Year: 2008

Christmas special – Cathy Cassidy interview

When Cathy Cassidy was in Bath for the Children’s Literature Festival in September, my daughters Livi and Abby, along with their friend Ellie, were lucky enough to get the chance to interview her. In the interview, Cathy talks about how she started out as a writer, how she creates her characters and gives some hints about her next books. She also has tips for aspiring young writers. You can listen to the interview by clicking here. [20:36]

Auster and Aslam

The latest podcast I’ve produced for Faber has just gone up on their site. In it I talk to novelists Paul Auster and Nadeem Aslam about the books they published this autumn. You can find the podcast here. In Auster’s book, Man in the Dark, an ageing literary critic, August Brill, spends a night imagining a dystopian future in which America is embroiled in a civil war as a way of distracting him from the ghosts that trouble his sleep, not least of which is the death of his granddaughter’s boyfriend in Iraq.

Resumption of normal service

Podularity has been off air for the last month while I’ve been finishing a book (and so busy, in fact, that Podularity’s first birthday went unrecorded). But as of 4.15pm yesterday the book has gone, so normal service will shortly be resumed. Coming up before the end of the year are podcasts on Russia’s national poet, Pushkin, an interview with Raymond Tallis on hunger and my long-promised interview with Julian Baggini on the nature of complaint in contemporary life, to name but three. Looking further ahead, the plan for 2009 is to make Podularity podcasts a regular fortnightly event, with much more content on the site. Meanwhile, here’s a link to a podcast (scroll down the page on their site to find it) which I made recently for Yale University Press featuring Philip Pullman, Bettany Hughes and Leonie Gombrich. Philip and Bettany, I’m very pleased to say, have agreed to be future guests on the programme. This recent podcast is about Ernst Gombrich’s Little History of the World, a book the great art historian wrote …

Tiger triumphant

Congratulations to Aravind Adiga for his Booker win last night for his debut novel, The White Tiger. For those of you who missed it, you can find my interview with Aravind from earlier this year here. And if you want to sample his novel, you can hear him reading from it here and here.

19. Mark Vernon on: What is wellbeing?

Mark Vernon has just brought out a book on wellbeing in a new series of which he’s general editor. But this isn’t a run-of-the-mill self-help series. The series is called The Art of Living  and it’s published by independent philosophy specialist, Acumen. Their stated aim is to “open up philosophy’s riches to a wider public once again”. Consequently, authors have been asked to tackle the big question “How should we live?” in relation to a diverse selection of topics, including hunger, illness, work and sex. (You can hear my interview with Raymond Tallis on Hunger in a couple of weeks.) So the books have practical ambitions, but they’re rooted in an understanding of philosophical tradition (though this isn’t limited to the western canon). In the interview I was keen to get Mark to tease apart wellbeing and happiness. Happiness has been the subject of many books recently, whereas we tend to think of wellbeing as more of a Sunday supplement concept that embraces getting a good night’s sleep and drinking less caffeine. So what exactly …

18. Julian Baggini: Mistrust the lucky ducky

“In marketing and in politics people have got more sophisticated in their manipulation techniques, so more than ever we need to know what they are, so that we can spot the truth when we see it.” Julian Baggini is the first guest to pay a return visit to the Podularity studio. I last interviewed him back in March in programme 8, A Philosopher in Everytown, when he talked to me about the folk philosophy of the English.

Andrew Sean Greer on San Francisco in the 50s

My latest podcast for Faber & Faber is now available on their site and on iTunes. In it I talk to American novelist Andrew Sean Greer about his latest book, The Story of a Marriage. It’s a beautifully realized depiction of what happens to the relationship between two people when a third appears on the scene – but in almost every way unexpected. “We think we know the ones we love,” the book begins, but it turns out that our knowledge is often imperfect. The book is full of surprises without straining credibility and it’s also a marvellous depiction of the fog-bound suburbs of San Francisco during the Korean War, when people were dealing with a new war while still living in the shadow of the previous one. In the interview, Andrew also tells me how he became a dog owner…

17. “Unstitching the carefully tailored suit” – among the dead philosophers

“The book is written against the view that a philosopher’s biography is of no importance and that philosophy can be reduced to a series of systems of thought. It’s really an attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers. That was the way that philosophy was taught until the eighteenth century. So in a way it’s a revival of a rather ancient idea of philosophy being taught through exemplary biography or the idea of philosophy as a way of life.” In this week’s podcast I talk to Simon Critchley about his recently published Book of Dead Philosophers. The book might at first seem like one of those forgettable book of quirky lists and miscellaneous bizzareries, but in fact it’s much more than that. As Jonathan Derbyshire put it in his Guardian review: “These descriptions aren’t just intended to be diverting, however (though they are certainly that); Critchley says that they are also meant to challenge a conception of philosophy which holds that it is a form of abstract, conceptual inquiry that …

First Four for Faber

Over the last few months I’ve been producing a new podcast for Faber and Faber, which you can find on their recently relaunched website here. In the first four podcasts, which are now available on iTunes, I talk to – among others – Hanif Kureishi, Peter Carey, Sebastian Barry (pictured left) and Junot Díaz. The podcast will be a regular monthly feature of the Faber site and there will be “specials” every so often too. I’m hoping to interview Paul Auster about his latest novel, Man in the Dark, in the autumn, for example.

Troubled Rainbow Nation

The third podcast I’ve recorded for Le Monde diplomatique has just gone up on their site. In it I interview Johann Rossouw, editor of the publication’s Afrikaans edition, about the recent violent events in his country. He talks about what sparked those events, but looks behind the proximate causes to the deeper roots in the way in which South Africa emerged from its colonial and apartheid-governed past. Listen to the podcast by clicking here. The abstract-looking image that accompanies this post was taken in Durban’s Botanical Gardens by Robbie Ribeiro.