178. Rerun: Elizabeth Jenkins - The Tortoise and the Hare

In memory of the iconic Carmen Callil, we are replaying the first of her two appearances on Backlisted.

Joining Andy and John in this episode is Carmen Callil, the legendary publisher and writer, who is best know for founding the Virago Press in 1972. Once described by the Guardian as ‘part-Lebanese, part-Irish and wholly Australian’, Carmen settled in London in 1964 advertising herself in The Times as ‘Australian, B.A. wants job in book publishing’. After changing a generation’s taste through her publishing at Virago, and in particular the Virago Modern Classics, which continues to bring back into print hundreds of neglected women writers, Carmen went on to run Chatto & Windus and became a global Editor-at-Large for Random House. In 2006 she published Bad Faith: A History of Family & Fatherland, which Hilary Spurling called ‘a work of phenomenally thorough, generous and humane scholarship’. Appointed DBE in 2017, she was also awarded the Benson Medal in the same year, awarded to mark ‘meritorious works in poetry, fiction, history and belles-lettres’. The book under discussion is one of her favourite novels, The Tortoise & the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins, first published by Gollancz in 1954 and triumphantly reissued by Virago Modern Classics in 1983.
Also in this episode we explore the new audio version of one our favourite writer’s best novels - The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson, famously published in a box containing 27 randomly ordered sections in 1969. And last but very much not least: this episode also features our very first canine guest - Effie, Carmen’s extremely well-behaved border terrier.

Books mentioned:

B.S. Johnson - The Unfortunates; Christy Malry’s Own Double Entry
Jonathan Coe - Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
Elizabeth Jenkins - The Tortoise & the Hare; The View from Downshire Hill; Harriet; Doctor Gully; Jane Austen
Carmen Callil - Bad Faith: A History of Family & Fatherland
Antonia White - A Frost in May
May Sinclair - The Life & Death of Harriet Frean
Storm Jameson - Journey from the North vol 1; Journey from the North vol 2
Rosamond Lehmann - The Weather in the Streets
Elizabeth Taylor - Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Anita Brookner - A Start in Life

Other links:

The Second Shelf bookshop
Foyles Bookshop- South Bank Centre
The Unfortunates on Alexa
Elizabeth Jenkins - Obituary in the Daily Telegraph ( Sep 2010)

177. Noel Streatfeild - Ballet Shoes

Merry Christmas Everyone! This year’s Backlisted Christmas special celebrates Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, a classic of children’s literature and the childhood favourite of our producer, Nicky Birch. We are joined by the writer Una McCormack and Tanya Kirk, the Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections (1601-1900) at the British Library, who are both lifetime Streatfeild fans. Ballet Shoes was an immediate bestseller upon publication and the runner-up for the inaugural Carnegie Medal. It has never been out of print and was the first in a series of ‘Shoes’ books by Streatfeild. It has been adapted many times both as an audiobook and for film and television and in 2019 BBC News included Ballet Shoes on its list of the 100 most influential novels of all time. We discuss why this might be the case and much more besides and even hear from Miss Streatfeild herself. And it being a Christmas episode, there is a fiendish festive quiz. 

We also feature two other classic books by writers best known through their writing for children. John discusses The Giant under the Snow by John Gordon, an eerie Puffin classic from 1968, while Andy revels in the darkness of John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, first published in 1956, a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, definitely written for adults and perfect for cutting through your post-lunch torpor. Enjoy!

Books mentioned:
Noel Streatfeild - Ballet Shoes; A Vicarage Family
Anglea Bull – Noel Streatfeild: A Biography   Also available via Internet Archive
John Gordon – The Giant under the Snow
John Christopher – The Death of Grass (introduction by Robert Macfarlane)
Tanya Kirk (ed) - Haunters at the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas
Una McCormack - The Autobiography of Mr Spock
Tove Jansson – Comet in Moominland
Terry Jones – Erick the Viking

Other links:
Noel Streatfeild on Desert Island Discs (1976)
Useful Noel Streatfeild resource site

176. Kate Chopin - The Awakening

The Awakening is an American classic, first published in 1899. The novel’s focus is the inner life of Edna Pontellier, a 29 year-old a married woman and mother of two boys, whose husband Léonce is a New Orleans businessman of Louisiana Creole heritage. The book’s notoriety derives from Edna’s refusal to accept the role that American society of the late 19th century has allocated to her. After the controversy that greeted it on publication, The Awakening sank from view until it was rediscovered by a new generation of readers after the Louisiana State University Press published Chopin’s collected works in 1969. Now acclaimed as a feminist classic – it was published in the UK in 1978 by The Women’s Press and is now both a Penguin and an Oxford classic, a Canongate Canon, and one of the most popular university set texts in America. We’re joined by the Irish American writer Timothy O’Grady and publisher Rachael Kerr to find out why. This episode also finds Andy revelling in Beware of the Bull, a new biography of the incomparable Yorkshire singer-songwriter Jake Thackray (Scratching Shed), while John enjoys Louise Willder’s Blurb Your Enthusiasm, the product of her twenty-five years as a copywriter at Penguin.

