About
Marlon and Jake explore the power of setting in novels—and why the best stories feel like they couldn’t have happened anywhere else. They discuss settings that become characters in their own right, fictional worlds they’d love (or absolutely hate) to inhabit, and books that made unexpected places fascinating. Plus: why a modern-day Captain Nemo might just be a tech bro.
Amerika by Franz Kafka
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Last Man by Mary Shelley
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder