
It’s time for another installment of The Stacks Book Club. This month we’re discussing The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness by Anne Boyer with Mychal Denzel Smith (Stakes is High). Our conversation explores the commodification of cancer, the ways sexism is entrenched in the language of breast cancer, and how form and content can work together and fight against one another in the same text.
There are no spoilers in this episode.
Be sure to listen until the end of the podcast to find out The Stacks Book Club pick for July!
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Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes. You can also find everything we talked about on Amazon.

- The Undying by Anne Boyer
- Stakes is High by Mychal Denzel Smith
- Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching by Mychal Denzel Smith
- The 2020 Pulitzer Winners
- Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag
- The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
- The Undying by Anne Boyer (Audiobook)
- “Your Success Probably Didn’t Come From Merit Alone” (The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times)
- The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip-Williams
- “Ep. 64 The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip-Williams — The Stacks Book Club (Lori Gotlieb)” (The Stacks)
- Julia Louis-Dreyfus
- Angelina Jolie
- “My Medical Choice” (Angelina Jolie, The New York Times)
- The BRCA Gene (The National Breast Cancer Foundation)
- The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn
- The Woman in the Window (Joe Wright, 2021)
- A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deception (Ian Parker, The New Yorker)
- Bookshop.org
- Amazon
- Open Form (Mychal Denzel Smith, Lithub Radio)
- The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
Connect with Mychal: Twitter | Instagram | Website | Open Form Podcast
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