Books mentioned:

Kate Chopin - The Awakening & Other Stories; A Night in Acadie; Bayou Folk; Athenaise
Emily Toth - Unveiling Kate Chopin
Louise Willder - Blurb Your Enthusiasm
Paul Thompson and John Watterson - Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray
Timothy O’Grady - I Could Read The Sky; Monaghan; Children of Las Vegas: True stories about growing up in the world's playground; Curious Journey: The IRA and Cumann Na Mban, 1916-1923 (with Kenneth Griffith)

Other links:

Treme (HBO Series, David Simon, 2013)

175. Tarjei Vesaas - The Ice Palace

The Ice Palace or Is-slottet by Tarjei Vesaas is a 20th century classic by one of Norway’s greatest modern writers. First published by Gyldendal in 1963, it went on to win the Nordic Council Literary Prize in 1964. In 1966, it was published in Elizabeth Rokkan’s English translation by Peter Owen who described it as the best novel he ever published. To discuss it we’re joined by friend of the show Max Porter – who’s surprised it isn’t the most famous book in the world – and by another great Norwegian, Karl Ove Knaussgård, who agrees but who also think’s Vessas’s The Birds ( or Fuglane), published six years earlier, might be even better. We discuss both books in their English translations (recently released as Penguin Modern Classics) and Karl Ove treats us to a reading from the beginning of The Ice Palace in Norwegian. This episode also features Andy sharing his pleasure and deep amusement at Bob Dylan’s latest book – The Philosophy of Modern Song (Simon & Schuster) while John is moved by Emergency, Daisy Hildyard’s darkly beautiful novel about a rural Northern childhood overshadowed by presentiments of the coming climate disaster (Fitzcarraldo Editions).

Books mentioned:

Tarjei Vesaas - The Ice Palace (trs. Elizabeth Rokkan); The Birds (trs. Torbjørn Støverud & Michael Barnes); The Hills Reply (trs. Elizabeth Rokkan); The Boat in the Evening (trs. Elizabeth Rokkan); The Seed (trs. Kenneth G. Chapman)
Karl Ove Knaussgård - My Struggle: A Death in the Family (Book 1); A Man in Love (Book 2); Boyhood Island (Book 3); Dancing in the Dark (Book 4); Some Rain Must Fall (Book 5); The End (Book 6); A Time for Everything; Seasons Quartet: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer
Max Porter - Lanny; Grief is The Thing with Feathers; The Death of Francis Bacon; Shy
Bob Dylan - Tarantula; Chronicles; The Philosophy of Modern Song
Daisy Hildyard - Emergency
Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
Halldor Laxness - Independent People (trs. J.A. Thompson)
Jon Fosse - The Other Name: Septology I - II (trs. Damion Searls)

Other links:
Post from Norwegian Literature Abroad (NORLA) about translating Vessas
Tarjei Vesaas on Mattis in The Birds
Tarjei Vesaas (et al) on The Ice Palace
The Ice Palace (Is-Slottet), a film by Per Blom (1987)

174. Maeve Brennan - The Springs of Affection

There can be few writers more deserving of Backlisted’s attention than the Irish writer, Maeve Brennan. An adopted New Yorker, Brennan died there in 1993 and was by that time so thoroughly forgotten in her native land, that she received no obituaries in any Irish papers. We are joined by the writers Sinéad Gleeson and David Hayden to discuss her collection, The Springs of Affection – subtitled ‘stories of Dublin’ – which was first published posthumously by Houghton Mifflin in 1997, although all but one of these first appeared in the New Yorker, where Brennan was a staff writer for twenty-seven years. It was the enthusiastic praise from other writers including Alice Munro, Edna O’Brien and Mavis Gallant among others, that helped get The Springs of Affection the kind of international attention that the two collections published in Maeve’s lifetime failed to achieve. Since then, Maeve Brennan’s reputation has grown steadily, and her stories are now regularly and favourably compared to those of Joyce, Chekov and Colette. In Ireland, in particular, she has won the admiration of a new generation of women writers, who in Anne Enright’s phrase, see her as ‘a casualty of old wars not yet won.’ This episode also features Andy revisiting the Linda Nochlin’s classic 1971 essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? while John is impressed by Orlam, P.J. Harvey’s dark and brooding verse novel, written entirely in Dorset dialect.

