The Book Show

Past Programs

Books - Fiction - 2008

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Taboos in literature

05/12/2008
It's 50 years since the controversial novel Lolita was published and Nabokov said that there were only three taboos in literature: incest, inter-racial marriage and atheism. What is taboo now?

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (review)   Read Transcript

01/12/2008
Christos Tsiolkas burst onto the literary scene in 1995 with the novel Loaded, and in 2006 won the Age Book of the Year fiction award for Dead Europe. In his latest novel, The Slap, he explores the different reactions of friends at a barbecue to a child being slapped. The novel is set in Melbourne and for The Book Show, reviewer Patricia Maunder takes a thought-provoking stroll through suburbia, and discovers the diverse, complex realities behind some seemingly ordinary lives.

Louis Nowra on ice

27/11/2008
Louis Nowra, novelist, playwright, essayist and screenwriter, has a new book out. It's a novel called Ice, a meditation on the many forms of ice: frozen water, ice the drug, ice as death, ice as preservation. It starts with a huge iceberg being towed into Sydney Harbour in the second half of the 19th century.

The Prometheus myth reworked: Michel Faber

25/11/2008
Novelist and short story writer Michel Faber has created a new version of the Prometheus myth in The Fire Gospel. In the myth, Zeus is so angry that Prometheus has stolen fire and given it to mere humans, he binds up the thief and allows an eagle to peck out his liver for all eternity. In Michel Faber's The Fire Gospel, Prometheus is a Canadian academic called Theo Griepenkerl. In Iraq for his university, he is inspecting a museum when a bomb goes off. It kills the curator and destroys a statue, releasing nine scrolls of Aramaic text that had been hidden inside. Griepenkerl happens to be an Aramaic scholar and he steals the documents, which turn out to be the memoir of Malchus, a first century Christian convert and witness to the crucifixion.

The sister arts in Australia

24/11/2008
Painting and the visual arts, poetry, fiction and music are said to have a family resemblance and the dialogue between the forms has been described as the sister arts. In the early days of Australian writing, authors who incorporated the sister arts in their narratives were considered derivative—even un-Australian. These were writers like Henry Handel Richardson and Eleanor Dark, who today we think of as definitively Australian. The rivalry and correspondence between the sister arts is the subject of the latest Southerly journal.

Reading the art of Yinka Shonibare

24/11/2008
We're turning the page in search of the literary references in the work of British-born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare's black and white photography. His work is the focus of a new program at the Museum of Contemporary Art called 'Inspired Reading'. The first session in the program examines the influence on Yinka's work of Oscar Wilde's 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, that gothic horror story about a man who remains forever young and beautiful, while his portrait ages and gets uglier as his acts of debauchery increase.

A Most Wanted Man - John le Carré   Read Transcript

19/11/2008
A strange thin young Russian-speaking man claiming to be a Chechen Muslim appears in Hamburg. Add in a passionate young German human rights lawyer, a 60-year-old Scottish banker with a cooling marriage and an estranged daughter, a German spy and his female sidekick, and the hunt for the young man in order to connect him with a terrorist network. A Most Wanted Man is the latest book from John le Carré, the nom de plume for author David Cornwell.

Vale Ivan Southall

18/11/2008
Ivan Southall died last Saturday at the age of 87. He wrote over 30 novels for young people and seven books for adults, winning all kinds of prizes and accolades along the way and being translated into over 20 languages. Many children read his Hill's End at school in the mid-60s and it's one of the books that was regarded as a turning point in Australian children's literature. It marked the beginning of a series of Southall novels which tackled the idea of children overcoming terrible events. In 1997 he wrote Ziggurat. It tells the story of Nut who, at the age of 17, disappears, leaving no evidence to point to whether he went by compulsion or of his own accord. He awakens in another place and to another existence. Has he died? He makes a journey to discover what has happened to him, who he is and what he believes, with the help of a dog called Sam and a lion. This is an interview Ramona Koval did with Ivan Southall in 1997.

A West Bank story

17/11/2008
Australian-Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah talks about her latest book Where the streets had a name, a tale of longing and loss seen through the eyes of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl.

Novel simulations in Second Life

17/11/2008
There's the Charles Dickens theme park, book- inspired computer games and film adaptations of novels like Bladerunner, but to get an immersive experience of a book, some enthusiasts have recreated the settings of their favourite novels in Second Life, an online virtual world. A literary conference in Second Life called 'Stepping into Literature' featured these simulations and librarians, book lovers and academics attended.

Writer beware! How to avoid writing scams

11/11/2008
The literary equivalent of the Nigerian scam that politely asks for your bank details is the writing scam. Writer Beware gives writers advice on how to avoid writing scams, unscrupulous literary agents and bogus writing contests. Victoria Strauss operates the website for Writer Beware and is the co-founder and vice-chair of Science Fiction Writers of America Committee on Writing Scams. Max Barry is the author of the satirical novels Company, Jennifer Government and Syrup. He also has some handy tips for getting published without being scammed.

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (review)

11/11/2008
Two debut novelists' books made it on to the Booker shortlist this year. One of them was the winner -- The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, and the other one was A Fraction of the Whole by Australian writer Steve Toltz. His novel is a sprawling black comedy about the Deans, a family of outcasts. For the Book Show, David Astle reviews A Fraction of the Whole.

Australian writer detained in Thailand

07/11/2008
For more than two months Australian writer Harry Nicolaides has been in a Bangkok jail, accused of insulting the Thai monarchy. He was arrested in late August because of a brief passage in his novel Verisimilitude. Published in 2005, the book offers a critique of political and social life in contemporary Thailand. In the 300 page book are three lines that refer to rumours about the private life of Thailand's Crown Prince, three lines which Thai authorities say warrant a charge of 'lese majeste' or insulting the monarchy. If convicted, Harry Nicolaides faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. Australian barrister Mark Dean has taken up his case.

