Bienvenue à The Cordelivres Criticism Club

A new adventure in revolutionary criticism from Indirect Books

We’re excited to announce the launch of The Cordelivres Criticism Club, a new podcast series from Indirect Books.

Centered on the notion of literary dissection and deep analysis, we’re going to be taking the concept of “applied criticism”—a blending of craft, theory, critique, and conversation—to books and stories, new and old. Our first discussion, coming this Wednesday, is on Virginia Woolf’s 1923 short story “In The Orchard,” checking out our foundational concept: the distinction between narrative and narration.

The idea of the series is to have a platform to practice the type of focused literary critique and discussion that we prioritize as editors, publishers, writers, and readers. Think of it as a supercharged book club, where we’ll be getting into the text from the inside-out and thinking about how what we read can inform what we write.

The format is a bit like a workshop discussion, or an especially ambitious chat over coffee. We’re looking at pieces of literature that we love and trying to figure out how the composition is working, pulling out a few things craft-wise that may be not be immediately apparent to provide insight to the work as an art object.

The name of the series comes from the Cordeliers Club, a political society during the French Revolution, who were pretty wild, liked to read, and had a name which lends itself really well to transformation into the French word for book. (We’re pronouncing it “quarter leaves.”) Longtime friends of L’Esprit may be able to guess which of the Indirect editors came up with this one.

New podcast episodes will post on Wednesdays (cross-posted on our Free and Direct feed), with show notes posting on Saturdays (exclusive to Substack). We’ll have conversations, musings, deep-dives, special guests, recurring bits, unfounded claims, obscure references, wild assertions, dogmatic opinions, iconoclastic stands, and a hell of a lot of really good literature. No guillotine, though.

So welcome to the club, and thanks for stopping by. We hope you enjoy the show, and we’re always looking for new books or stories for episode ideas. Let us know what you think and, as always, stay critical.