Past Programs
Books - Fiction - 2007
Richard Ford: Edinburgh International Book Festival Read Transcript
31/12/2007
Most people think writing is about characters and what they do, but American novelist Richard Ford thinks it's about making experiments with language. Furthermore, as a dyslexic person who didn't read a book to the end till he was 18, finding the right places for the words in his novels is a big clerical nightmare.
Michael Ondaatje on Divisadero Read Transcript
27/12/2007
Recorded at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje, the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion, speaks to Ramona Koval about his remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time, Divisadero.
Divisadero begins in the 1970s on a ranch in northern California, where Coop, Claire and the narrator – who, as the story opens, tells us she has stopped calling herself Anna – are divided by an act of violence. Anna's mother died giving birth to her. Claire was also orphaned at birth and was left without a family, so Anna's father took both babies home from the hospital and raised them as sisters. Coop is five years older. His parents, who owned the next farm, were murdered by their own hired hand when he was four.
Michael Ondaatje begins with a reading from Divisadero.
The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (review) Read Transcript
21/12/2007
What do you get when you ask Richard Ford to select his favourite short stories from the past 50 years of American writing?
The most obvious result is a very large book -- a substantial stocking-filler and holiday reading project.
Melinda Harvey has delved inside the anthology for the Book Show, to give us a deeper sense of the literary allsorts chosen by Richard Ford.
Imagining the literary future and the year in review
21/12/2007
Today we reflect on the literary year that's been and speculate on what 2008 may bring in publishing and literary life.
Domestically, Australia has undergone a major political shift. We've swapped prime ministers and parties in government, but does that signal a shift in the nation's psyche, or is Kevin Rudd just John Howard lite?
Will we see ourselves reflected in new ways in the work of authors, journalists, playwrights and screenwriters or can we expect more continuity than change?
Internationally the world will be focussed on getting the United States to join the team on climate change -- while the US itself will be in election mode in 2008 -- and looking inward.
Which voices will prick our collective conscience? Who will step forward to take the place of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya or Turkish newspaper editor Hrant Dink?
To discuss these and other issues the Book Show is joined by some fine literary thinkers:
Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books;
Henry Rosenbloom, head of Melbourne based Scribe Publishing;
and playwright, author and speechwriter Michael Gurr.
Surveillance by Jonathan Raban (review) Read Transcript
19/12/2007
Jonathan Raban's new novel Surveillance portrays a United States where everything has been changed by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Lucy Bengrstrom lives in Seattle, the heartland of American liberalism. But in Raban's novel, the city is now full of machine-gun toting soldiers and there are surveillance cameras everywhere.
And this compels Lucy to rebel against everything her personal and professional life has taught her.
Surveillance is a novel of political ideas, but, says our reviewer Brendan Gullifer, not one that draws conclusions.
Fictional ecology: environmental politics and fiction
18/12/2007
In November 2007, state governments in Victoria and New South Wales decided to lift their moratorium on genetically modified canola.
The issue divides opinion like few others -- critics see GM crops as Frankenstein food with dangerous and unforseeable consequences. Supporters say genetically modified organisms will save the world, feed the starving and help us grow survive in a warming world with unreliable rainfall.
How might fiction deal with the debate over the pros and cons of GM crops -- and similar environmental issues for that matter?
The landscape is often cast in a major role in Australian novels, but what about the politics of our environment, could they feature more prominently -- as they have in the US and Britain?
Or is that kind of fiction too laboured, too close to polemic? Are topics like GM canola and climate change better left to non-fiction?
Singing and fishing in Matthew Condon's Trout Opera Read Transcript
17/12/2007
Journalist and writer Matthew Condon's Trout Opera romps through 20th century Australia. It begins with a giant trout shuffling across a bridge and courses through the first world war and up to the time of the Olympics, when the charming main character, Wilfred Lampe, is made into an exhibit for the occasion, as 'Old Man From Snowy River'. This is a literary opera that tracks the darkness and light of the heart.
A homage to Alice Munro from the Edinburgh International Book Festival
04/12/2007
At this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, the much-loved Scottish poet Liz Lockhead told a packed audience why she loves the work of Alice Munro.
Alice Munro is widely considered one of the best living writers in the world. Her short stories are largely set in Canada's southwestern Ontario but Alice Munro's reach is international.
And the Edinburgh International Book Festival paid special tribute to her this year with a series of events -- including one, hosted by fellow Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, that was attended by a host of other writers who love Munro's work -- writers like Ali Smith, Kate Atkinson, and Liz Lockhead herself.
Here, Liz Lockhead celebrates the work of Alice Munro.
Kate Mosse slips through time in Sepulchre
29/11/2007
Following the global success of Labyrinth, which sold more than 1.5m copies, Kate Mosse talks to broadcaster Nicola Barranger in the UK about her new novel Sepulchre.
Like Labyrinth, Kate's new book is what she calls a 'time slip' novel -- two parallel plots which are interlinked. Leonie and her brother Anatole leave Paris for medieval Carcassone in the early part of the 20th century. Once there Leonie stumbles across a ruined Visigoth sepulchre. Meanwhile in the 21st century Meridith, a young American, is researching a biography of the French composer Claude Debussy and also heads to the Aude Valley in search of her birth family.
Given that she has moved between the UK and south-west France for the past 18 years, setting has been a big influence and inspiration on Kate Mosse's writing. She outlines the details of the plot of the new novel -- explaining that, like her previous novel, it is set in the present and the past; this time in modern day Paris and fin-de-siècle south-west France.
Jane Austen and comedy
29/11/2007
Jane Austen is read from Bath in England, where she spent her later life, to Australia, India and Japan. Perhaps what explains her near universal celebration is her wit. This week the international flavour of her comedy is being celebrated in Melbourne at La Trobe University at a Jane Austen and Comedy conference.
James Jauncey's Scottish dystopia -- The Witness
26/11/2007
James Jauncey imagines a brutal future of the Scottish highlands in his new novel for young adults, The Witness. The all-powerful Department has passed the One Acre Act, giving the government power to dispossess the owners of any plot of land larger than a single acre. Guerrilla warfare has broken out as landlords have joined with crofters and stalkers in a resistance movement.
Eighteen-year-old John MacNeil witnesses a village massacre by Department troops. In its aftermath, he finds an abandoned child, Ninian, and is compelled by forces within and without to take him under his wing. It's fast-paced and violent and asks all kinds of moral questions, and James Jauncey joins the Book Show from a BBC studio in the heart of Edinburgh.
New York Review of Books update with Robert Silvers Read Transcript
22/11/2007
Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, talks about Philip Roth's new novel Exit Ghost, the latest and last in the series begun in 1979 featuring New England writer Nathan Zuckerman. He tells us about environmental activist Dai Qing on China's dire water shortage and a 'looming environmental catastrophe'; and about several new books revealing how drug companies have helped exaggerate the extent of serious depression in order to push sales of antidepressants.
Mandy Sayer's The Night Has a Thousand Eyes
22/11/2007
Australian novelist Mandy Sayer's latest book, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, explores childhood innocence in a sordid and damaged adult world.
Mandy Sayer was an Australian/Vogel Literary Award winner seventeen years ago - since the she's published eight books and was named one of Australia's best young novelists. Not so young anymor, Mandy Sayer is probably best known for her two critically acclaimed memoirs - Dreamtime Alice about her time as a street performer in New York and New Orleans - and Velocity where she recounts her often difficult and traumatic upbringing.
For the Book Show Kyla Brettle spoke to Mandy Sayer and she begins with a reading from her book The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
And just a warning, there is strong language in the interview.
