Show Notes
Send us Fan Mail It took William Boyd three failed attempts at writing a novel before he hit gold with A Good Man in Africa, which won him both the Whitbread Book Award for a first novel and the Somerset Maugham Award. That was in 1981, and Boyd hasn’t stopped to draw breath since. His 16th novel, Trio, has just been published in paperback, and another novel will be published this year. Among his other achievements is bringing James Bond back to life, in the novel Solo–in which the martini-sw...
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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...
Send us Fan Mail “Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading,” declared Kirkus in its review of her new novel, Crush, a sharp and seductive exploration of midlife desire and the unruly force of infatuation. Calhoun is the author of the acclaimed history St. Marks Is Dead; the memoir Also a Poet, which chronicles her attempt to finish an abandoned biography of Frank O’Hara begun by her father, the critic Peter Schjeldahl; the essay collection Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give; and ...