Books mentioned
Maeve Brennan - The Springs of Affection (Paperback - Intro by William Maxwell)
The Spring of Affection (Ebook - Intro by Anne Enright)
The Springs of Affection (Paperback pre-order - Intro by Claire -Louise Bennet);
The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker
The Visitor
The Rose Garden: Short Stories
Angela Bourke - Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy: An Irish Writer in New York
Linda Nochlin - Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
P.J. Harvey - Orlam
Sinéad Gleeson (ed) - The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers; The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories
Sinéad Gleeson - Constellations: Reflections from Life; Where My Feet Fall (including an essay on Maeve Brennan’s Manhattan)
David Hayden - Darker With the Lights On: Stories
Joanna Russ - How to Suppress Women's Writing
William Maxwell - All the Days & Nights: Collected Stories
James Joyce - Dubliners

Other links:

Maeve Brennan in The New Yorker
Fintan O’Toole on Maeve Brennan in the Irish Times, Jan 1st 1998
Anne Enright on Maeve Brennan in the Guardian, May 2016
Maeve’s biographer Angela Bourke on the Irish Times Books Podcast, 2017
Maeve’s editor Christopher Carduff on The Visitor in the Irish Times, 2017

173. Henry James - The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales

This Hallowe’en episode of Backlisted focusses on the collection of ‘uncanny’ stories by Henry James, first gathered together under the title The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales to form the seventeenth volume of the New York Edition of his Collected Works in 1917. We are joined, as ever, by our resident spook-master Andrew Male, and by acclaimed novelist and Henry James aficionado, Tessa Hadley. We each choose a story to present and read from - these are tackled in chronological order to better trace the evolution of James’s famously dense and challenging late style . Before that Andy confesses his admiration for I Used to Live Here Once, Miranda Seymour’s new biography of Jean Rhys and reads a short Jean Rhys ghost story, while John revisits Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel’s haunting (and haunted) memoir.

For avoidance of doubt, the ten stories collected in The Altar of the Dead & Other Stories are: ‘The Altar of the Dead’, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, ‘The Birthplace’, ‘The Private Life’, ‘Owen Wingrave’, ‘The Friends of the Friends’, ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, ‘The Real Right Thing’, ‘The Jolly Corner’, ‘Julia Bride’. All but “Sir Edmund Orme’ are contained in volume two of the Everyman Classics edition of the Collected Stories.

Books mentioned:

Henry James - The Altar of the Dead & Other Tales (ebook); The Altar of the Dead & Other Tales (Online); Collected Stories (vol 2); The Turn of the Screw & Other Stories; What Maisie Knew; The Ambassadors; The Wings of a Dove; The Golden Bowl
Tessa Hadley - Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure
Mirand Seymour - I Used to Live Here Once
Hilary Mantel - Giving Up the Ghost

Other links:

Virginia Woolf on Henry James’s ghost stories
Maud Casey on the ghost stories of Henry James & Jean Rhys on LitHub, 2018
Maria Popova on ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ The Marginalian Oct 23, 2022

172. Dervla Murphy - Full Tilt

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy was first published in 1965 and is the first of Dervla Murphy’s twenty-six books. It's a journal she kept on the 3,500 mile, six-month journey she made by bicycle from her home in Lismore, Ireland to Delhi in India in 1963, Ireland, traversing Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan on her trusty bike, Ros. Joining us to discuss the book are Felicity Cloake, food writer and the award-winning author of the Guardian’s long-running ‘How to Make the Perfect’ series and Caroline Eden, author and journalist, whose latest book, Red Sands is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point to explore Central Asia.

This episode also features Andy reading from Craig Brown's new collected works, Haywire, while John has been enjoying In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s disappearing birds and the people trying to save them by Patrick Galbraith.