Philip Roth's Exit Ghost (review) Read Transcript
21/11/2007
It can be difficult for novelists to write endings. But the end of a much loved series can also be difficult for readers, when characters they've come to know so well are finished off -- often because their creators want to move on to other pastures.
Harry Potter's last appearance was made in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus took his bow in Exit Music. Now Philip Roth has written the swansong of his character Nathan Zuckerman. In fact, in Exit Ghost, 71-year-old Zuckerman is contemplating the meaning of his own existential end.
Geordie Williamson has been reading Exit Ghost for the Book Show.
Literary drag -- Melbourne Writers' Festival
21/11/2007
Good writers are often praised for their ability to get inside the heads of their characters - to slip seamlessly and convincingly into the skin of another person.
Paradoxically they're also noted for their distinctive authorial voices -- the sense of their unique selves and perspective on the world infused in their words.
But can we really read the writer behind the text? At this year's Melbourne Writers Festival - Michael Robotham and Alexander McCall Smith - author of the much loved Number 1. Ladies' Detective Agency series - talk about writing in the voice of the opposite sex.
Sarah Hall's militant women -- The Carhullan Army
20/11/2007
In the tradition of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, Sarah Hall's latest novel The Carhullan Army is a dystopian novel about a separatist feminist settlement in training to liberate the cities and towns controlled by the ubiquitous 'Authority'.
It is Sarah Hall's third novel and is set in the place where she grew up, in Cumbria.
The story is narrated by a woman known only as Sister. She escaped from a township called Rith, where women are forcibly fitted with contraceptive units, and everyone works in menial jobs. There is perpetual war, floods and a fuel crisis.
The perpetual boredom of this repressive life is crushing the narrator, and so she decides to escape to join a group of women who had set up an alternative colony 15 years ago in a remote part of the country -- it is called Carhullan. So, she leaves her husband and escapes from the town and must walk to the Carhullan settlement across the Cumbrian landscape. She is looking for a new life, but she doesn't receive a warm welcome from the women, who ambush her on her trek to their farm.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Sarah Hall, who was in the BBC's Carlisle studio.
Sarah Hall begins with a reading from The Carhullan Army. The narrator has just been captured by the women from the Carhullan settlement and they've confiscated her rifle.
Chris Sheedy and Jenny Bond on the stories behind the world's favourite books
14/11/2007
What influenced writers like Jane Austen and Peter Carey to take up the pen? Chris Sheedy and Jenny Bond reveal the stories behind the stories in Behind the bestsellers: the stories behind the world's favourite books.
City Stories: Melburnalia
14/11/2007
You get the feeling sometimes that New York city is more often a character in literature, film and theatre than Melbourne, or Brisbane or Darwin. So, in the first of our City Stories series we're looking at a project in Melbourne by White Whale Theatre that puts place and setting at the heart of its production.
Five Melbourne writers penned five unique plays set in the suburbs of Melbourne. The result is a play called Melburnalia.
For The Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange wanders down the laneways of Ringwood, Footscray, St Kilda, the CBD and Kew with the writers.
And just a warning, there is strong language in this piece.
Mystery solved: Edgar Allan Poe's death
08/11/2007
Matthew Pearl, author of The Poe Shadow, thinks he has solved the puzzle of what caused Edgar Allan Poe's death.
Poe died in 1849 in Baltimore, but the cause of death is unknown. Suicide, alcohol, tuberculosis, heart disease, and even rabies are some of the possibilities that have been put forward.
Now the mystery has apparently been solved; and it's been done by the clever mind of a writer, rather than a scientist.
It is apt that while Matthew Pearl was knee deep in research for his own book about Poe's death, he uncovered this mystery.
Matthew Pearl joins the Book Show from a studio in Boston; and that is quite fitting, because Poe was born there.
Michelle de Kretser: The Lost Dog Read Transcript
06/11/2007
Michelle de Kretser talks to Robert Dessaix for The Book Show about her new novel, The Lost Dog.
Voices by Ursula Le Guin (review) Read Transcript
31/10/2007
The latest fantasy novel by Ursula Le Guin is Voices, it's the second instalment in The Annals of the Western Shore.
Alison Croggon, who is, among her many literary guises, a writer of genre fiction, reviews Le Guin's latest novel for young adults.
Inky Awards - teen choice for young adult fiction
30/10/2007
We all know of the Booker prize, the Pulitzer prize, the Miles Franklin award but now there's the Inky awards. These are the only Australian awards for young adult fiction whose judges are the teenagers who read them.
Young adult fiction may not always get a lot of attention in literary circles, but this award is raising its profile. It's also raising the profile of the readers who are able to connect with the characters in the fiction, like in Simmone Howell's Notes from the Teenage Underground, which made it on to the short list of the Inky awards.
The Inky Awards is run by the State Library of Victoria's Centre for Youth Literature and Insideadog.com.au, where the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to the organisers and some of the younger judges of the awards.
Who wrote Frankenstein? Read Transcript
26/10/2007
Was Mary Shelley too young and uneducated to have written Frankenstein? The gothic classic, first published anonymously in 1818, has got the experts raging in a debate.
John Lauritsen, the author of The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, says that that man was Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley's husband and senior by five years.
And Lauritsen has his supporters. The scholar and social commentator Camille Paglia thinks Lauritsen is right, and has published a favourable review of his book on Salon.com. But in response Germaine Greer has written for The Guardian that the flawed prose in Frankenstein means it could only have been written by the 19-year-old Mary.
John Lauritsen discusses The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein with The Book Show's Ramona Koval. They are joined by two other Shelley experts: Charles Robinson, who compiled the Frankenstein Notebooks, and Neil Fraistat, who co-published Volumes I and II of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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Callisto by Torsten Kroll (review) Read Transcript
18/10/2007
If you're a successful writer, do you really have to do festival appearances, interviews and book-signings? Can you choose to stay at home in Queensland and just write? Torsten Krol is a writer who's had no trouble attracting lucrative book deals on the strength of his first two novels. But no-one, not even his agent, seems to have seen him or even heard his voice. All communication is by email, and some people are wondering if he (or she) is actually another well-known writer in disguise. We love a mystery, but is it all just publisher's hype? Ryan Pain has been reading Torsten Krol's second novel Callisto for The Book Show.
Emma Magenta's The Origin of Lament
17/10/2007
Not all books that look like they're for children are for children, as the Book Show's Kyla Brettle discovers after reading about the fraught adventures of Magenta in The Origin of Lament. Kyla Brettle talks to Magenta's creator, Emma Magenta.
War, Denmark and Hans Christian Andersen
17/10/2007
After the Bible, Hans Christian Andersen's popular fairy tales are said to be the most translated works in literature. But some of his minor stories speak directly to our times, as they did in his 19th century Denmark which faced German expansionism. Scholar and cultural commentor Norman Berdichevsky explores the social significance of Hans Christian Andersen's stories to today's readership.
Ceridwen Dovey's Blood Kin
16/10/2007
Ceridwen Dovey writes with surgical efficiency about complicity as the blight of our times. Her debut novel Blood Kin is set in a timeless, placeless land that's experienced the overthrow of a despot. She explores the complicity of ordinary people to the excesses of the powerful through her three main characters: the president's portraitist, barber and chef.
Doris Lessing - Nobel prize winner 2007 Read Transcript
12/10/2007
Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel prize for literature by the Swedish Academy. Today we're bringing you a conversation Ramona Koval had with her in Edinburgh in 1999 when she'd just published the novel Mara and Dan.
Playing guess who? with the Times Literary Supplement's Peter Stothard
10/10/2007
It seems everybody in London thinks Robert Harris's new book The Ghost is about Tony Blair, but Robert Harris is denying that his one time friend is a character in this novel. Peter Stothard from the Times Literary Supplement gives his opinion.