Marilynne Robinson's Home   Read Transcript

31/10/2008
Marilynne Robinson, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Gilead, has written a new novel, Home. It takes place in the same period and the same Iowa town of Gilead in the mid 1950s. Home is set in the house of Pastor Robert Boughton. He's a widower, a retired pastor, and he's being cared for by his younger daughter Glory. She's in her late 30s and getting over a broken engagement to a man she has discovered is already married. And Jack has not been seen for some 20 years, after the disgrace of getting a young girl pregnant.

Peter Goldsworthy: Everything I Knew

27/10/2008
Australian novelist, essayist, librettist and poet Peter Goldsworthy talks about his new novel Everything I Knew. It's set in Penola, South Australia, in 1964 when Miss Peach, a new teacher on a scooter who's the spitting image of Audrey Hepburn, comes to town and fourteen-year-old Robbie Burns sits up and takes notice.

An Upwrite Man - Tim Parks on the relationship between writers and their families

24/10/2008
Tim Parks is a novelist, essayist, critic and translator. He lives in Italy with his wife and children. Earlier this year, you may remember, Tim spoke to us about his collection of literary essays The Fighter. His most recent novel, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, has just been published. The arrival of the first printed copies of a new book, and the fact that his children are now old enough to read his novels, prompted Tim to think about the relationship between writers, particularly writers of fiction, and their families.

Corporate fiction

22/10/2008
When big companies alter their policies, they often call in 'change consultants' to help change the culture of the corporation. We all know policy documents don't make for scintillating reading, so the difficulty is how to make these changes sexy. Organisations like Telstra and Queensland Rail did quite an unusual thing: they commissioned a writer to write a novel set in their company, with characters and plot to make the policies come alive. Steve Bright worked on these projects and recently wrote a story for the City of Melbourne to imagine how its policies for the city would look in the year 2020. He did this with a group of consultants who meet at a cafe every few weeks to come up with story ideas. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange sat in on one of the fiction writing sessions.

Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black   Read Transcript

21/10/2008
Hilary Mantel recently wrote in the Guardian newspaper about the night life of a writer, saying 'Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer, if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?' Before she was a writer Hilary Mantel trained as a lawyer and was a social worker. She has won awards for her novels, she's written short stories, and her memoir Giving up the Ghost has been described as an autobiography in fiction and non-fiction, taking the reader from early childhood to the discoveries in adulthood that led her to writing. Her last book was Beyond Black, a novel about a medium, Alison, who travels with her assistant Colette and with a spirit guide Morris who causes her great discomfort. Unlike spirit guides who tell you deep philosophical things, Morris was a scrounger and a drunk who leered and told tasteless jokes. It's a mixture of humour and horror and, as Hilary Mantel says, it's 'just like life'.

Murray Bail's The Pages (review)   Read Transcript

21/10/2008
Ten years ago, Murray Bail wrote the internationally acclaimed Eucalyptus. A decade on, his new offering is The Pages. It's an intricate story about an enigmatic philospher who dies and leaves his work in-progress in a shed on his family's property in New South Wales. For the Book Show Geordie Williamson reviewed The Pages.

Morris Lurie's To Light Attained   Read Transcript

20/10/2008
Australian writer Morris Lurie was the winner of the 2006 Patrick White Award. His new novel is To Light Attained. In it we meet Herschel Himmelman, who tells us the story of his daughter, his marriage, his state of mind and his search to understand why his troubled daughter has suicided in her early twenties. It's a father's anguish in words.

House of Exile by Evelyn Juers   Read Transcript

17/10/2008
In Evelyn Juers' book House of Exile we meet Heinrich Mann and his wife -- 24 years his junior -- Nelly Kroeger. Heinrich was Nobel-prize-winner Thomas Mann's less famous brother. He was a writer too, and a political activist, and his wife was a bar hostess. It was a marriage that was not exactly approved of by the wealthy, middle-class Mann family. But that was the least of their worries -- Heinrich was a critic of the National Socialists and they fled Germany in 1933, ending up in sunny California, USA, with other expat European intellectuals. This is a book that challenges traditional understandings of biography.

Books to read to children during financial ruin -- Erica Perl

14/10/2008
Each day we hear of the worsening state of the world economic system. Of course, it's not the only time there's been an international financial crisis -- just think of the 30s Great Depression, the 70s oil crisis or the recession in the 80s. For many young people though, this is their first experience of global economic collapse. As Erica Perl has found, a look at children's books written during tough times reveals a recurring theme of economic hardship. They seem to be sending a message to kids that times have been worse.

The Twelfth Fish by Graham Perrett

14/10/2008
If you were asked to name a politician who was also a novelist, who would you think of? British Conservative Jeffrey Archer perhaps? Or his 19th century predecessor Benjamin Disraeli? The ALP's Graham Perrett represents the federal seat of Moreton in Queensland and was elected to parliament in November last year. Now Graham is also a published novelist. His first book, The Twelfth Fish, is about a school teacher who is posted to the small town of Lawson in outback Queensland.

Life in Seven Mistakes by Susan Johnson (review)   Read Transcript

13/10/2008
The Bartons are a dysfunctional family living on Queensland's Gold Coast. They are the focus of Australian writer Susan Johnson's latest black comedy Life in Seven Mistakes. For The Book Show, reviewer Jo Case read this, Susan Johnson's seventh book, and identifies with its portrayal of messy family relationships and what she calls generational blindness.

On the road with Delia Falconer

13/10/2008
Writer Delia Falconer has edited an anthology called The Penguin Book of the Road, which includes writing from the journals of the explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell to stories by Tim Winton and Helen Garner. In it the road is a place of mystery and danger and a place to dream.

Frank Moorhouse -- The control of the imagination

10/10/2008
The fallout from the Bill Henson photos of teenagers continues. The Australia Council recently asked for submissions on the depiction of children in art. It plans to develop protocols for artists around this subject. Frank Moorhouse has long been involved in anti-censorship campaigns. This is part of a presentation he gave at the National Young Writers' Festival about the control of the imagination. In this speech, Frank Moorhouse looks into what he sees as the implications for arts, literature and freedom of expression of these possible Australia Council protocols.