Books mentioned:
Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle; Wheels within Wheels; In Ethiopia with a Mule; A Place Apart: Northern Ireland in the 1970s by Dervla Murphy
One More Croissant for the Road; Red Sauce Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake 
Red Sands; Samarkand: Recipes and Stories From Central Asia and the Caucasus by Caroline Eden
Haywire by Craig Brown
In Search of One Last Song: Britain’s disappearing birds and the people trying to save them by Patrick Galbraith

Other links
Dervla Murphy’s Desert Island Discs
Who is Dervla Murphy? (2016 documentary)
Full Tilting - the Dervla Murphy fan site 
Re-Tilt - Isabelle Masters 2015 retracing Dervla’s original journey today 

171. Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic

Roadside Picnic, first published in 1972, is the best-known work of Russia’s most famous modern science fiction writers, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, together the authors of 26 novels and scores of short stories. To discuss it we are joined by the writer and radio presenter Jennifer Lucy Allan, and the publisher and translator Ilona Chavasse. The book is based on the premise that Earth has been briefly visited by an alien civilisation that have left behind them six ‘Zones’, places strewn with their debris, some of it lethal to humans; all of it fascinating and perplexing. The Zones feed a black market in artefacts supplied by ‘Stalkers’ who are prepared to risk their lives and sanity by entering the forbidden areas to retrieve them. We consider why the book is still considered one of the greatest of all SF novels, how it came to be read as a dark foreshadowing of the Chernobyl disaster and why it has proved itself so ripe for adaptation, both as a series of video games and, most famously, as the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic 1979 film, Stalker. This episode also finds Andy returning to a haunting novel he read earlier this year: The High House (Swift Press) by former guest Jessie Greengrass, while John is carried away by Everybody (Picador), Olivia Laing’s magnificent book about freedom and the human body.

Books mentioned:

Roadside Picnic; Monday starts on Saturday; The Inhabited Island; The Snail on the Slope; Hard to be a God by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
The Foghorn's Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast by Jennifer Lucy Allan
The High House by Jessie Greenglass
Everybody by Olivia Laing
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Rosewater by Tade Thompson
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; Ubik; The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick

Other links:

Stanislaw Lem on Roadside Picnic
Den of Geek article on the adaptations of Roadside Picnic
Illustrations from the adandoned TV adaptation of Roadside Picnic
Boris Strugatsky on working with Tarkovesky
Geoff Dyer on Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky interviewed by Tonino Guerra about Stalker (1979)
Guapo - A History of Visitation (2013 album inspired by Roadside Picnic)

170. Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South

North and South is Elizabeth Gaskell’s fourth novel and considered by many to be her best. It tells the story of Margaret Hale, a principled young middle-class woman from the rural South whose family are obliged to re-settle in the Northern industrial town of Milton. Joining us to discuss the novel’s contemporary relevance, are two new guests: Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and Nell Stevens, author of the memoir, Mrs Gaskell & Me. We cover the books presentation of labour relations at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the changing position of women in society, the reasons for Elizabeth Gaskell’s uncertain reputation, her unsentimental treatment of death and – spoiler alert – whether the novel’s ending works. Also in this episode, Andy is impressed by No Document, Australian writer Anwen Crawford’s ground-breaking work of elegiac non-fiction and John enjoys the exquisite imagination on display in Chloe Aridjis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist, the Mexican novelist’s recent collection of stories, essays and pen portraits.

Books mentioned:

Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South; Cranford; Mary Barton; The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad; The Candy House
Nell Stevens - Mrs Gaskell & Me; Briefly, A Delicious Life
Anwen Crawford - No Document
Chloe Aridjis - Dialogue with a Somnambulist
John Chapple & Arthur Pollard (eds) - The Letters of Mrs Gaskell
John Chapple & Alan Shelston (eds) - The Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell
Jenny Uglow - Elizabeth Gaskell
Charles Dickens - Hard Times
Charlotte Brontë - Shirley

Other links:

The Gaskell Society
Elizabeth Gaskell at the British Library
’The Unjustly Overlooked Victorian Novelist Elizabeth Gaskell’ by Hannah Rosefield, New Yorker, Sep 2018

169. Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Authors Jay Griffiths and Geoff Dyer are our guests for a discussion of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard was only twenty-nine when her first prose book was published in 1974; it went onto win the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction the following year. To discuss this classic of observational nature writing and spiritual enquiry, we are joined by two writers making their Backlisted debuts: Jay Griffiths, the author of Wild: An Elemental Journey and Geoff Dyer, whose most recent book The Last Days of Roger Federer, featured on the Gormenghast episode. By coincidence, Andy has been reading Pages from the Goncourt Journals (NYRB Classics), a spicy, gossip-rich glimpse into 19th century French literary life which has a foreword by Geoff, while John immerses himself in the inner world of John Donne, through regular Backlisted guest Katherine Rundell’s widely acclaimed biography: Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber).