Writing for Second Life: Richard James Allen
10/10/2007
How is writing for Second Life different from writing a book, a play or even a film? Today we crawl into the future to find out about writing stories for virtual worlds.
Poet Richard James Allen has adaptated his work Thursday's Fictions for Second Life -- it's already been a book of poetry, a film and a theatre work.
The adaptation was collaborative process and he worked with Jackie Turnure from LAMP (Laboratory of Advanced Media Production) to transform his writing for this virtual world.
It's part of the Story of the Future project run by the Australia Council which explores new ways for writers to ply their trade across platforms from games to mobile phones.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke first to Richard James Allen when he was in Melbourne recently and asked him to describe the story, Thursday's Fictions.
Amy Bloom's Away Read Transcript
09/10/2007
Away is a novel from celebrated American writer Amy Bloom. It covers nearly 2 years in the life of a larger than life character Lillian Leyb. (leyb means lion in Yiddish) and she is certainly a lion-hearted woman in the strong and descriptive language of Amy Bloom, whose short stories have been published in Antaeus, The New Yorker amongst other publications and her work has been anthologized in numerous collections, including the Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards.
She teaches creative writing at Yale but she's also worked as a psychotherapist and is the author of a non-fiction work called Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude.
But back to the novel - Away - Lillian Leyb is a Jewish immigrant from Russia who has fled her home after her husband, parents and neighbours were murdered in a pogrom. She has been separated from her two-year-old daughter, Sophie, and she is attempting to start a new life for herself on the Lower East Side in New York.
Desperation makes her know what she wants and she can see how to get it. This involves becoming the lover of Reuben, the owner of the Yiddish Theatre and of his handsome more or less gay actor son Meyer.
Amy Bloom joins Ramona Koval from her home in the USA.
Getting a handle on Henry: Henry Handel Richardson
08/10/2007
Henry Handel Richardson is one of the greats of early 20th century Australian literature. She wrote The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and The Getting of Wisdom as well as music, poems and short stories. After 13 years and 12 volumes the largest research project ever undertaken on an Australian author has just finished. Henry Handel Richardson's work has been reassessed in this Monash University project.
Anita Rau Badami's Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
02/10/2007
The history of 20th century India reads like a tragedy. From the time of partition to the explosion of the Air India Flight in 1984, Anita Rau Badami connects the lives of women to this tragedy in her new book Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Her characters' hopes for the future are defeated by the wheels of history.
Richard Ford: Edinburgh International Book Festival Read Transcript
01/10/2007
Most people think writing is about characters and what they do, but American novelist Richard Ford thinks it's about making experiments with language. Furthermore, as a dyslexic person who didn't read a book to the end till he was 18, finding the right places for the words in his novels is a big clerical nightmare.
AL Kennedy on her novel Day
26/09/2007
From this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, Ramona Koval speaks with writer and stand-up comedian AL Kennedy about her new novel Day.
Day is the story of Alfred Day, a Second World War veteran who becomes an extra in a war film. On the film set, Day has flashbacks of his time as a prisoner of war -- and through this tells the story of his life.
AL Kennedy was inspired to write Day after reading a Picture Post article about the making of the war film The Wooden Horse, in which actual former POWs play POWs on the screen.
A comic Great Gatsby? Nicki Greenberg's graphic adaptation of this classic
24/09/2007
Comic books are often associated with iron-jawed superheroes or the scruffy troublemaker Ginger Meggs -- or The Phantom brooding in his jungle cave. Not many people would think of F Scott Fitzgerald's classic, The Great Gatsby, but Melbourne comic book artist Nicki Greenberg did. She's taken almost seven years to adapt one of the 20th century's best-loved books.
For The Book Show George Dunford spoke to Nicki Greenberg in Melbourne.
Patrick Gale: Brisbane Writers' Festival Read Transcript
20/09/2007
British author Patrick Gale's latest novel is Notes from an Exhibition. Set in Gale's home county of Cornwall, it tells of a family headed by a woman who is both successful artist and manic depressive mother; roles that are hard to separate.
Each chapter of the book begins with a note from the exhibition of the work and life of an artist called Rachel Kelly. She's a painter, a mother of four -- in fact a very bad mother of four; she has bi-polar illness, and is a gifted and tormented artist with an extremely loving and forgiving husband. Patrick Gale shows her in all her facets.
From the Brisbane Writers' Festival Patrick Gale began with a reading from Notes from an Exhibition.
Armistead Maupin: Brisbane Writers' Festival Read Transcript
18/09/2007
San Francisco writer and gay activist Armistead Maupin, author of the best-selling series Tales of The City, in conversation with Ramona Koval at the Brisbane Writers' Festival about his most recent book, Michael Tolliver Lives.
After 18 years, Maupin has returned to Barbary Lane in this new book which is another love song to Maupin's adopted home. Tolliver was of course the beloved hero of the Tales of The City series, a man who has been living with AIDS for a long time now. The book begins with Michael being greeted by a man he passes in the street who says 'You're supposed to be dead'.
So Michael Tolliver has survived with AIDS into his late fifties, and has even fallen in love and married his much younger husband Ben. Here, from the Brisbane Writers' Festival last Sunday afternoon is Armistead Maupin. And a warning: there's sexually explicit language and adult themes in what you're about to hear.
Chris Womersley's The Low Road
17/09/2007
The Low Road is a crime thriller without the detective. It's the debut novel of journalist Chris Womersley and has been described as a book about the kinship of criminals. It follows the journey of three criminals looking for a way out of their current lifestyles.
There's Lee, who has annoyed a clique in the criminal underworld and has run off with $8000 of theirs: they're coming to get him, or at least the washed-up Josef is coming for him. Then there's the character Wild, whose life has been spiralling out of control -- he grudgingly takes Lee under his wing and they go on a journey together to find solace for Wild and to get the bullet out of Lee's rib-cage. It's a noir thriller that veers into gothic territory.
Chris Womersley speaks to the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange about The Low Road and begins with a reading.
Malcolm Knox 's Jamaica Read Transcript
13/09/2007
Australian writer and journalist Malcolm Knox discusses his latest novel Jamaica with Radio National's Peter Mares. It's a darkly comic tale of male friendship and betrayal that follows a team of six rich, 40-something friends on a trip to Jamaica to compete in a dangerous ocean swimming race. It's a story shaped by class and money and fuelled by alcohol and sex -- or at least the preoccupation with sex -- all territory familiar from Knox's previous two novels Summerland and A Private Man.
Napoleon's Double by Antoni Jach (review) Read Transcript
06/09/2007
What happens when you take seven characters whose names start with Jean, throw them into the Egyptian desert, meet Napoleon, and then send them off to Australia to do some cartography? The answer is nothing much, but that was part of the appeal for Brendan Gullifer, writer and broadcaster. He read Napoleon's Double by Antoni Jach for the Book Show and he was swept away by the journey.
Fay Weldon: Edinburgh International Book Festival
06/09/2007
Since Fay Weldon's Down Among the Women, written in the 1970s, she has written about subjects from cloning to cuckolding. Her new novel is, in a sense, again 'down among the women', but this time the women are high achievers -- mortgage brokers, judges, journalists even.
In The Spa Decameron, ten women meet at a spa over Christmas and New Year and indulge in ten days of pampering and talking together.
Graham Swift: Edinburgh International Book Festival
05/09/2007
Booker prize-winner Graham Swift, who explores the nature of families and blood ties in his latest novel, Tomorrow, in conversation with Ramona Koval at the 2007 Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Tomorrow is set in a single night, the night before a couple is to tell their twin 16-year-old children a secret of their birth. It is a story of a marriage and the delicate matter of cherishing happiness.