2008 Nobel Prize for Literature winner

10/10/2008
The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced last night. This year the prize has gone to French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. Speaking to reporters in Paris, Le Clezio said he was very honoured and when asked if he deserved the prize he replied "Why not?". Dr Jacqueline Dutton, head of French Studies at the University of Melbourne, has met Le Clezio and written a book about his work. She and Professor James English, author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value, discuss the prize with Ramona Koval.

Il Gattopardo - The Leopard   Read Transcript

09/10/2008
Fifty years ago when an Italian novel appeared describing the life and death of an intellectual Sicilian aristocrat, critics didn't know what to make of it. Il Gattopardo, which the English-speaking world knows as The Leopard, was attacked almost immediately, with critics dismissing it as either deeply reactionary or anti-Italian. But Italy's reading public was quick to make up its mind, and since then the novel hasn't stopped selling.

Robert Drewe's reading life

09/10/2008
At this year's Melbourne Writers Festival Robert Drewe talked about his reading life and the books that have inspired him. Robert Drewe's books have earned numerous awards - The Drowner was the first novel to win a Premier's literary award in every state, his novel Fortune won a National Book Council award and he received a Commmonwealth Writers Prize for the short story colllection The Bay of Contented Men. His books have also been adapted for the screen. Our Sunshine was made into the film Ned Kelly and both The Bodysurfers and The Shark Net - his memoir of growing up in Western Australia in the 1950s and 60s - became TV mini series. Robert Drewe begins his address at the festival with Tarzan of the Apes, which he found much more interesting than the children's books then on offer.

Herding Kites - 10 years of writing from the National Young Writers' Festival

08/10/2008
Herding Kites is the anthology of writings from a decade of the National Young Writers Festival. The festival is part of the broader This is Not Art event which includes parallel festivals: Sound Summit, Electrofringe, and Critical Animals. Each year, poets, graphic novelists, established writers and emerging voices converge in Newcastle in a writers' festival unlike any of the major literary events that happen in the capital cities each year. Herding Kites features well known authors like Anna Funder and Max Barry but also many unknown writers who go to the festival to share ideas and network...in their own particularly anarchic way. Michael Williams is the editor of this collection.

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne (review)   Read Transcript

08/10/2008
Teen novels with the meerest whiff of teen angst are often promoted as the next Catcher in the Rye. And yes, Joe Dunthorne's book Submarine has been compared to JD Salinger's classic. Dunthorne wrote it for his creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. He's 26 years old and his main character is Oliver Tait -- he's 15 and is struggling to deal with his parents' failing marriage. For The Book Show Ryan Paine reviewed Submarine, and doesn't think it lives up to the promise of Catcher in the Rye.

Romance writing in the 21st century

06/10/2008
We delve into the world of square jaws and ripped bodices and ask how romance writing has changed over the years. How different are romance titles of the 21st century from those published during the First World War for instance?

Junot Diaz gives thanks to literature

02/10/2008
Junot Diaz is author of the Pulitzer prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The story of a fat, nerdy boy, a migrant from the Dominican Republic, like Diaz himself, who now lives in the United States. Junot Diaz was invited to give the closing address at the Sydney Writers' Festival and gave a gracious, charming and thoughtful address in which he thanked the many people who contribute to the celebration of books and literature, from festival volunteers to readers and librarians. This is part of what he had to say.

Examining the Booker prize

30/09/2008
How significant are literary prizes? We examine the much-hyped Man Booker Prize, awarded to a novel written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland. This year's winner will be announced on October 14th and Australia's claiming two writers on the short list, Steve Toltz and Aravind Adiga.

Pacifism and English Literature with R. S. White

30/09/2008
While war has been a permanent fixture of history, peace seems to exist more in our imagination than in reality. R.S. White, Professor of English at the University of Western Australia has looked at literature to see how peace has been imagined by writers from the Middle Ages to the present. He says that peace became part of the language of poetry in the 14th century, long before the anti-war poetry of the First World War.

Fine Just the Way It Is: Annie Proulx (review)   Read Transcript

30/09/2008
Three years after Annie Proulx's short story 'Brokeback Mountain' lit up the silver screen, and four since her previous book, she's back with another collection of short stories, Fine Just the Way It Is. Patricia Maunder saddles up for this Pulitzer Prize-winning author's latest look at the American Midwest, past and present, and soon finds herself touched by its relentless snow, dust and despair.

Toad, Mole and Anne of Green Gables turn 100   Read Transcript

29/09/2008
We celebrate the centenary of two books which have had enduring appeal for children and adults: Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery, about plucky, red-haired orphan Anne Shirley, and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, featuring the wonderful animal characters of Mole, Badger, Ratty and Toad of Toad Hall.

Odysseys and nostalgia - Arnold Zable with Julian Burnside

26/09/2008
In his new book Sea of Many Returns Arnold Zable introduces a mythic element into the modern immigrant experience. This book is set in part on the Greek Island of Ithaca and it's a Homeric tale about emigration to Australia and the memories, people and history that trail in the wake of these journeys. At the Melbourne Writers' Festival, Arnold Zable speaks with his friend, Julian Burnside, barrister and refugee advocate, about his new book.

The reading life of Anita Heiss

25/09/2008
From the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival, Anita Heiss speaks about the books that have made a lasting impression on her and the authors who've inspired her. Anita Heiss is a novelist, poet, activist and social commentator who describes herself as 'a concrete Koori with a Westfield dreaming - a city chick whose idea of Survivor is a night in a caravan'. Her published works include the poetry collection Token Koori, Sacred Cows, a work of satirical social commentary, and the chick lit novel Not Meeting Mr Right. In 2003 she received an Australian Society of Authors medal for under 35s for her contribution to the Australian community and public life and in 2007 she won a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Deadly Award for outstanding achievement in literature.

