Virtual Memories – season 4 episode 14 – They Call Me MISTER Hyde!
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“I like that we live in an age that’s increasingly curious about this dark side, and not merely in terms of its pure darkness, but of how seemingly ordinary or normal people can commit atrocities.”
Daniel Levine joins us to talk about his debut novel, HYDE
“Art and torture occupy opposite ends of the same spectrum. Art is the attempt at beauty on a superfluous level . . . while torture is pain taken to an almost artistic, a musical level.”
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About our Guest
Daniel Levine studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Brown University and received his MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Florida. He has taught composition and creative writing at high schools and universities, including the University of Florida, Montclair State University, and Metropolitan State College of Denver. Originally from New Jersey, he now lives in Colorado. Hyde
Credits: This episode’s music is Dr. Jekyll by Miles Davis. (It was either that or Dr. Heckle & Mr. Jive by Men at Work.) The conversation was recorded at Daniel Levine’s childhood home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
, a work of literary scholarship. He has been a critic and literary historian for nearly a quarter of a century at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, and was formerly the fiction critic for Commentary. He has written for Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals. He is working on a memoir, Life on Planet Cancer, and lives in Columbus, OH, with his wife Naomi and their four children: Dov, Saul, Isaac, and Miriam (“Mimi”). He writes at 
, as well as the lifelong advice she got from Mary Gordon, the ways that writing a book is like building a stained-glass window, why being an orthodox Jew in Memphis wasn’t just like Designing Women with better wigs, and the advantages of being offline for a week when the New York Times publishes your op-ed about getting divorced. 
and 
, which was a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and newspapers including The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, Commentary, Good Housekeeping, and Poets and Writers, and her fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She has been a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, and Visiting Scholar at The Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. She lives in Newton, MA with her three children.
, a YA graphic novel about dogs on the battlefield. We talk about their collaborative process and how it developed over the course of this project, as well as the challenges of writing about war for a YA audience, how the trajectory of dog use parallels the development of military technology, and the ways that our empathy for animals can help us better understand the cost of conflict.
, a picture book she did in collaboration with her husband artist Kevin Duggan, and 
. 
(for them), feeding into a 
(Yale University Press), the new exhibition he’s curating for the British Library, 
in 1987, the first collaboration between 
between 1984 and 1986, and 
in 1988 by James Robinson and Paul Johnson. Since 2003, Paul has been the director of 