Pat Barker: Edinburgh International Book Festival Read Transcript
04/09/2007
Booker prize winning writer Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy made her famous for her moving portrayal of shell shock victims in the First World War, returns to that battle front in her latest book. Life Class looks at a group of artists at the famous Slade art school and the debates around what are fitting subjects to be portrayed in art -- is it the beauty or the reality of life?
Dave Eggers: novelist, social activist and pirate supply store owner
31/08/2007
Dave Eggers is something of a phenomenon. In fact he was described in the London Observer as the Michael Jordon of American literature. He first shot to fame seven years ago, when his memoir, A Heart-breaking Work of Staggering Genius, became a surprising number one best seller.
Since then, he has established his own publishing company McSweeneys, which publishes a literary journal open to all writers -- that sells like hotcakes and attracts the biggest names in literature today. Names like Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith and Pulitzer prize winner Michael Chabon.
He has also written a number of books -- What is the What being the latest.
Dave Eggers speaks at the Melbourne Writers' Festival to writer and broadcaster Tony Wilson -- and an apology, the sound quality of lapel mics in old town halls is never as good as we'd like it to be...
Ewan Morrison's The Last Book You Read and Other Stories Read Transcript
29/08/2007
In Australia for the Age Melbourne Writers' Festival, Ewan Morrison speaks to the Book Show about his collection of streetwise short stories. The Last Book You Read and Other Stories captures the desires of men and women who are gay, straight, young and old.
Nancy Huston's Fault Lines
28/08/2007
Nancy Huston is a Canadian born novelist and essayist who writes primarily in French and translates her own works into English. Winner of France's Prix Femina 2006, her latest novel Fault Lines is the tale of four generations of the one family. And it's told through the perspective of six-year-olds from each generation.
The story sweeps from 1945, where a young girl, Kristina, stolen as a baby from the Ukraine, is living with what she thinks is her real German family during the collapse of Germany; to Solomon, Kristina's great-grandson, a Californian of the 21st century, a precious Bush-admiring kid fascinated by grotesque images of dead Iraqis on the Internet.
From California to New York, from Haifa to Toronto and Munich, the novel unwinds back through time from a present haunted by the past, and examines how the decisions and political upheavals of one generation impact on the next.
Nancy is speaking from the studios of Radio France in Paris and she's talking to The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Kirsty Murray talks about her Asialink writer's residency
27/08/2007
'Write about what you know' is good advice for any writer, and it's easy to follow if you're writing about contemporary life in your own home town. But what about historical fiction set in another country?
Kirsty Murray writes historical fiction for young people and her characters come from other cultures and other times - like India in 1910, for instance, where an Australian children's theatre troupe went on strike in the middle of a tour, and sacked their manager.
Kirsty Murray recently came back from a three-month Asialink writer's residency in India, where she was researching that story.
Indra Sinha's Animal's People
23/08/2007
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007, Indra Sinha's Animal's People is an explosive and energetic novel that takes the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India in 1984 as its starting point. The narrator 'Animal'—a victim of the disaster who doesn't accept pity—jumps off the page and talks to you!
Post Hurricane Katrina: writing about New Orleans Read Transcript
23/08/2007
Michelle Rayner: The great playwright Tennessee Williams said of New Orleans that 'on my social passport, Bohemia is indelibly stamped, without regret on my part.' 'Bohemia' must have been a kind of a pseudonym for New Orleans.
The father of southern high gothic, William Faulkner, was a resident of New Orleans when he wrote his first novel, and Williams Burroughs' New Orleans home under the Huey Long Bridge was immortalised by his pal Jack Kerouac in On the Road.
The city of New Orleans has long fostered a thriving literary culture, but what happens when your computer is under water and your roof blows away in the wind? It disrupts not only daily life, but the creative process as well.
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 led to the forced exile of a whole swathe of writers from New Orleans. Two years on from the disaster, some writers have started to move back, they are starting to write again in that city, and particularly about their experience of Hurricane Katrina. For instance, the writer James Lee Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown, is set in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Jane Ciabattari is from the US National Book Critics Circle and she has been watching the slow re-establishment of the New Orleans literary community. She's a highly regarded journalist and writes and reviews for The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
Andrew Hutchinson's Rohypnol
22/08/2007
In Andrew Hutchinson's debut novel Rohypnol, a gang of wealthy private school boys hit Melbourne's nightclubs, spiking the drinks of unsuspecting women before raping them. These monsters have money, are used to getting what they want and don't plan on answering to anyone.
Rohypnol won the 2006 Victorian Premier's literary award for an unpublished manuscript by an emerging writer and is written in the tough and unflinching style of Loaded and Dead Europe, by Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas -- and it comes as little surprise to discover in the acknowledgements that Christos Tsiolkas was indeed Hutchinson's mentor on the book.
Andrew Hutchinson is speaking today from Canberra to Rhiannon Brown.
Anita Heiss and Indigenous publishing
22/08/2007
Poet, chicklit writer, social commentator, and member of the Wirundjeri nation of central New South Wales, Anita Heiss talks about her new book of poetry I'm Not a Racist But... and reflects on the state of Indigenous publishing in Australia. She also wrote a book with children from La Perouse primary school in Sydney called Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon.
Jorge Luis Borges - politically blind but a literary visionary
20/08/2007
It's the 108th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges -- the great Argentinian writer known for his short stories and strange mythical creations in The Book of Imaginary Beings.
In his honour, a Symposium on Borges is being held in Sydney from 23 to 24 August. It's a collaboration between Macquarie University, the Argentine Consulate General of Argentina and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The Symposium is looking at Borges's literary connections with the English world.
Jeff Browitt is giving a presentation at the symposium. Jeff is Senior Lecturer Latin American Studies, University of Technology Sydney, and he joins us on the phone from Sydney.
Peter Behrens: The Law of Dreams
20/08/2007
Peter Behrens talks with Michelle Rayner about his first novel, The Law of Dreams, an epic odyssey set during the Irish Famine of 1847.
Paddy O'Reilly's short stories
07/08/2007
Now to a collection of short stories about giant women, break-ups, Russian cross-dressers in Japan and lonely housewives.
Paddy O'Reilly has been writing short stories for many years, but The End of the World is her first published collection.
The stories are tragi-comic and have bold characters with a penchant for telling stories themselves. They've been described as adventurous, sharp-witted and beautifully crafted.
For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Paddy O'Reilly in Melbourne and asked her what the common thread was that linked these short stories together.
JM Ledgard's Giraffe Read Transcript
06/08/2007
JM Ledgard, author and journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya, speaks about his novel Giraffe, a meditation on captivity, the failures of Communism, the strangeness of these gentle, towering, vertical creatures.
Giraffe tells the story of the slaughter of the world's largest captive herd at the Dvur Králové zoo in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic on April 3, 1975. The herd, forty-nine in all, had been captured in Africa two years earlier and brought to the Europe with the joint aim of creating a new Czech subspecies, the Camelopardais Bohemica, and to entertain the workers.
When it was discovered the giraffes were suffering from a deadly virus, the authorities feared infection of the local animal population, and so on the night of the May Day celebrations the whole herd was ordered to be slaughtered. The incident was to remain a tightly guarded state secret; that is, until now...
Jonathan Ledgard is speaking today to the Book Show's Rhiannon Brown from the BBC studio in Nairobi, Kenya.
