Show Notes
For this minisode we’re doing something a little different - this episode is sponsored by publisher Picador, who this year have launched a new list of contemporary classics, called The Picador Collection, to coincide with their 50th anniversary year. With the aim of bringing seminal titles to a new generation of readers, the Picador Collection combines the gravitas of a modern classics list with the eccentric, boundary-pushing spirit of cult paperback publishing. To celebrate the collection, we interviewed the inimitable Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, who has five books featured on this list. Then we talked to Stu Wilson, from the art department at Picador. The Picador Collection titles all have a fresh new look, designed by Katie Tooke, and Stu will be telling us about the work that went into designing the series, and the fascinating process of cover design more generally.
We are ALSO running a competition with Picador! 5 lucky listeners will win a sturdy and now very rare Literary Friction tote, along with each of our two favourite titles from the Picador Collection, plus one of Jamaica’s books, which means five books in total - if you want to find who chose what (and see if you can guess…) check out both of our socials: @picadorbooks and @litfriction on Twitter and Instagram.
The competition is now LIVE and will be open until the 6th of October, so you have a two week window to enter! You can find more details here: https://www.panmacmillan.com/literaryfriction-giveaway
More from Literary Friction
So it turns out, we missed talking to each other about books, and we missed you! And thanks to some vital sponsorship from our friends at Faber Books, we are BACK, baby, for this extra long one-off Year in Review episode.
It's time for our usual Year in Review show, but seeing as this is also our last EVER episode (sob!), we're shaking things up a little to bring you a bit of a decade in review as well, so we can look back over our highlights from ten wonderful years of Literary Friction.
What does it mean, to pursue a life of your own? And what is art and literature's role in figuring out what that might look like? This month we're delighted to be talking to writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, whose latest book Radical: A Life of My Own is both a personal lexicon and a memoir, which thinks deeply about what it would mean to truly forge a life of one’s own.
Our theme this month was suggested by our patron Maral, who asked us to do an episode about our friendship, because she’s interested in how our (very!) different personalities align. We thought it might be a little self-indulgent to spend a whole episode talking about us specifically, so we’re also going to return to the theme of friendship more broadly, and talk about some of our favourite books about friends.
How do the people and things we desire shape our identities? And how do you render the physical intensity of desire on the page? Author K Patrick joins us in thinking about desire this month - we spoke to K about their debut novel Mrs. S, which tells the story of a young Australian who arrives at an elite English all-girls boarding school for a job and ends up having a life-changing affair with the headmaster's wife. It's a sensual portrait of queer desire, and the transformative power of lust and longing, which is why we wanted to revisit the theme of desire in this show. So, listen in for all the usual recommendations, our favourite writing about desire, and why desire is crucial to the act of reading itself.