John Marsden's Hamlet   Read Transcript

24/09/2008
Australian author John Marsden has created his own version of Hamlet, the ultimate story of revenge and betrayal. But his version is for teenagers. John Marsden's Hamlet is frustrated by sexual desire, the tyranny of the adult world and his own brand of teen angst. He wears black jeans and t-shirts and plays footie with his mates, but it's still set in Denmark and the ghost of his father still haunts him.

Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books

24/09/2008
The editor of The New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers, talks about Philip Roth's new novel Indignation. He also discusses the tragic story of scientist Nikolai Vavilov, persecuted in Stalinist Russia, and an essay by British travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron about Marco Polo's extraordinary 13th century journey east from Europe into the exotic lands of the Mongol Empire.

The Omega Force by Rick Moody (review)   Read Transcript

23/09/2008
Rick Moody has been described as having a prodigious gift for ventriloquism and while accolades for his writing seem to trail his every word, as we'll hear, not all critics sing his praises. Rick Moody's latest book The Omega Force is a collection of three stories. Kirsten Alexander found the collection patchy terrain.

Chris Cleave's Other Hand

23/09/2008
'You can't dance to current affairs,' says British writer Chris Cleave and it's this belief that inspires him to write, to populate the events that clutter the daily news and to give them an emotional landscape. Chris Cleave is not afraid to tackle large themes in his novels. His first book Incendiary was about a woman grieving the loss of her husband and son, killed in a fictional terrorist attack in England. Its official publication date was 7 July 2005, the day more than 50 people were killed by terrorist bombings in and around London. It might have put him off writing but didn't. Chris Cleave's new novel The Other Hand is another ambitious and complex book dealing with big issues such as refugees, globalisation, political violence and individual ethics.

Terry Pratchett - other realities   Read Transcript

19/09/2008
Terry Pratchett's Discworld arrived 25 years ago with the publication of The Colour of Magic in 1983. Since then he's written more than 30 novels in the Discworld series, as well as other fantasy and alternate-reality books. His other worlds have made Terry Pratchett an international bestseller as well as earning him an OBE for services to literature and a Carnegie Medal for his children's novel The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. At this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival Terry Pratchett talked about other realities and introduced his most recently published book Nation.

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge (review)   Read Transcript

19/09/2008
British author David Lodge is partially deaf and this experience has worked its way into his latest novel Deaf Sentence. For The Book Show, reviewer David Astle has been reading the latest of David Lodge's offerings.

Nathalie Abi-Ezzi: A Girl Made of Dust

17/09/2008
Nathalie Abi-Ezzi spent the first eleven years of her life in Lebanon before her family moved to England in 1983. It's these early years of her life that provide the impetus for her novel A Girl Made of Dust. It's a story of a young girl, Ruba, who tries to hold her family together through sheer force of will as war and indiscriminate violence creep closer.

An instinct for short stories: Anne Enright   Read Transcript

15/09/2008
From the Edinburgh International Book Festival Irish novelist, short story writer and winner of last year's Man Booker Prize, Anne Enright, speaks to Ramona about her instinct for the short story form and about how to craft those sorts of short, sharp tales that pick you up, hold you and then leave you breathless and unsettled.

Ukrainian satirist Andrey Kurkov   Read Transcript

09/09/2008
Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian writer of Russian extraction. His writing combines acute political observation, deep human understanding and a talent for black comedy. His novel The President's Last Love is about life in Ukraine before and after the Soviet union. It's the story of a young catering manager who reaches the top of the political tree almost by accident.

Anne Fine at the Edinburgh International Book Festival   Read Transcript

08/09/2008
English writer Anne Fine was the Children's Laureate a few years ago, but she also writes for adults. She calls her novels for adults sour comedies. At the Edinburgh International Book Festival she spoke to Ramona Koval about the latest of these, Fly In The Ointment.

James Bond and Sebastian Faulks meet in Devil May Care (review)   Read Transcript

08/09/2008
Decades after Ian Fleming's death his James Bond novels remain so popular that Sebastian Faulks has written a new addition to the spy-thriller series, Devil May Care. Patricia Maunder looks at this latest attempt to recreate Fleming's pulp-fiction magic and discovers that 007 not only likes his martinis shaken, not stirred, but also prefers his pepper cracked, not ground.

Colm Toibin and Patrick McGrath   Read Transcript

05/09/2008
An entertaining pairing of two of the finest writers of fiction at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival -- Patrick McGrath and Colm Toibin. They talk to Ramona about mothers, martyrs and what to do if you're about to be burned at the stake.

The adventurous world of Hannah Tinti   Read Transcript

04/09/2008
The American town of Salem, Massachusetts, provides plenty of stimulation for a budding writer's imagination. After all, Salem was famous for its witch trials, and it's where Nathaniel Hawthorne was born. Hannah Tinti grew up there and says that because of this gothic heritage, stepping back into that period in history was quite natural for her. Her debut novel The Good Thief is set in the 1840s and revolves around the illicit work of body-snatchers who were known as Resurrection Men. Like her 2004 short story collection Animal Crackers, it's attracting considerable praise.

Hanif Kureishi on writing, psychoanalysis and relationships   Read Transcript

03/09/2008
Hanif Kureishi is a very successful and multi-award winning writer of novels, short stories, screenplays, plays, non-fiction and essays. He spoke to Ramona Koval at the Edinburgh International Book Festival about his new novel Something To Tell You. In the book we meet the middle-aged Dr. Jamal Kahn, a Freudian psychoanalyst who tells us about his journey through 1970's London suburbia, his first love, his family, his history of fears and longings and his guilt about an incident that happened in his youth.

Anya Ulinich - Petropolis   Read Transcript

02/09/2008
Anya Ulinich's debut novel Petropolis is a satire about the parallels between the United States and Russia. Sasha Goldberg is part of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia, except she knows nothing about Judaism, is half African and leaves Russia for the US as a mail-order bride, not really the sort of thing the intelligentsia are supposed to do.