From zines to books ... zinester Vanessa Berry goes hi-fi
02/08/2007
Zines don't really show up in the census, as far as publishing is concerned, but there's a thriving zine community in Australia, and today we meet one of its stars ... if the idea of celebrity in such a low-fi medium isn't too much of a contradiction.
Vanessa Berry has been making zines since her teenage years. The quality of her writing caught the eye of a small publishing house based in Sydney, and she was persuaded to publish some of her best work in a book which has just been released by Local Consumption Publications.
Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist Read Transcript
31/07/2007
From the Byron Bay Writers Festival, Ramona Koval speaks to novelist, essayist, screenwriter and director Richard Flanagan about his most recent novel The Unknown Terrorist, about the gruelling experience of a German book tour, and about what made him a writer -- including his extraordinary experiences in the Tasmanian public service, and why he left it.
Arthur Boyd's artist book: Sangkuriang, a mythical Indonesian story
23/07/2007
Sangkuriang is a collaborative work between Indra Deigun and Arthur Boyd, who created swirling, magical images to accompany this mythical Indonesian story about volcanoes and strange, unearthly creatures. It was printed in 1993 and is in the State Library of Queensland artist book collection.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to librarian Helen Cole about this book, which is one of her most treasured items in the collection.
Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books Read Transcript
11/07/2007
A new novel from JM Coetzee is always a publishing event. An excerpt just published in the New York Review of Books of Diary of A Bad Year suggests that Coetzee is yet again playing with the bridge between fiction and non-fiction.
Also we look at two new books which attempt to reveal the real Hillary Clinton...
And we ask, what's behind the new surge of interest in the writing of the late Latin American writer Roberto Bolano?
To discuss all this and more is the editor of the New York Review of Books and Book Show regular, Robert Silvers, speaking to Ramona Koval.
Sonya Hartnett's The Ghost's Child
05/07/2007
Sonya Hartnett's new novel The Ghost's Child is an evocative, poetic and dreamy story about an old lady who is visited one day by a young boy; the child of a ghost and a ghostly child at the same time. And from there the story of the old lady evolves -- the story of her growth from a girl to a woman and the doomed love she has for a strange young man.
Dave Eggers' What is the What (review) Read Transcript
04/07/2007
The American writer Dave Eggers has a cult following, especially with younger readers. He came to international fame with his part-fiction, part-memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and in his latest novel, Dave Eggers has also blended genres; What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng is based on a real-life story. It's told by Valentino, a Sudanese refugee in the USA.
Ryan Paine is editor of Voiceworks magazine, and a fan of Dave Eggers. For the Book Show he's been reading What is the What which he received as a parcel in the mail recently.
The story of Penguin Classics
04/07/2007
In the year when classic literature topped sales, we meet classics publisher at Penguin Books, Adam Freudenheim. This world-famous series consists of over 1,200 titles ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
David Astle reviews Granta's Best of Young American Novelists #2 Read Transcript
29/06/2007
How do know who the latest and greatest new writers are? Well you can read reviews, or play lucky dip at the book store, or, of course you can listen to the Book Show. But another good way is to browse books of collections for a sneak peak into the creative worlds of different writers in a sort of one-stop-shop.
Our reviewer David Astle has been doing just that, and for the Book Show, he's been reading Granta's latest collection called Best of Young American Novelists #2.
Gail Jones's novel Sorry
26/06/2007
Gail Jones's latest novel Sorry examines the relationship between social justice and literature. Sorry is told from the perspective of a young white girl, Perdita, growing up in the Pilbara in Western Australia in the 1930s and 40s. She lives in a remote shack with her cold parents; her mother Stella, who's always reciting Shakespeare, and her brutish anthropologist father, Nicholas.
Perdita finds more affection from her friends, Billy her deaf neighbour and Mary, the family's Aboriginal domestic servant. When Nicholas is murdered, Mary confesses and is sent away, leaving Perdita bereft, with a stutter and unable to remember the circumstances of her father's murder.
This is a novel that explores the legacy of the Stolen Generation and whether it's too late to say 'sorry'. It has an explicit political agenda and, in the post-script, Gail Jones includes an explanatory note about the national inquiry into the stolen generation that happened 10 years ago.
Gail Jones spoke to the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange in Melbourne. She starts with a reading from the beginning of Sorry.
Xinran Xue's Chopstick girls
25/06/2007
Miss Chopsticks is Xinran Xue's first novel but it builds on themes she explored on her radio show about women's experience of living in the shadows of the communist regime, and in her first book The Good Women of China. Miss Chopsticks recounts the story of three sisters who, discarded as useless and weak by the men of their village, head for the city lights of Nanjing in search of a better life.
Now living in London, Xinran Xue visited Australia recently as a guest of the Sydney Writers' Festival. She spoke to Cathy Pryor about her 'chopstick' girls and her continuing hopes for the women of China.
Alexis Wright's 2007 Miles Franklin Award-winning novel, Carpentaria (repeat)
22/06/2007
Born in northwestern Queensland, Alexis Wright has been involved in Indigenous rights for many decades, working as an educator and writer, including editing an anthology on land rights in Central Australia called Taking Power: Like This Old Man Here. Her first novel Plains of Promise was published in 1997 and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize, the Age Book of the Year and the NSW Premier's award for fiction, and has since been translated into French.
Like Plains of Promise, her second novel Carpentaria is set in the vast dominating landscape of the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland. It is an epic tale of the strained relationship between the white folk of the fictional town of Desperance and the internal struggles of the Indigenous community, who are fighting for survival against an all-powerful mining company.
In Carpentaria, Alexis Wright has created a world that is populated by extraordinary characters. The drift between a modern reality and a place that existed thousands of years before in the Aboriginal Dreamtime.
Alexis Wright spoke to Radio National's Cathy Pryor about her inspirations and her motivations.
This interview was first broadcast on The Book Show on November 6, 2006.
The passion and pain of literary translation Read Transcript
21/06/2007
Who would have thought that translating 19th century literary greats would be an activity infused with the possibility for passionate debate over a word used by Emile Zola -- and even global outrage over how to organise a collaboration between translators of the multivolume Remembrance of things Past by Marcel Proust?
Translators are considered to be cultural mediators and ambassadors of foreign literature, but what do we really know of the pain and suffering that goes into their work; and how well recognised are they? The English language translators for Emile Zola and Marcel Proust who are based in Australia will be speaking about the art of translation at an event organised by PEN Sydney next Wednesday 27 June, at the NSW State Library. They join me to discuss contemporary debate in literary translation.
A Chinese detective novel: The Eye of Jade
19/06/2007
Even though private detectives are banned in China, Diane Wei Liang has written a Chinese detective novel, The Eye of Jade, that uncovers family secrets from the time of the cultural revolution. Diane Wei Liang spent part of her childhood in a labour camp, and she has lived the last 18 years in the USA, and now in England.
Her experience of growing up in China and her longing for Beijing infuse her debut novel The Eye of Jade -- the first in a detective series with 27-year-old detective Mei -- in this adventure she's searching for a Han dynasty jade.
Phil LaMarche's American Youth
17/06/2007
The debut novel of Phil LaMarche, American Youth, explores a complex view of gun culture in America. For the LeClare family in this novel guns are a sentimental part of their family heritage, but a gun accident that leads to the death of a boy in their house reveals broader tensions in the family and in their conservative New England community.
Phil LaMarche's American Youth
14/06/2007
The debut novel of Phil LaMarche, American Youth, explores a complex view of gun culture in America. For the LeClare family in this novel guns are a sentimental part of their family heritage, but a gun accident that leads to the death of a boy in their house reveals broader tensions in the family and in their conservative New England community.