Books mentioned:

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; The Abundance
Jay Griffiths - Wild: An Elemental Journey; Nemesis, My Friend
Geoff Dyer - The Last Days of Roger Federer
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt - Pages from the Goncourt Journals
Katherine Rundell - Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Other links:

Annie Dillard talks to David Remnick for The New Yorker Radio Hour, 2016
Annie Dillard talks to Melissa Block, NPR 2016
Annie Dillard’s reads ‘Dots in Blue Water’ NPR, 2005
Mockingbird Song
'The Thoreau of the Suburbs', Diana Saverin, The Atlantic, Feb 2015
Silent All These Years by Brian VanDyke, The Millions Sept 2021
Annie Dillard’s website
Jay Griffiths’ website
Geoff Dyer’s website

168. Helen DeWitt - Lightning Rods

The second novel by by literary wunderkind, Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods is probably the most challenging book we’ve yet featured on Backlisted. Usually described as a satire on American capitalism, it is the diasarmingly upbeat and funny tale of Joe, a struggling salesman, who develops a new office product that he believes serves an urgent need in modern corporate life. Quite what that product is and how it works requires a delicacy in description and a warning for listeners: this is not one for family listening. We are joined by returning guests, novelist and playwright Marie Philips and writer and performer, Ben Moor. The episode also features Andy rediscovering a lost folk horror classic from the 1970s - The Autumn People (also known as The Autumn Ghosts) by Ruth M. Arthur while John is blown away by the force of Sarah Churchwell’s incandescent and incisive account of an American classic: The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells.

Books mentioned:

Helen DeWitt - Lightning Rods; The Last Samurai; Some Trick; The English Understand Wool
Ruth M. Arthur - The Autumn People/The Autumn Ghosts
Sarah Churchwell - The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells
Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal and Other Writings

Other links:

Helen DeWitt talking to the Paris Review
Helen DeWitt answers questions on Lightning Rods, 2011
Helen DeWitt at New Directions
Helen DeWitt's website and blog
New Directions Publishing
Ben Moor’s Edinburgh shows

167. John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos

It's sixty-five years since John Wyndham published The Midwich Cuckoos, the fourth in his hugely successful series of science fiction novels that began in 1951 with The Day of the Triffids. Many people’s first introduction to The Midwich Cuckoos is through the classic film from 1960, which was renamed Village of the Damned and starred George Sanders. We’re joined for this episode by the writer and director David Farr, who has just produced the most recent adaptation of the novel: a seven-episode series for Sky. As well as assessing the merits of the book – sometimes obscured by its popular success – we discuss the process of adapting a classic novel for a modern audience. This episode also features Andy sharing his holiday read – The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (author of The Constant Nymph which we featured last year). The novel is set in Cornwall, which was exactly where Andy found himself when he read it. John also introduces a new independent publisher, Hazel Press, whose exquisite small, environmentally friendly books include The Wren by Julia Blackburn, a haunting sequence of short journal entries and prose poems.

Books Mentioned:

John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos; The Day of the Triffids; The Chrysalids; Trouble With Lichen; Chocky; Consider her Ways and Others
Margaret Kennedy - The Feast
Julia Blackburn - The Wren

Other Links:

John Wyndham Interview with Derek Hart on Tonight (1960)
The Hazel Press

166. Paul Theroux - The Kingdom By the Sea

Forty years ago the writer Paul Theroux hoisted his knapsack on his back and set off on a journey on foot around the coast of the United Kingdom; the effects of Thatcherism were being felt in earnest and the Falklands War was in progress. The Kingdom by the Sea, Theroux's grumpy, funny account of this journey, was published the following year (1983) and caused outrage in many of the seaside towns the author had passed through and seemingly written off.

In this episode the Backlisted team - Andy, John, Nicky and Tess - revisit the book, and a few books like it, to discuss whatever happened to travel writing; how Britain has changed since 1982; and what Theroux got right - and wrong - about his adopted country. In addition, John enjoys a more recent travelogue, Felicity Cloake's new book Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey (Mudlark); while Andy reads two poems from Fiona Benson's stunning new collection Ephemeron (Cape Poetry).

