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