
Biographer Katherine Bucknell on Christopher Isherwood's Odyssey from Weimar Berlin to California
Shelf LifeShow Notes
Send us Fan Mail What can we learn from Weimar Germany and its rapid unraveling in the 1930s? Lately that question has gained more urgency as the US turns away from the trans-Atlantic alliance that has underpinned European security for the past 80 years. For Katherine Bucknell, no writer was better placed than Christopher Isherwood for understanding the speed with which a country can slide into autocracy. It was his book Goodbye to Berlin that became the basis for the musical, Cabaret. Withou...
More from Shelf Life
Send us Fan Mail In the week of her eighty-eighth birthday, and the publication of Frenzy, her latest collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates sat down with her friend and fellow novelist A.M. Homes at the Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, New York. What began as a conversation about time and the short story soon wandered into more unexpected territory, from grief and ghosts to Barbie dolls, the limits of literary imagination, and whether there are stories even their authors ...
Send us Fan Mail Francis Spufford’s new novel, Nonesuch, drops us into Blitz London—blackouts, random acts of violence, food rationing—and then, almost imperceptibly, the world acquires another layer. In this episode, Spufford, the author of Golden Hill and Light Perpetual, among others, talks about the “daft mixture of wartime finance, early TV, archangels, Renaissance magic, and falling bombs," that makes Nonesuch such an epic and invigorating read. We talk about the Blitz as a kind of perm...
Send us Fan Mail Madeleine Dunnigan’s fierce, unnerving coming-of-age novel, Jean, is set in the final weeks at Compton Manor, an all-boys school that sells itself as enlightened where desire moves like weather, and cruelty is a kind of social sport. In this episode Dunnigan explains why the boarding-school setting is such a useful framing device; what drew her to the late 1970s punk-era—close enough to the Second World War to feel its aftershocks, but far enough to watch a new, disillusioned...
Send us Fan Mail Few cities lend themselves to myth quite like New York, a city that reinvents itself so often that each generation claims its own version. In this episode, we speak with journalist Jonathan Mahler about The Gods of New York, his sweeping portrait of the 1980s city of ambition and excess, when figures like Ed Koch, Donald Trump, and Al Sharpton weren’t just characters in the story—they were battling, in public, for the city’s soul. Mahler, best known for Ladies and Gentlemen, ...
Send us Fan Mail Before you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman, is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for peeling back the myths around “Lady Lindy” to reveal the...