Books mentioned:

Paul Theroux - The Kingdom By the Sea; The Great Railway Bazaar; The Happy Isles of Oceania; The Mosquito Coast
Jonathan Raban - Coasting
Fiona Benson - Ephemeron
Felicity Cloake - Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey
George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn
Roger Deakin - Waterlog
Iain Sinclair - Lights Out for the Territory
Bill Bryson - Notes From a Small Island
Daniel Defoe - A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
Samuel Johnson & James Boswell - A Journey through the Western Isles of Scotland
Michael Bracewell - Souvenir
Anne Theroux - The Year of the End

Other links:

Paul Theroux on Arena: Blackpool (BBC, 1989)
Auberon Waugh reviews The Kingdom By the Sea in the New York Times
Review of The Year of the End by Anne Theroux - Rachel Cooke (Guardian, Jul 2021)

165. Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast

Novelist Joanne Harris (Chocolat, A Narrow Door) is our guest for a celebration of Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959) by Mervyn Peake, three novels which are often referred to, erroneously, as The Gormenghast Trilogy. With Joanne's expert guidance, John and Andy revisit Peake's visionary work for the first time in decades and are surprised and delighted by what they discover. Also in this episode, Andy marks the belated UK publication of Maud Martha, the sole novel by poet Gwendolyn Brooks (Faber); while John enjoys Geoff Dyer's new book about tennis and much more, The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (Canongate).

Books mentioned:

Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan; Gormenghast; Titus Alone; Titus Awakes; The Gormenghast Trilogy
Joanne Harris - Chocolat; A Narrow Door
Gwendolyn Brooks - Maud Martha
Kay Dick - They
Rachel Ingalls - Mrs Caliban
Wilson Harris - Palace of the Peacock
Emeric Pressburger - The Glass Pearls
Geoff Dyer - The Last Days of Roger Federer & Other Endings
James Joyce - Ulysses
Thomas Love Peacock - Nightmare Abbey
Victor Hugo - Les Miserables; Notre-Dame de Paris
J. L. Husymans - A Rebors
John Braine- Room at the Top
Albert Canus - The Outsider
Joe Orton - Entertaining Mr Sloane
W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman - 1066 & All That
Colin Wilson - The Outsider

Other links:

Hundred Years of Mervyn Peake
Desert Island Discs, Sir Ranulph Fiennes:
Desert Island Discs, Keith Floyd:
The Mervyn Peake official website:
Peake Studies
The Cure, Faith
Gormenghast (2000) on Amazon Prime:
Joanne Harris website
New Folio Society edition of the Gormenghast Trilogy (sic), illustrated by Dave McKean and with an introduction by Neil Gaiman, it costs £745 plus P&P but knock yourselves out!

164. Elizabeth Bowen - The Death of the Heart

Tessa Hadley (Free Love, Late in the Day) joins us for a discussion of The Death of the Heart (1938), the sixth novel by Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen; as you'll hear, Tessa has been reading and rereading Bowen's work since she discovered it in her local library when she was 12 years old. We go deep into the glorious idiosyncrasies (and idiosyncratic glories) of Bowen's style and consider why her reputation has waxed and waned in the years since her death in 1973.

Also in this episode, John celebrates his recent trip to New Orleans with a reading of Nine Lives (Random House US), Dan Baum's book about the city; and Andy navigates his way round Géricault's painting ‘The Wreck of the Medusa’ using Tom de Freston's new book Wreck (Granta) as his compass.

Books mentioned:

Elizabeth Bowen - The Death of the Heart; The Last September; The House in Paris; Eva Trout; The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (edited by Tessa Hadley); Collected Stories (introduction by Angus Wilson); The Mulberry Tree (edited by Hermione Lee)
Tessa Hadley - Free Love; Late in the Day
George Ewart Evans - Where Beards Wag All; Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay
Robert Ashton - Where are the Fellows Who Cut the Hay?
Tom de Freston - Wreck: Géricault’s Raft & the Art of Being Lost at Sea
Dan Baum - Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death & Life in New Orleans
Hugh Walpole - Rogue Herries
Ivy Compton Burnett - More Women than Men
Henry Green - Living, Loving , Party Going

Other links:

Elizabeth Bowen - Truth and Fiction, BBC 1956
Elizabeth Bowen interview, 1959
The Death of the Heart, 1987 film adaptation
The Elizabeth Bowen Society
Channel 4 documentary on three Anglo-Irish sisters, 1986
Tessa Hadley on re-reading Elizabeth Bown, LRB (9 Feb, 2020)