Andrei Makine's The Woman Who Waited Read Transcript
13/06/2007
The Woman Who Waited tells the story of a woman's 30-year wait for the man she loves to return from the front during WW2, a wait that seems impossible and inhuman in the eyes of the book's narrator -- a callow, 26-year-old writer from Leningrad who has travelled to a remote northern village of the Soviet Union to record the local customs.
Andrei Makine was born in Siberia in 1957 but sought asylum in France in 1987. With his fourth novel, Le Testament Francais, he became the first author to win two of France's most important literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis.
Andrei Makine was a guest of the recent Sydney Writers' Festival, where he talked with The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game Read Transcript
12/06/2007
In his debut novel De Niro's Game, Montreal based writer Rawi Hage paints a portrait of two young men, Bassam and George, growing up in Beirut during the Lebanon war of the 1980s. Bassam and George have few choices for the future as their daily lives are ruled by guns, power and most importantly luck -- for kicks, young men play Russian roulette like the men in the movie The Deerhunter that stars Robert De Niro.
Rawi Hage grew up in Lebanon during the war and this book reflects his experience -- but it's told in a poetic language that captures the madness of war.
For The Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Rawi Hage at the Sydney Writers' Festival and asked him why George and Bassam make the different choices they make; Bassam into petty crime to fund his dream to leave Beirut -- and to leave Lebanon -- and George into the Christian militia.
9/11 fiction: does it work? Read Transcript
12/06/2007
In the six years since the September 11 attacks on America, the large-scale violence and chaos forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to understanding current events. The 9/11 episode has made its way into more than one work of fiction -- but how successful have the various attempts been in capturing it? Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, discusses this, and the most recent attempt to deal with the issue by American author Don DeLillo and his new novel Falling Man.
Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land Read Transcript
10/06/2007
One of America's greatest living writers, Richard Ford, discusses the third in his trilogy The Lay of the Land. It follows the life of American everyman Frank Bascombe, the real estate salesman facing prostate cancer and the breakdown of his second marriage in the so-called Permanent Period of his life. Richard Ford speaks to Ramona Koval at the Sydney Writers' Festival.
Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost
07/06/2007
In Greek mythology, Orpheus was believed to be one of the chief poets and musicians of antiquity, and the inventor or perfector of the lyre. He travels to the underworld in search of his dead wife, Eurydice. In Janette Turner Hospital's new novel, Orpheus Lost, mathematically gifted Leela, from the town of Promised Land in the American South, travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of her lover Mishka, a musician from the Daintree in northern Queensland. It's a book that explores the nature of obsession and some of the issues of our time of terror.
Lorien Kay reviews Ten Days in the Hills Read Transcript
05/06/2007
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, that medieval story of a bawdy party in the countryside around Florence, provides the inspiration for Jane Smiley's latest work Ten Days in the Hills, which is essentially a story about a Hollywood house party and the conversations of the guests.
For the Book Show, Lorien Kay has been reading Smiley's latest offering: Ten Days in the Hills.
Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land Read Transcript
04/06/2007
One of America's greatest living writers, Richard Ford, discusses the third in his trilogy The Lay of the Land. It follows the life of American everyman Frank Bascombe, the real estate salesman facing prostate cancer and the breakdown of his second marriage in the so-called Permanent Period of his life. Richard Ford speaks to Ramona Koval at the Sydney Writers' Festival.
Two novels for and about teenage girls (review) Read Transcript
03/06/2007
Kate Bochner reviews two novels for and about teenaged girls, written by Melbourne-based writers. Notes from the teenage underground is the first novel by Simmone Howell. A rose by any other name is the latest story by Maureen McCarthy. Maureen McCarthy's very popular stories have several times been adapted for television. You may have seen one miniseries , based on one of her books, Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life on ABC TV.
Joanne Harris
03/06/2007
Novelist Joanne Harris speaks with Rhiannon Brown about her long-awaited follow-up to Chocolat. Her book, The Lollipop Shoes, is an urban fairytale incorporating magic, good and evil, cantrips and chocolate.
Joanne Harris
30/05/2007
Novelist Joanne Harris speaks with Rhiannon Brown about her long-awaited follow-up to Chocolat. Her book, The Lollipop Shoes, is an urban fairytale incorporating magic, good and evil, cantrips and chocolate.
Michael Ondaatje on Divisadero Read Transcript
20/05/2007
Recorded at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje, the celebrated author of The English patient and In the skin of a lion, speaks to Ramona Koval about his remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time, Divisadero.
Divisadero begins in the 1970s on a ranch in northern California, where Coop, Claire and the narrator – who, as the story opens, tells us she has stopped calling herself Anna – are divided by an act of violence. Anna's mother died giving birth to her. Claire was also orphaned at birth and was left without a family, so Anna's father took both babies home from the hospital and raised them as sisters. Coop is five years older. His parents, who owned the next farm, were murdered by their own hired hand when he was four.
Michael Ondaatje begins with a reading from Divisadero.
Noah Richler's Literary Atlas of Canada
17/05/2007
Writer and broadcaster Noah Richler is this year's winner of the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada. The jury for the prize described it as a window into Candian writing in the present day. Ramona Koval brings you her chat with Noah Richler at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal.
The joy of living of Kadar Abdollah
16/05/2007
Today you'll meet a very charismatic writer who was born in Iran, but who now lives in the Netherlands and writes best-sellers in Dutch: Kadar Abdollah is his name. My Father's Notebook is his first novel to be translated into English.
Kadar Abdollah was a physics student and a politically active one in Tehran who resisted first the regime of the Shah and then the Ayatollah Khomeini. He wrote for a banned publication and secretly published two books about life under Khomeini and subsequently found himself fleeing Iran in 1985 and coming to the Netherlands as a refugee in 1988.
My Father's Notebook is a complex and tender book, and Kadar Abdollah was in conversation with Ramona Koval at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal.
Michael Ondaatje on Divisadero Read Transcript
14/05/2007
Recorded at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal, novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje, the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion, speaks to Ramona Koval about his remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time, Divisadero.
Divisadero begins in the 1970s on a ranch in northern California, where Coop, Claire and the narrator – who, as the story opens, tells us she has stopped calling herself Anna – are divided by an act of violence. Anna's mother died giving birth to her. Claire was also orphaned at birth and was left without a family, so Anna's father took both babies home from the hospital and raised them as sisters. Coop is five years older. His parents, who owned the next farm, were murdered by their own hired hand when he was four.
Michael Ondaatje begins with a reading from Divisadero.
The Secret of Lost Things with Sheridan Hay
10/05/2007
In Sheridan Hay's debut novel The Secret of Lost Things the 18-year-old Tasmanian, Rosemary Savage, goes to New York after the death of her mother and finds a job at the Arcade – a huge, rambling bookstore – and ends up working with people who seem like they've just stepped off the pages of a Dickens novel.
The Secret of Lost Things is a coming-of-age novel about a young woman dealing with grief and finding that a big part of her education is in the bookstore. But there's also a literary twist, she ends up on an adventure searching for records of Herman Melville's lost manuscript The Isle of the Cross. Along the way there are also references to Melville's Moby Dick and Redburn, but also to Shakespeare's Tempest. In her novel, Sheridan Hay explores the idea of the work-within-the-work.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Australian born Sheridan Hay in New York, where she has lived for many years. Sheridan starts with a reading from the book.
Daniel Mason's A Far Country
08/05/2007
When drought and war grip the backlands in Daniel Mason's A Far Country, fourteeen-year-old Isabel is sent by her family to live with relatives in the settlements in the south. Her beloved older brother Isaias moved there several months earlier, but now he has gone missing. While Isabel settles into her new life, finding him becomes her obsession.