Kate Mosse in conversation at the Melbourne Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

01/09/2008
Kate Mosse is the author of the blockbuster historical fantasies Labyrinth and Sepulchre, time slip novels in which contemporary characters find their lives entangled with figures from the past. Kate Mosse is also one of the founders of the Orange Prize for Fiction, a thirty thousand pound prize for a novel by a woman.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (review)   Read Transcript

27/08/2008
The judges for the world's richest short story prize, the Frank O'Connor Award, thought Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection Unaccustomed Earth was so good they didn't bother making a shortlist -- they just gave her the prize outright. And it seems they did pick a winner, because the book has reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. This isn't the first prize Jhumpa Lahiri has won for her short stories. She won a Pulitzer for her collection Interpreter of Maladies. She's also written a novel called Namesake which was made into a film. Anna Hedigan reviews the latest collection.

Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins   Read Transcript

27/08/2008
New Zealand writer Emily Perkins's book Novel About My Wife is set in London, where the author lived for 10 years. It takes the point of view of scriptwriter Tom Stone, whose career has stalled and whose life doesn't match his middle-class aspirations. What we read is his account of the events that led up to his wife Anne's death. But he's also writing a novel about his wife, so it's a novel within a novel. Writing it is his way of coming to terms with Anne's absence and his way of reconstructing the events that led to her death. This is a mystery novel of sorts; Tom knows why Anne died, though he failed to see the warning signs but, as readers, we remain uncertain about the cause of her death -- was she mentally ill or was she really being stalked? Sarah L'Estrange spoke to novelist Emily Perkins for The Book Show. Emily Perkins begins by reading from the beginning of her book, Novel About my Wife.

James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning (review)   Read Transcript

20/08/2008
Proving that there might be some truth in the cliche that any publicity is good publicity, the PR material attached to James Frey's new work Bright Shiny Morning boldly claims that NOTHING IN THIS BOOK SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ACCURATE OR RELIABLE. That's a direct quote -- both from the first page of the book and the postcard that came with the review copy. Susan Humphries examines Frey's unabashed manoeuvre into the world of fiction for The Book Show.

Amanda Curtin's new novel The Sinkings   Read Transcript

18/08/2008
Western Australian writer Amanda Curtin's new novel The Sinkings deals with the 19th century murder of an ex-convict called Little Jock, who had lived his life as a man, but was found in death to have been a woman. Amanda Curtin uses this story to traverse some difficult territory, exploring the experience of being neither man nor woman, of being born of indeterminate gender and what that might mean, not just for a child, but also for a mother.

Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday   Read Transcript

13/08/2008
Gordon Burn is the author of Born Yesterday which takes the news events of 2007 in the UK and constructs them into a narrative or, as he calls it, it's 'the news as a novel'. But is this a novel or literary non-fiction?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn   Read Transcript

12/08/2008
Alexander Solzhenitsyn died last week aged 89. The author of a One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, First Circle and many other books, Solzhenitsyn exposed the brutality of the Soviet system to his fellow Russians and to the rest of the world. To discuss the extraordinary impact of this dissident writer, Peter Mares is joined by Judith Armstrong who taught Russian studies at the University of Melbourne for twenty years and is a Fellow of the Contemporary Europe Centre at the University of Melbourne.

Who wrote Frankenstein? (repeat)   Read Transcript

08/08/2008
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. (First broadcast 26/10/2007)

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Fay Weldon: Edinburgh International Book Festival (repeat)

07/08/2008
Since Fay Weldon's Down Among the Women, written in the 1970s, she has written about subjects from cloning to cuckolding. 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. It's, in a sense, again 'down among the women', but this time the women are high achievers -- mortgage brokers, judges, and even journalists. (First broadcast 6/9/2007)

Alex Miller's Landscape of Farewell (repeat)   Read Transcript

06/08/2008
Alex Miller first won the Miles Franklin Award in 1993 with his book The Ancestor Game and then again in 2003 with Journey To The Stone Country. His novel Landscape of Farewell is a profound and moving story about the land, the past, exile and acceptance. It builds on the subject matter of Journey To The Stone Country. Ramona Koval speaks to Alex Miller. (First broadcast 19/11/2007)

Michael Chabon: swashbuckling gentleman of the road (repeat)   Read Transcript

05/08/2008
You might have read Michael Chabon's book The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It's a hard boiled detective story in the style of Raymond Chandler set in an alternative world -- what if Israel did not exist and instead millions of European Jewish refugees took shelter in Alaska? It became a New York Times bestseller and the National Book Critics Circle in America named it number three in their five top fiction books of 2007. Michael Chabon has written other acclaimed novels and short stories, including his award winning first young adult novel, Summerland. He's also written articles, essays, and a number of screenplays and shares a story credit for the film Spiderman 2. In 2005, he edited the Best American Short Stories yearly anthology. The extremely gifted and flexible Michael Chabon speaks to Ramona Koval about his swashbuckling adventure novel, Gentlemen Of The Road, which started as a serial in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. (First broadcast 5/12/2007)

Nicholas Shakespeare's Secrets of the Sea (repeat)   Read Transcript

04/08/2008
Secrets of the Sea is set in a fictional, decaying seaside town in south east Tasmania called Wellington Point. It's where Alex Dove returns from England after his parents die in a car accident. He returns to a large, unprofitable farm and a dusty collection of ships in bottles. There, he meets Merridy, who has her own experience of tragedy -- her brother disappeared as a child. The two marry, they work the land, and Merridy establishes an oyster hatchery, but they are unable to have a child. They drift a little until a storm at sea causes them to give shelter to a strange young man called Kish. Ramona Koval speaks to Nicholas Shakespeare about Secrets of the Sea and their conversation begins with a reading from the book. (First broadcast 4/10/2007)

Jay Parini on Why Poetry Matters   Read Transcript

31/07/2008
The poets Scott, Byron and Longfellow were best sellers in their time, but since then, the popularity of poetry has shrunk. In his new book Why Poetry Matters Jay Parini investigates why the status of poetry has fallen and how to prop it up.

