All posts filed under: literature

Summer Reading Choices: Louise Foxcroft

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Louise Foxcroft is the author of Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause, which won the Longman History Today prize for Book of the Year 2009.You can listen to my interview with Louise about this book by clicking here. Here are her holiday reading recommendations: In the early summer, ready to get away from the drizzle, I reread Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt and The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay. The English have always been very good at producing caustic aunts who can’t stay put but who can tolerate the young and irritate the rest of the family with their fantasies, politics, and unsuitable lovers. There was a distinct glut of them after the first world war and it was obviously difficult to know what to do with them. On the whole, the aunts seem to have made life up as they went along, so the first idea you have to expunge from your mind is that aunts are in any way dull or cosy. Graham Greene’s aunt appears late …

Summer Reading Choices: Elizabeth Speller

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Today’s guest selector of summer reading is Elizabeth Speller, author most recently of a highly praised debut novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett. She is also the author of several works of non-fiction – including a memoir, Sunlight on the Garden – and a prize-winning poet. Here are her choices: Dragging a hefty suitcase of books to Greece to provide a whole summer’s reading tends to sharpen opinions about the contents; there is, literally, a heavy freight of expectation and hope. This year three or four big disappointments have been balanced by three surprises. Only as I write do I realize that these are linked by a theme of war. This is perhaps not surprising as my own novels concern war, but my three choices are so different from each other that this almost irrelevant except that war changes everything and these are all novels of individuals whose certainties have been swept away. Richard Bausch’s Peace is a short novel set in a hard WWII Italian winter and focusing on one small, weary platoon …

Summer Reading Choices: Michael Bywater

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Our next guest recommender of Summer Reading is Michael Bywater, author (of Lost Worlds and Big Babies, inter al.), broadcaster, and – as you will see when you read on – now writing for the stage… This summer I’m too too utterly utterly up to my ears in queers, dears. Specifically the (slightly illusory) late nineteenth century London homosexual world and the point at which it collides, in a flurry of ortolans’ tongues and lilies, with the largely abortive English Aesthetes. This is no indulgence – actually at times it’s hard going – but work: I’m writing (it may sound improbable) a musical about Oscar Wilde with (equally improbably) those two giants of American popular music, the songwriting duo Leiber and Stoller. The work itself is a treat, but Oscar himself poses three problems: his literary work was something (in England at least) of a dead end; most of the legends about him are untrue; and the world is well-supplied with Oscar mavens who’ll be on the edge of their seats, not with delight, but …

city-pick Amsterdam

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The latest volume in the city-pick series – on Amsterdam – has just been published. When their Berlin book came out, Podularity carried an interview with the book’s editor, Heather Reyes. This time, we go one better and present an audio diary which I compiled on location in Amsterdam with Dutch poet and critic, Victor Schiferli, the co-editor of city-pick Amsterdam. Our main project was filming a number of interviews with Dutch writers, currently going up on Vimeo and YouTube, and in the interstices, we made the sound recordings that you can listen to below – a sort of audio introduction both to Amsterdam and Victor’s book. Just click on the pictures below to hear the sound clips. 1. Spui Square and the Athenaeum Bookshop 2. De Zwart cafe and literary feuds 3. Dam Square 4. Amsterdam in wartime 5. The Vondelpark (and who was Vondel?) 6. In the Red Light District 7. Amsterdam on Two Wheels 8. Victor’s Thoughts on Compiling the Book

In search of happiness

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I met François Lelord in London recently to discuss his international bestseller – just released in English – Hector and the Search for Happiness (Gallic Books). François is a psychiatrist by training, so it’s no coincidence that the hero in his first venture into fiction is a Candide-like young practitioner of that profession who becomes dissatisfied with his life and goes off round the world in search of the meaning of happiness…

42. The Return of Captain John Emmett

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To record this week’s podcast, I travelled to the Cotswolds to visit my guest (and friend), Elizabeth Speller. Elizabeth has recently bought a splendid shepherd’s hut on wheels which she is using as a retreat to write in. Although this book wasn’t written there, its sequel, currently a work in progress, will be. You can see the hut – which is enough to arouse the envy of anyone with writerly ambitions – in the video we recorded, which will be on this site shortly. In the mean time, click on the link above to listen to our audio podcast in which we talk about making the transition from non-fiction to fiction, the challenges of setting a novel in the past, and the ways in which the reverberations of the First World War continued to be felt in the years that followed armistice. The novel has been getting terrific reviews: The Times, for example, said: “Speller’s writing is gorgeous, her research immaculate and very lightly worn. Sheer bliss.” And the Independent said: “Covering death, poetry, a …

40. Charles Dickens – a writer’s life

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We mark the birthday of Charles Dickens earlier this week with a special extended edition of my interview with his biographer Michael Slater from the end of last year, which originally appeared on Blackwell Online. John Bowen, reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, said: “[it] immediately takes its place as the most authoritative, fair-minded and navigable of modern biographies. Slater, the most distinguished of modern Dickens scholars, is a master of detail and a stickler for dates (there are a dozen or so on the first page) and the book gives a vivid sense of the day-to-day, week-by-week bustle and productivity of Dickens’s life, its polymorphous inventiveness, its relentless juggling.” In this extended version of the interview, you can hear how Michael Slater first became interested in Dickens, what persuaded him to take on the monumental task, and which aspects of Dickens personality and writing have fascinated him most. Click on the link above to listen to the podcast.