Daniel Mason is speaking from California to the Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Alex Jones on the meaning of Helen Garner
03/05/2007
Alex Jones's book Helen Garner And The Meaning of Everything is about a retired professor – the Dreamer – and his search for the meaning of everything.
It's part literary detective novel, part free-fall shaggy dog story and it's also a portrait of a generation, the Baby Boomers – or at least one slice of that generation.
David Malouf has called it 'farcical and slyly illuminating'.
Alex Jones has spent most of his working life teaching at the University of Sydney, where language and literature were his daily food. He is now retired and joins us on The Book Show.
The Uncomfortable Dead: a Zapatista crime thriller
26/04/2007
The novel The Uncomfortable Dead is a collaboration between the leader of the Zapatista guerrilla movement, Subcomandante Marcos, and one of Mexico's best-known writers, Paco Ignacio Taibo. Besides more than a dozen thrillers featuring his world-weary hero Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, Paco Taibo has written best-selling biographies of Che Guevara and one of the great heroes of the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa.
Subcomandante Marcos was unavailable for an interview, as he was hiding in the hills, but for the Book Show Nick Caistor tracked down Paco Taibo to his Mexico City lair and starts by asking him whose idea it was to write The Uncomfortable Dead as a collaboration.
Judging a book by its cover
26/04/2007
How many love affairs with a book begin with that first glance at the cover? A book jacket can lure us in; the images, colours, even typeface speaking a subliminal language which engages the reader and suggests the pleasures that lie within.
Within the specialised world of book designers, New Yorker Chip Kidd is an acknowledged master. He's been called everything from the Elvis of the industry to a 'design demigod' and he's currently in Australia speaking at various design events around the country.
He's created covers for a long list of contemporary authors including William Boyd, John Updike, Michael Crichton and Peter Carey.
For the Book Show, he spoke to Radio National's Annie Hastwell about the relationship between author and designer.
Kirsten Alexander reviews The Emperor's Children
26/04/2007
Claire Messud is a writer of fiction, primarily novels, and the author, most recently, of The Emperor's Children. It's described as an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following September 11. Reviewer Kirsten Alexander had a look at the novel for the Book Show.
Tim Parks on The Mezzanine
24/04/2007
Novelist, essayist and translator Tim Parks these days observes the world from his vantage point in northern Italy, just outside Milan. Today he shares his reflections on an extraordinary novel first published in 1988. It's by New York writer Nicholson Baker, and it's called The Mezzanine.
Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and England's richest literary prize
23/04/2007
Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and Book Show regular, Peter Stothard, talks about Ian McEwan's new novel On Chesil Beach, the much anticipated follow-up to Saturday. It tells the story of a young couple's wedding night, but what McEwan has created here is a social and political portrait of Britain in 1962, on the verge of major social change. We also find out about the controversy surrounding England's richest literary prize – the David Cohen – which was awarded to the Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon.
Kunal Basu's Racists
23/04/2007
Racists is a novel about a cruel experiment centred on the panorama of 19th-century ideas about race and racial science. Calcutta-born English author Kunal Basu tells the story of two rival scientists, the English Dr Samual Bates and his French rival Jean Louis Belavoix. To settle the argument of the differences between black and white, master and slave, they devise an elaborate experiment.
They isolate two babies, a black boy and a white girl, on an uninhabited island, for a period of 12 years. The children are cared for by a mute nurse with strict instructions not to intervene in their development. The children are reared without language and outside the normal frameworks of morality or culture. Bates expects the white girl to exert her racial dominance over the black boy; Belavoix, on the other hand, expects the relationship to end in racist murder. By the end of the experiment, they believe, the children will have furnished definitive proof about the superiority of French or English science.
Kunal Basu outlines the experiment to the Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Justin Cartwright (repeat) Read Transcript
22/04/2007
Justin Cartwright talks about his new novel The Song Before it is Sung, which is based on a historical friendship between Isiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, one of the failed assassins in the 10 July 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler. It's a novel of ideas, exploring the compexities in human relationships and it is, of course, a riveting story.
Justin Cartwright joins us from our London studios.
(First broadcast 4/3/2007)
Alan Spence's The Pure Land (repeat)
18/04/2007
Scottish writer Alan Spence joins us with a discussion about his new book The Pure Land. This novel is a retelling of the story of Tom Glover, a Scottish trader who helped open up Japan to the western world in the mid-nineteenth century, and whose story was one of the sources for the sad tale of Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly.
Alan Spence begins with a reading from The Pure Land.
(First broadcast 8/3/2007)
Review of Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother (repeat) Read Transcript
18/04/2007
We review A spot of bother, Mark Haddon's follow-up to his acclaimed debut novel, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time. In the new book, George Hall, recently retired, thinks talking is 'overrated' and is convinced the spot on his thigh is cancer. He's also having trouble dealing with his daughter's marriage, his son's homosexuality, and his wife's affair.
Our reviewer is Radio National's Lynne Mitchell.
(First broadcast 19/3/2007)
50th anniversary: The Cat in the Hat (repeat)
16/04/2007
Of all his books, it's The Cat in the Hat that he's most remembered for. Dr Seuss, that is, or Theodor Seuss Geisel, to use his proper name. And earlier this year was the 50th anniversary of the publication of that zany title that's been so seminal in promoting literacy among young children. The Cat in the Hat is famous for its lively use of limited vocabulary ... putting the fun into learning to read.
To read it, one of Australia's most popular children's writers, Duncan Ball.
(First broadcast 2/3/2007)
Sarah Dunant's In the Company of the Courtesan Read Transcript
15/04/2007
The setting for Sarah Dunant's new novel In the Company of the Courtesan is 16th century Venice. It opens with the violent sack of Rome in 1527 by Spanish and German armies, and there we meet Bucino Teodoldi, a protective and clever dwarf employed by Fiammetta Bianchini, Rome's most celebrated courtesan, all of 21 years old.
Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant trained as a historian at Cambridge. She is known for her crime novels featuring private investigator Hannah Wolfe, and more recently for her historical novels, the first of which was The Birth of Venus.
Sarah Dunant joined the Book Show from London and starts with a reading from In the Company of the Courtesan.
Sarah Dunant's In the Company of the Courtesan Read Transcript
12/04/2007
The setting for Sarah Dunant's new novel In the Company of the Courtesan is 16th century Venice. It opens with the violent sack of Rome in 1527 by Spanish and German armies, and there we meet Bucino Teodoldi, a protective and clever dwarf employed by Fiammetta Bianchini, Rome's most celebrated courtesan, all of 21 years old.
Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant trained as a historian at Cambridge. She is known for her crime novels featuring private investigator Hannah Wolfe, and more recently for her historical novels, the first of which was The Birth of Venus.
Sarah Dunant joined the Book Show from London and starts with a reading from In the Company of the Courtesan.
Adib Khan: Spiral Road
10/04/2007
Now to a new book by Adib Khan which deals with the loyalties – personal and political – of a migrant Muslim man, Masud Alam. After living in Richmond, an inner suburb of Melbourne, for many years, he goes back to visit his family in Bangladesh. Things are of course not the same as when he left – his father is succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, his mother is finding it hard to cope, his brother has all the family responsibilities on his shoulders, and his sister is now a divorced woman after her violent marriage has been dissolved. And of course this is post 9/11 so he is now officially living in a time of terror.
Adib Khan lived in Bangladesh till 1973 when he came to Australia, studied English literature and history, and worked as a teacher. He started writing in his 40s and had great success with his first novel Seasonal Adjustments, which won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Book of the Year award in the 1994 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and the 1995 Commonwealth Writer's prize for Best Book.