James Lee Burke on Jesus Out to Sea   Read Transcript

29/07/2008
American writer James Lee Burke is perhaps best known for the series of crime novels featuring his character Detective Dave Robicheaux. But today Ramona Koval speaks with him about his collection of short stories Jesus Out To Sea. Born in Houston Texas in 1936, James Lee Burke grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf coast. He has worked as a rancher, an English lecturer, a labourer on offshore oil rigs, a land surveyor, a social worker in Los Angeles, a clerk for the Louisiana Employment Service, an instructor in the US Job Corps and a newspaper reporter. All of which prepared him mighty well for writing the stories in this collection. And when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, that tragic event inspired other stories, stories that seem to have a kind of rage bubbling underneath them. James Lee Burke joins Ramona Koval from his home in Montana.

Writers as readers: Luke Davies   Read Transcript

23/07/2008
At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors talked about what they read and the books that have inspired them. Luke Davies is a novelist, poet and screenwriter currently trying his luck in LA. He's the author of the recently published God of Speed and his book Candy was made into a film. It focuses on young lovers who are in a spiral of heroin addiction. Luke Davies was himself an addict 20 years ago and in this talk he guides us through the books that penetrated his drug induced haze and re-introduced him to the world of emotions and feeling.

Fan fiction - the creative and legal pitfalls

21/07/2008
The adulatory, and sometimes legally risky, world of fan fiction, where readers who can't get enough of their favourite books, TV series and movies, create new stories and take the characters to new places. The beginnings of fan fiction are strongly identified with Star Trek in the 1960s when fans started writing their own episodes of the series. It's a case of fans having a creative response to stories with which they identify. Fans have also written back with Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter and even with Of Mice and Men. What are the literary precedents for fan fiction and, because it is so derivative, are there copyright issues Australian fansters need to know about?

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon   Read Transcript

18/07/2008
Born in 1964, Aleksandar Hemon grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and became a journalist. In 1992 he travelled to America on a US-sponsored goodwill tour. His home city came under siege while he was in Chicago, where he stayed as a refugee. After a wide variety of low level, minimum wage jobs, he started writing in his second language, English, in 1995. His acclaimed collection of stories The Question of Bruno provoked comparisons with Conrad, Nabokov and Kundera when it appeared in 2000 and won several awards. His new book is The Lazarus Project. Aleksandar Hemon won one of the American MacArthur Foundation's famed 'genius grants' in 2004 to fund research for the book which is an exploration of immigration and identity.

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam (review)   Read Transcript

10/07/2008
It seems our lust for hospital TV dramas is as great as it is for crime series, but is there a parallel in fiction? We know crime fiction is hugely popular, but is there the same thirst for emergency room writing? Well if Margaret Atwood has anything to do with it, a Canadian doctor-turned-writer has a good future ahead of him. Margaret Atwood has become somewhat of a literary patron for Vincent Lam. She wrote the foreword to his medical guide The Flu Pandemic and You, and she's also responsible for bringing his book of short stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures to the attention of a publisher. It draws on his experience as a doctor and it's now an award winning book, taking Canada's top literary honour, the Giller. Reviewer Kirsten Alexander tells the story of how Vincent Lam met Margaret Atwood.

Writing for children without a message - Kim Kane   Read Transcript

07/07/2008
Kim Kane says that while she doesn't like chickens or gumboots, which are apparently both prerequisites for being a children's writer, she does like children and her debut novel has just come out, it's called Pip: The Story of Olive.

The Endangered List by Brian Westlake (review)   Read Transcript

07/07/2008
After Steve Irwin died from a stingray spear through his heart, academic and commentator Germain Greer said that 'The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin'. She was broadly criticised for these comments. Perhaps that's why the author of The Endangered List -- a parody of Irwin, his family and Australia Zoo -- chose to write under a pseudonym. He called himself Brian Westlake, which is actually the name of a crocodile and it's the name of the main character in this book. For the Book Show Voiceworks editor Ryan Paine read The Endangered List.

The Science of Fiction   Read Transcript

04/07/2008
When it comes to literature, are we what we read? Well, if you read novels, it seems that the answer is 'Yes'. Cognitive scientists at the University of Toronto in Canada claim to have found that reading fiction affects our psychology, in effect re-wiring our brains as we process the emotional ebb and flow of character and plot. One of the researchers, cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley, speaks to Ramona Koval about the findings, and explains how they were able to measure the impact of such a private, silent pursuit as reading.

Richard Wright: The Life and Times

03/07/2008
In the year that marks the centenary of his birth, Richard Wright's biographer Hazel Rowley talks about the achievements of this African-American author who wrote powerful and at times controversial novels, short stories, poetry and non-fiction and who achieved a number of firsts: the first bestselling black American writer; the first black man to buy a house in Greenwich Village; the first African-American writer to leave for Paris after World War 2; the first black American writer to star in a movie based on his own novel.

Merlinda Bobis's message for adults   Read Transcript

02/07/2008
In her second novel The Solemn Lantern Maker, poet and playwright Merlinda Bobis takes the reader to the shanty towns that populate the streets of Manilla in the Philippines. She tells the story from the perspective of a child, Noland, who is mute and sells lanterns at a busy intersection in Manilla. He rescues an American woman when she's caught in the cross-fire of a drive-by shooting, and takes her to his hut in the slums where his mother tends to her. He is then implicated in what's thought to be a terrorist abduction of the tourist. The story shows the vulnerablilty of street children in the Philippines to abuses of power—especially when they have no voice. Merlinda Bobis dedicates this book to the children who are like the characters in her novel, and says it's a book with a message for adults.

Cion by Zakes Mda (review)

30/06/2008
South African born novelist and playwright Zakes Mda says the end of apartheid made it easier for him to write. He lived in exile in the US until 1995 when he was able to return to South Africa. That was the year his first novel Ways of Dying came out and he has since won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for The Heart of Redness in 2001. He is now based in the US where he teaches creative writing at the University of Ohio. His latest book is Cion and reviewer Kevin Murray has been reading this novel for the Book Show.