163. Oscar Wilde - De Profundis

Our guest is Stephen Fry, writer, actor and polymath, who last week joined John and Andy in person to discuss Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, the essay addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas in 1897 'from the depths' of Wilde's incarceration in Reading Gaol. It has been described by Colm Tóibín as 'one of the greatest love letters ever written'; it is also Wilde's most powerful testament of the sacred duty of the artist as he conceived it. We discuss the work's convoluted publication history, Wilde's posthumous reputation and his ongoing relevance in the 21st century. In addition, Andy has been reading Hayley Campbell's fascinating All the Living and the Dead (Raven Books), which he describes as "a work of true rigour mortis"; while John digs enthusiastically into Villager (Unbound), the new novel from writer and former Backlisted guest Tom Cox.

Books mentioned:

Oscar Wilde - De Profundis & Other Prison Writings (edited by Colm Tóibín); The Importance of Being Earnest & Other Plays (edited by Peter Raby); The Soul of Man Under Socialism & Selected Critical Prose
Stephen Fry - Fry’s Ties; Stephen Fry’s Inside Your Mind (Audio)
Hayley Campbell - All the Living & the Dead
Tom Cox - Villager
Matthew Sturgis - Oscar: A Life
Richard Ellmann - Oscar Wilde
Emmanuel Carrère - The Kingdom

Other links

Bunthorne sings "Am I Alone and Unobserved?" from Gilbert & Sullivan's Patience (1891)
De Profundis read by Simon Russell Beale, introduction by Merlin Holland
De Profundis: Oscar Wilde's Letter from Inside (BBC Radio 4, 2016)
Omnibus: Oscar (BBC One, 1997)
Prisoner C33 (BBC Four, 2022)
Neil Bartlett reads the whole of De Profundis in the old chapel of Reading Prison, 2016
Patti Smith reads extracts from De Profundis in the old chapel of Reading Prison, 2016
Rupert Everett reads ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ in the old chapel of Reading Prison, 2016
Stephen Fry in Wilde (Brian Gilbert, 1997)
The Happy Prince (Rupert Everett, 2018)
John Betjeman and Jim Parker, ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’ (from Betjeman's Banana Blush, Charisma Records 1974)
Colm Tóibín on De Profundis, 2016
The Oscar Wilde Society

162. Natalia Ginzburg - Family Lexicon

Publisher Marigold Atkey and journalist Emily Rhodes join us for a discussion of Lessico famigliare, Natalia Ginzburg's novelistic memoir or autobiographical novel, first published in Italy in 1963 and most recently translated by Jenny McPhee as Family Lexicon (Daunt/NYRB). Ginzburg had a long and distinguished career in Italian literature, theatre and politics. This episode explores her fascinating life and asks why her work is finding new readers and admirers in the 21st century, amongst them Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney. Also in this episode John enjoys How To Gut a Fish (Bloomsbury), a debut collection of short stories by Shelia Armstrong; while Andy reflects on Vashti Bunyan's pilgrimage to the Outer Hebrides, as recounted in Wayward (White Rabbit), her memoir of the 1960s and beyond.

Books mentioned:

Natalia Ginzburg - Family Lexicon (translated by Jenny McPhee); The Little Virtues (translated by Dick Davis); Voices in the Evening (translated by D.M. Low); The Dry Heart (translated by Frances Frenaye); All Our Yesterdays (translated by Angus Davidson); Valentino & Sagittarius (translated by Avril Bardoni)
Vashti Bunyan - Wayward
Sheila Armstrong - How to Gut a Fish
Tove Ditlevsen - Childhood, Adulthood, Dependency: the Copenhagen Trilogy (translated by Tiina Nunnally & Michael Favala Goldman)
Gerald Durrell - My Family & Other Animals
Giorgio Bassani - The Garden of the Fonzi-Continis (translated by Jamie MacKendrick)
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend - Book 1 in the Neapolitan Trilogy (translated by Ann Goldstein)
Donatella Di Pietrantonio - A Girl Returned (translated by Ann Goldstein)

Other links:

Emily Rhodes’ Walking Book Club
Old Memories
Colm Tóibín on Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg interview on Italian TV, 1964
Pier Paolo Pasolini - The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964)

161. Andrew Salkey - Escape to An Autumn Pavement & Jamaica

Our guests are both new to Backlisted: the legendary publisher, editor, writer Margaret Busby and the award-winning poet, Raymond Antrobus. They join us to discuss the work of the Caribbean writer, Andrew Salkey, in particular his 1960 Hampstead ‘bedsit novel’, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, and his epic poem Jamaica, which explores the historical foundations of Jamaican society and was first published in 1973 by the pioneering press, Bogle L’Ouverture. As you will discover, Salkey was a consummate live performer - as are both our guests – and the episode make a strong case for his work to be revisted. This episode also features Andy enjoying the graphic novel and memoir, All the Sad Songs by Summer Pierre, while John is blown away by Aftermath, Preti Taneja’s brave and uncompromising account of recovering from a public tragedy.

