk responsible for making this period so iconic in the literary sense. Not only in America, but as part of the entire Black diaspora.

15. How Do You Write a Bestseller?

Air Date: 2021-03-18