literature, podcasts

Auster and Aslam

Nadeem Aslam coverPaul Auster Man in the DarkThe 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.

And Aslam’s Wasted Vigil brings an American CIA man, a Russian woman seeking her soldier brother, and a young Muslim fundamentalist to the home of an English doctor in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains. This conjunction of characters enables Aslam to tell the story of Afghanistan’s recent past in a way that is by turns richly poetic and shockingly violent.

There’s a longer version of the Auster interview here. And the full version of the Aslam interview is here.