Neil Gaiman and the graphic novel   Read Transcript

29/06/2008
Neil Gaiman is one of the creators of the graphic novel. The English writer has been crossing media forms for decades and has developed a reputation as a trailblazer. He's the first to acknowledge that this accolade is usually the result of successful collaborations with illustrators, film directors and other writers. Neil Gaiman has written fantasy, horror, and high-tech stories for adults, young adults and children. Sometimes it's hard to know which book is intended for which audience - and he likes it that way.

Imagining Brisbane -- Simon Cleary   Read Transcript

25/06/2008
Simon Cleary's debut novel is The Comfort of Figs. It's a creation story about Brisbane and the construction of the Story Bridge in the 1930s. But at its heart it's about the rift between a father who built that bridge and a son who is obsessive about planting fig trees.

Robert Silvers, editor, New York Review of Books

25/06/2008
Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, joins The Book Show again to discuss highlights from the latest issue. First of all, with the presidential election looming (as it seems to have been for years now), we look at someone who could well emerge as a major figure in a future Democrat government, but who few people in Australia will have heard of—Jim Webb. This is a man who's being touted as a serious contender for vice-presidential running mate, alongside Barack Obama. But he's also a remarkable character in his own right, with a public profile that's equal parts 'war hero' and writer. His first book Fields of Fire, written in 1978, has been called the best book about the Vietnam war. And his writing, along with a passion for boxing, has had him compared to the late Norman Mailer. He's also a screenwriter (Rules of Engagement) and a documentary producer, but so much of Jim Webb revolves around his experiences and attitudes to war. So Robert and Ramona discuss Jim Webb's latest book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, which reads as something of a manifesto—a pitch for high office. Then Robert and Ramona move on to Italy, and the rather epic figure of Giuseppe Garibaldi. According to reviewer Dave Gilmour, while other heroic Italians such as Mazzini, Cavour and Victor Emmanuel have become tarnished as clear historical facts start to eclipse pure nationalistic sentiment, Garibaldi remains 'an authentic Italian hero', one of 'the generation of giants' who helped to create modern Italy between 1848 and 1870. They discuss a new book which looks at this revolutionary life—Alfonso Scirocco's Garibaldi: Citizen of the World. And finally, a look at Edmund White's review of three new translations of work from French writer Marguerite Duras. And in the process he paints an extraordinary image of her post-war years and her intemperate lurchings from alcoholic deathbed to social centre of attention.

The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block (review)   Read Transcript

24/06/2008
Young American writer Stefan Merrill Block's debut novel, The Story of Forgetting, is another addition to the growing genre of Alzheimer's literature. It's a tale told from the perspectives of an old man and a teenage boy, embroidered with fairytale and science. For the Book Show, Patricia Maunder has some thoughts on why this exploration of forgetting is so memorable. All In The Mind's Natasha Mitchell interviews Stefan Merrill Block at the Sydney Writers' Festival. Find audio and transcript here.

Colonial Australian crime fiction   Read Transcript

20/06/2008
Crime fiction was popular in 19th century Australia and there was plenty of raw material to inspire writers - bushrangers, convicts, lawlessness on the goldfields, mysterious outback deaths. Ken Gelder has helped to revive some of this literature for 21st century readers in a collection he has co-edited called The Anthology of Colonial Australian Crime Fiction.

Miles Franklin Award winner 2008 - Steven Carroll   Read Transcript

20/06/2008
Steven Carroll has won this year's Miles Franklin award for his novel The Time We Have Taken, the third book in a series chronicling the life of a family in an emerging Melbourne suburb. The series begins in the 1950s, with The Art of the Engine Driver, moves into the 60s with The Gift of Speed, and lands in the 70s with The Time We Have Taken. The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown interviewed Steven Carroll in 2007. Find transcript and audio here.

The perils of publishing eccentric fiction   Read Transcript

17/06/2008
What would you do if you received a rejection letter for your novel that said, 'It's very hard to make a definite assessment of this book'? Wayne Macauley went down to the local library, photocopied it, enlarged it and stuck the phrase on his wall as a source of inspiration. It took Wayne Macauley 13 years to get his first novel into print. After countless rejections by the big publishing houses Blueprints for a Barbed Wire Canoe was finally accepted by a small independent outfit called Black Pepper. The novel then made it on to the reading list for Year 12 English, and quickly went to a second edition. Wayne Macauley has written up this experience in the journal Meanjin and talks about his journey to being published. He has some suggestions for promoting self-publishing.

David Guterson's The Other   Read Transcript

15/06/2008
Author of Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson, talks about his latest book The Other. It's the story of a friendship between two men from very different backgrounds. The narrator, Neil Countryman, comes from blue collar stock and he's the first in his family to go to college. His friend, John William Barry, is from the opposite end of the social spectrum. The Barry family tree is firmly rooted in the pioneer history of Washington State, its branches laden with former governors, bankers and money. Over time the friends choose different paths.

David Guterson's The Other   Read Transcript

12/06/2008
Author of Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson, talks about his latest book The Other. It's the story of a friendship between two men from very different backgrounds. The narrator, Neil Countryman, comes from blue collar stock and he's the first in his family to go to college. His friend, John William Barry, is from the opposite end of the social spectrum. The Barry family tree is firmly rooted in the pioneer history of Washington State, its branches laden with former governors, bankers and money. Over time the friends choose different paths.

Julia Leigh's Disquiet   Read Transcript

10/06/2008
In 1999, Australian author Julia Leigh won international praise for her first novel, The Hunter, the story of mercenary sent to the Tasmanian wilderness by a multinational biotech company to track down and kill the last Tasmanian tiger, in order to harvest its genetic material. Leigh was named by The Observer as one of the novelists to watch in the 21st Century, but it's taken nine years for her second novel to appear called Disquiet. Disquiet is the story of a woman returning after to the family chateau in France after a long absence in Australia. She carries the scars of a failed and brutal marriage and is accompanied by her two children, who've never before met their French relatives. Julia Leigh's two novels, The Hunter and Disquiet, are very different stories - and yet there are some key similarities between them.

