The Most Important Character Isn’t a Character

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.

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• 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