Books mentioned:

Andrew Salkey - Escape to an Autumn Pavement; Jamaica; Away; Hurricane
Margaret Busby - Daughters of Africa (ed); New Daughters of Africa (ed)
Raymond Antrobus - The Perseverance; All the Names Given; Can Bears Ski?
Summer Pierre - All the Sad Songs
Preti Taneja - Aftermath
Sam Selvon - The Lonely Londoners
George Lamming - The Pleasures of Exile
Colin Macinnes - Absolute Beginners
Roger Mais - Black Lightning
Ursula Le Guin - The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories
Robin Costs Lewis - Voyage of the Sable Venus
Monique Roffey - The Mermaid of Black Conch

Other links:

Lord Kitchener - ‘My Landlady’
Andrew Salkey reading his poetry and being interviewed by Henry Lyman, 1986
George Lamming interviewed by Huw Weldon, Monitor 1960
Caribbean Voices: Paul Mendez on Andrew Salkey

160. Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49

For this episode both our guests are old Backlisted hands: Sarah Churchwell, Professor in American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and Sam Leith, literary editor of the Spectator.

We are discussing the 1966 postmodern novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, by some way his shortest book, but no less complex and intriguing for its relative brevity. Sound the muted post horn!

Also in this episode, Andy extols the subtle virtues of former guest Susie Boyt’s novel, Loved and Missed while John discovers the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s dramatic sequence, Deaf Republic, which tells the stories of a fictional town falling under foreign occupation.

Books Mentioned:

Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49; Against the Day; Gravity’s Rainbow
Susie Boyt - Loved & Missed
Ilya Kaminsky - Deaf Republic
Sarah Churchwell - The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe; Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream; The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Myth of the Lost Cause
Sam Leith - You Talkin’ to Me: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama; Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page

Other links:

Deaf Republic audiobook
CNN report, 1997
Inherent Vice book trailer:
Pynchon on The Simpsons:
The Story of the US Mail, 1954:

159. Raymond Briggs - Fungus the Bogeyman

We are joined by author-illustrator Nadia Shireen and writer Andrew Male for a smellybration of Fungus the Bogeyman (1977) by the great Raymond Briggs, the much-loved and bestselling picture book Andrew describes as "the children's Anatomy of Melancholy". We consider Briggs's life and work in full: Father Christmas, The Snowman, When the Wind Blows, Ethel & Ernest and the sepulchral Time For Lights Out (2019), his latest - and perhaps last - book; we also hear several times from the (often very funny) author himself.

Also in this episode Andy talks about issues raised by reading Laugh a Defiance, a long out-of-print memoir by campaigner Mary Richardson; while John shares his enthusiasm for Jessica Au's new novel, Cold Enough For Snow (Fitzcarraldo).

Books mentioned:

Raymond Briggs - Fungus the Bogeyman; Father Christmas; The Snowman; When the Wind Blows; Ethel & Ernest; UG: Boy Genius of the Stone Age and His Search for Soft Trousers; The Man; Notes from the Sofa; Time For Lights Out
Nadia Shireen- Grimwood; The Bumblebear
Tom de Freston - Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea
Jessica Au - Cold Enough for Snow
Robert Burton - An Anatony of Melancholy
Edmund Burke - A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime
Thomas Carlyle - Sartor Resartus

Other links:

David Bowie introduction to The Snowman, 1984
Paul McCartney - ‘Bogey Music’ from McCartney II (1980)
Raymond Briggs, Desert Island Discs, 1983
Raymond Briggs, Desert Island Discs, 2005
Raymond Briggs discusses Fungus the Bogeyman on TV, 1979
When the Wind Blows, BFI DVD
Ethel & Ernest Trailer
Raymond Briggs: Snowmen, Bogeymen and Milkmen (documentary, 2019)