Spiral Road is his fifth novel and before he speaks to Ramona Koval, Adib Khan reads a passage from his book.
Adib Khan: Spiral Road
10/04/2007
Now to a new book by Adib Khan which deals with the loyalties – personal and political – of a migrant Muslim man, Masud Alam. After living in Richmond, an inner suburb of Melbourne, for many years, he goes back to visit his family in Bangladesh. Things are of course not the same as when he left – his father is succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, his mother is finding it hard to cope, his brother has all the family responsibilities on his shoulders, and his sister is now a divorced woman after her violent marriage has been dissolved. And of course this is post 9/11 so he is now officially living in a time of terror.
Adib Khan lived in Bangladesh till 1973 when he came to Australia, studied English literature and history, and worked as a teacher. He started writing in his 40s and had great success with his first novel Seasonal Adjustments, which won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Book of the Year award in the 1994 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and the 1995 Commonwealth Writer's prize for Best Book.
Spiral Road is his fifth novel and before he speaks to Ramona Koval, Adib Khan reads a passage from his book.
Georgina Harding's The Solitude of Thomas Cave
03/04/2007
For some people, the thought of spending months on end alone would be like a personal hell, and writer Georgina Harding explores this idea in her debut novel, The Solitude of Thomas Cave.
The novel is set in the 17th century – a time of exploration and discovery – and whaling ships are going further afield than they have previously. After experiencing personal grief, the British whaler Thomas Cave bets his crew-mates that he can survive the winter by himself on the whaling station, in what was thought to be Greenland. The question is will his mind survive the ordeal of solitude?
For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Georgina Harding in the ABC's London studios about her novel. Georgina starts with a reading from her book.
Kate Bochner reviews The Shoe Queen
29/03/2007
Radio National's own Kate Bochner reviews a book about a tale of forbidden love and must-have shoes set in 1920s Paris. It's the fourth novel by author Anna Davis, it's called The Shoe Queen, and it's part chick-lit, part historical saga.
Australian gothic fiction
23/03/2007
The underbelly of the Australian psyche will be exposed today in our panel discussion on Australian gothic literature. From the early colonial writers like Marcus Clarke and Henry Lawson, to Elizabeth Jolley and Peter Carey, the Australian landscape has been transformed into a menacing character in gothic tales of colonisation and displacement.
Alan Spence's The Pure Land
11/03/2007
Scottish writer Alan Spence joins us with a discussion about his new book The Pure Land. This novel is a retelling of the story of Tom Glover, a Scottish trader who helped open up Japan to the western world in the mid-nineteenth century, and whose story was one of the sources for the sad tale of Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly.
Alan Spence begins with a reading from The Pure Land.
William Boyd's novel Restless
11/03/2007
Scottish writer William Boyd is the author of nine novels, two collections of short stories and 13 screenplays. His characters are mainly misfits and flawed drifters on the run from something and his new spy novel Restless is no exception.
In 1976, Ruth Gilmartin learns that her very English mother, Sally, is not English at all. She is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigrée and second world war spy recruited by the British Secret Service recruited into the British Secret Service in 1939 by Lucas Romer as part of AAS, Romer's somewhat maverick branch of the service.
And she's behaving very strangely. Even her grandson notices she is odd. And that's when she gives her daughter Ruth a memoir that tells the story of her involvement with the world of spies and intrigue. And in the mid-70s setting, another story of intrigue takes place with a background of German terrorists, the Bader-Meinhoff gang, and the activities of SAVAK, the Iranian intelligence agency founded in 1957 that spied on and tortured and killed opponents of the Shah.
William Boyd speaks to Ramona Koval from the ABC's London studios.
Alan Spence's The Pure Land
08/03/2007
Scottish writer Alan Spence joins us with a discussion about his new book The Pure Land. This novel is a retelling of the story of Tom Glover, a Scottish trader who helped open up Japan to the western world in the mid-nineteenth century, and whose story was one of the sources for the sad tale of Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly.
Alan Spence begins with a reading from The Pure Land.
William Boyd's novel Restless
05/03/2007
Scottish writer William Boyd is the author of nine novels, two collections of short stories and 13 screenplays. His characters are mainly misfits and flawed drifters on the run from something and his new spy novel Restless is no exception.
In 1976, Ruth Gilmartin learns that her very English mother, Sally, is not English at all. She is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigrée and second world war spy recruited by the British Secret Service recruited into the British Secret Service in 1939 by Lucas Romer as part of AAS, Romer's somewhat maverick branch of the service.
And she's behaving very strangely. Even her grandson notices she is odd. And that's when she gives her daughter Ruth a memoir that tells the story of her involvement with the world of spies and intrigue. And in the mid-70s setting, another story of intrigue takes place with a background of German terrorists, the Bader-Meinhoff gang, and the activities of SAVAK, the Iranian intelligence agency founded in 1957 that spied on and tortured and killed opponents of the Shah.
William Boyd speaks to Ramona Koval from the ABC's London studios.
Liberal Jews and anti-semitism and Norman Mailer's Hitler novel
07/02/2007
Our regular US commentator and editor of the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers, discusses the bitter controversy simmering away in the United States linking Liberal Jews and Anti-Semitism, which has reportedly entangled government officials, academics and other opinion-makers including the American historian Tony Judt and former president Jimmy Carter.
We ruminate on 'poetic truth' in Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest, a biographical novel about Hitler as a young boy. The narrator in Mailer's book -- his first novel in a decade -- is a demon posing as one of Adolf Hitler's SS intelligence officers.
Plus botanical classification and the sex life of trees -- who would have thought mushrooms are closer relatives to humans than to the cauliflower!
The Complete Book of Aunts: Rupert Christiansen
30/01/2007
When you become an aunt, it's hard to know exactly what kind of an aunt you might best be. There are several models, all of them supported by famous auntly types in literature and in real-life, as described in many novels, memoirs and even poems. You know, Auntie Mame, Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene, Aunt Augusta in The Importance of Being Earnest...who exactly should you be? Well, now there's a kind of auntly handbook to help you decide. It's called The Complete Book of Aunts, and in it writer Rupert Christiansen has done all the work for you in trawling the literature of the aunt, and reporting on the wonderful world of the aunt in life and on the page.
Rupert is currently opera critic of London's Daily Telegraph and a member of the editorial board of Opera magazine. He has contributed to many newspapers and magazines, including The Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, Harpers & Queen, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, New Yorker and Talk.
Rupert Christiansen speaks to Ramona Koval on the phone from London.
Edmundo Paz Soldán on cyberterrorism, globalisation and political oppression
25/01/2007
Edmundo Paz Soldán is a prolific novelist but a relatively new name to English-speaking audiences. The Bolivian writer has just released his sixth novel, but it's only the second to be translated into English. The book is called Turing's Delirium, and it tells a very modern Bolivian story – but a story that also conjures terrible ghosts of the past.
An old dictator, Montenegro, has been democratically returned to power in Bolivia, mere decades after a bloody anti-communist reign. New Bolivia is now a player on the global stage, but a poor player, easily abused. Edmundo Paz Soldán's tale is set in the fictional city of Rio Fugitivo, where the local power company has been privatised and bought by a multinational firm. Far from this bringing benefits, the price of electricity has skyrocketed and there are constant blackouts.
This sets the scene for a battle between angry young people who use computers to hack and vandalise these new global enemies, and the state – in particular the codebreakers of the old regime who work in a place called The Black Chamber. Part of this story is told through the mind of a dying man ... Albert, the founder of The Black Chamber. His mind is slipping. He's a belligerent and evil old bastard who's determined to live, but who's losing his grip on reality.
(First broadcast on The Book Show on 14 September, 2006.)
