https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject
In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori Feathers is joined by translator Ursula Phillips to discuss her extraordinary translation of Ice, the monumental, genre-defying novel by Polish author Jacek Dukaj.

Clocking in at nearly 1,200 pages, Ice is both an alternate-history epic and a philosophical meditation on truth, language, power, and perception. Phillips guides us through the novel’s vast imaginative scope—from its reimagining of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, and its complex political, religious, and commercial entanglements in a world frozen by ice, to the deeply personal story of its hero, the Polish mathematician Benedykt Gierosławski, who travels to Siberia in search of his exiled father. Along the way, Phillips offers insight into the intellectual and technical challenges of translating such a singular work.

This conversation moves fluidly between plot, prose, and process, exploring how Ice engages with 19th-century novelistic traditions while pushing the boundaries of science fiction, historical fiction, and metaphysical inquiry. Phillips also reflects on narrative voice, linguistic instability, and the role of the translator as both craftsman and interpreter.



What We Discuss in This Episode





An overview of Ice’s alternate-history premise and frozen world after the Impact



The novel’s protagonist, Benedykt Gierosławski, and his search for his exiled father, who has become a cult figure in the Land of Winter



Political theories, religious movements, and commercial interests shaped by the Ice



The historical and speculative roles that the Russian Empire and the Trans-Siberian Railway serve in the novel’s plot.



The unusual shifts in narrative voice and perspective and how this is executed. The translator’s postscript and the philosophical problems of language and meaning



The technical and conceptual challenges of translating a 1,200-page novel



Dukaj’s lush, sensory language



Connections to Kafka, Dostoevsky, and the 19th-century “big novel” tradition



Recommendations on other Polish literature for readers to explore



Notable Moment

Lori reads a striking passage describing Benedykt’s first experience wearing frosto-glaze glasses—a scene that transforms the world into a riot of color and movement, highlighting the novel’s extraordinary visual imagination and the precision of Phillips’s translation.



About the Guest

Ursula Phillips is an acclaimed literary translator specializing in Polish literature. Her translation of Ice has been widely praised for preserving the novel’s philosophical depth, linguistic complexity, and stylistic ambition.



About the Book

Ice by Jacek Dukaj is an alternate-history novel set in a world reshaped by a mysterious climate-altering event. Blending science fiction, political theory, metaphysics, and historical fiction, the novel interrogates how truth, logic, and power shift under radically altered conditions.



Listener Tip

Ice includes a Glossary and Dramatis Personae to help readers navigate its neologisms and cast of characters.

Links and Resources:
📚 The Big Book Project on Substack
🎙️ Follow The Big Book Project on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube
➡️ Follow on Instagram

In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori sits down with novelist and philosopher Mark de Silva to explore his monumental 2022 novel The Logos — a thousand-page meditation on art, perception, capitalism, and the visual texture of contemporary life.

A writer steeped in philosophy and the visual arts, Mark reveals how The Logos emerged from nearly a decade of research into advertising theory, image culture, and the psychological forces that shape our desires. Lori and Mark’s conversation ranges from the phenomenology of seeing, to the dark glamour of New York City, drawing versus painting, and the strange seductions of stealth marketing.

Together, Lori and Mark dive deep into:

• The narrator’s crisis of art and identity — and how success in the gallery world becomes a trap
• Drawing vs. painting as competing ways of capturing truth
• The philosophy of visual perception and why looking too closely can dissolve the world
• Advertising as the new public art, and the blurred lines between art, manipulation, and influence
• Daphne and Duke, the quasi-celebrities at the center of a massive, ambiguous ad campaign
• New York City as a psychological landscape — its light, darkness, and peripheries
• Emotional stuntedness, knowledge as alienation, and the costs of obsessive perception
• The Logos as a portrait of contemporary capitalist culture — the beauty and the rot
• Mark’s new work-in-progress: a sweeping novel about psychiatry, objectivity, homelessness, and agricultural labor in California

Mark also recommends some of the big books currently on his mind, including:

• Hermann Broch — The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil
• Solvej Balle -- On the Calculation of Volume series

This is a rich, layered conversation about what it means to see, what it means to make art, and what it means to capture the truth of a world defined by images.

CHAPTERS

00:00 — The twin crises at the heart of The Logos
00:40 — Introducing Mark de Silva
02:00 — Nine years of research and writing
04:20 — An artist losing faith in the art world
06:15 — Advertising as the new public art
08:10 — Portraiture, obsession, and the essence of a person
10:00 — Seeing too closely and dissolving boundaries
12:00 — Drawing vs. painting: form vs. sensory seduction
15:15 — The sensory trap of consumer culture
17:30 — Ubiquity vs. usefulness in advertising theory
20:00 — Stealth campaigns, non-celebrities, and identity
23:00 — Art or capital? Garrett’s mysterious motives
25:30 — The darkness underneath Daphne and Duke
29:00 — New York City as a living organism
33:00 — Emotional stuntedness and the alienation of knowledge
37:00 — Writing through the eye — the book’s visual intensity
40:45 — Art after capitalism: what still matters?
45:00 — Is commercial art “real art”?
47:20 — Mark’s next novel: psychiatry, mind, and California
51:00 — Big book recommendations
55:00 — Closing reflections

In this final discussion of Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, Lori is joined once again by Dr. Larry Allums to close out one of the most haunting and inexhaustible novels in American literature.

Together, they trace Faulkner’s labyrinth of narration—Quentin and Shreve’s imaginative reconstruction of the Sutpen story—and explore what it reveals about truth, storytelling, and the South’s enduring obsession with its past. Lori and Larry discuss themes of fatalism, love, terror, and the moral weight of history, examining how characters like Judith and Charles embody both the inescapability of inheritance and moments of grace within it.

They also reflect on Faulkner’s ambivalence toward the South—his simultaneous hatred and love for it—and how that tension gives the novel its tragic depth. From the image of the blackbird referring to Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the conversation concludes by considering what it means, as readers, to seek truth in a story that resists any single interpretation.

A fitting end to The Big Book Project’s journey through Absalom, Absalom!—and a reminder that the most profound books never truly end; they continue to reverberate in the imagination long after the final page.

Chapters:00:00 — Introduction02:00 — The unreliable narrators: Quentin and Shreve15:30 — Judith and Charles: love, fate, and moral choice35:00 — The curse and fatalism of the Sutpen legacy50:00 — Faulkner’s ambivalence toward the South1:02:00 — Wallace Stevens and the search for truth1:04:30 — Closing reflections

📚 Subscribe to The Big Book Project for more deep dives into literature’s boldest novels.🎧 Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.