For bestselling novelist Marlon James and his longtime editor Jake Morrissey, fighting for books is all in a day’s work. But fighting over books? That’s just good, old-fashioned fun. It’s also the beating heart of their podcast, Marlon and Jake Read Dead People, now entering its much-anticipated third season. Conventional wisdom encourages that we never speak ill of the dead, but on Marlon and Jake Read Dead People, speaking ill of the dead is the main event. In each episode, author and editor banter about the late literary greats who inspire, torment, and obsess them. As James and Morrissey often joke, dead authors can’t clap back on Twitter—which perhaps explains the rollicking, no-holds-barred tone of their conversations, where disagreements and debates abound. Safe from the wrath of dead writers, both podcasters clearly feel unafraid to share literary hot takes that might be considered unpopular. In just this thirty-minute conversation with Esquire, James and Morrissey managed to lambaste literary giants like Ian Fleming, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Eudora Welty, among others. “Saying ‘my favorite Faulkner’ is like saying ‘my favorite disease,’” Morrissey joked. But even when James and Morrissey are dishing about books and authors they hate, it all comes from a place of immense love for and faith in literature. Amid an unprecedented surge in book bannings across the United States, they take their role as advocates for reading quite seriously. “The enemy has never been people who read a book and hate it,” James tells Esquire. “It’s often… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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