Joseph Heller, the late American author of Catch 22   Read Transcript

09/06/2008
Today, from the archives of an earlier Radio National program, Books & Writing, a conversation that Ramona Koval had with the late, great American novelist and memoirist Joseph Heller. Heller was a master of the absurd, so much so that the title of his first novel and most famous book Catch 22 has entered the English language as the expression for an absurd and illogical concept. You might remember when Heller's hero, Yossarian, is asked to fly on more dangerous World War Two bombing missions, the only way to get out of doing so is to plead insanity. But if you're insane, you wouldn't want to stop flying, so you must be sane to want to stop, in which case you have to keep flying. That's 'Catch 22'. The book is now considered a classic, and Heller went on to write six more darkly comic novels, including Closing Time, which charts the progress of Yossarian and the evil Milo Minderbinder and others in the cast of the first novel as they make their way in the inferno that is post-war America. In his memoir, Now and Then, you can read about many of the locations that have found their way into Heller's fiction, especially Coney Island, the place where Heller grew up and had so many of his formative experiences. It was 1998, a year before his death, when Ramona spoke to Joseph Heller in his upper West Side Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park and he was, at 75, glossily handsome and charming and ready to talk about his writing life. Ramona asked him first if he enjoyed the fact that the expression 'Catch 22' had well and truly been absorbed into the wider lexicon, as a term synonymous with absurdity and a sort of tail-chasing illogicality?

Anne Enright in conversation at the Sydney Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

08/06/2008
Anne Enright's short stories make you sigh when you finish them, and each one delivers you to a place you haven't been before -- to a point of view that you may not have considered before. And of course there's her marvellous novel The Gathering, the story of the nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan, and the history that made them what they were. Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for this novel. She was educated in English and Philosophy and was a student of the famed University of East Anglia's creative writing course, taught by novelist, critic and teacher Malcolm Bradbury and the remarkable Angela Carter. She's been a television producer and has written opinion pieces for newspapers, and of course she's now a rightly celebrated novelist and essayist. Before Anne Enright spoke to Ramona Koval last Thursday evening, in Sydney's Recital Hall at Angel Place, she began with a reading from her Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering.

Neil Gaiman and the graphic novel   Read Transcript

04/06/2008
Neil Gaiman has been described as 'the father of the graphic novel'. The English writer, who's been crossing media forms for decades, has certainly developed an enviable reputation as a trailblazer, but he's the first to acknowledge that this accolade is usually the product of wonderful collaborations -- with illustrators and film directors and even other writers, like Terry Pratchett. Neil Gaiman has written fantasy, horror, and high-tech stories for adults, young adults and children -- and sometimes it's hard to know which book is intended for which audience -- he likes it that way. His literary life started as an enduring collaboration with artist Dave McKean, but Neil seems unable to stay still, jumping between different forms and different media because he never wants to repeat himself, or try to compete, in any conventional way, with 3,000 years of traditional storytelling. Michael Shirrefs spoke to Neil Gaiman during his recent trip to Australia and asked him why he was always taking on new styles and new problems.

Luke Davies and The God of Speed   Read Transcript

01/06/2008
Howard Hughes had everything -- money, fame, power -- but by the end of his life he was consumed by drug addiction and an obsession with germs that left him confined to a blacked-out hotel room. This is the period in which poet, novelist and screenwriter Luke Davies sets his new novel The God of Speed, in which he explores the decayed mind of this once famous man.

Writings on Calcutta with Amit Chaudhuri

29/05/2008
While it may have changed its name to Kolkata, the Calcutta of Amit Chaudhuri's childhood has influenced his writing and sense of self. The city has also been the home of other famous Indian writers. The West Bengal city of Calcutta is the literary home of the giant of Indian writing Rabindranath Tagore. But it's with the literary successors of this icon that Amit Chaudhuri as novelist, essayist and musician finds a sense of comradeship -- with their sense of exile as migrants, foreigners and visitors in this city which is a seething, cosmopolitan metropolis. Amit Chaudhuri has written about the contribution of writers to the aesthetic of Calcutta in a May edition of the Times Literary Supplement. It is an extract from an anthology he's edited on Calcutta's literary heritage which is coming out later in the year, called Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta.

Fiona Capp - Musk & Byrne   Read Transcript

28/05/2008
The defiant figure of the female outlaw does not dominate stories of early Australia. Instead, we have the blokey Ned Kelly and his crew populating the mythological landscape with tales of daring bushrangers. But Australian writer Fiona Capp has imagined a story that blends her own family's journey to the Victorian goldfields in the late 1860s with a fictional story of a female outlaw - Jemma Musk. She's an artist and an independent woman who challenges the moral code of the small town she lives in. Fiona Capp has written two novels - Night Surfing and Last of the Sane Days - but she's also written a memoir called That Oceanic Feeling. So in her latest novel, she brings these two worlds together: her family history and the imagined landscape of fiction. At the Sydney Writers Festival, Fiona Capp spoke to the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange about her novel Musk and Byrne. Fiona begins by recounting the fantastic journey that forms the background to this novel - that of her great-great grandfather who travelled from Switzerland to Australia with his herd of cattle.

Junot Diaz in conversation at the Sydney Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

27/05/2008
Junot Diaz has had marvellous success with his short stories. They appeared in the New Yorker and The Paris Review and four times in subsequent editions of Best American Short Stories. Both his short story collection Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao have been critically acclaimed. Michiko Kakutani, the often hard to please critic of The New York Times called his Oscar novel 'An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fuelled by adrenaline-powered prose, it's confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that's equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.' Oscar Wao is a fat, nerdy boy, a migrant from the Dominican Republic, who lives with his sister and his mother, and dreams of becoming 'the Dominican Tolkien'. He falls in love with girls who won't respond to his nerdy advances and his greatest fear is that he will die a Virgin, unknown in the annals of Dominican Republic machismo. We meet his sister Lola and his room-mate Yunior and generations of his family who have been deeply affected by the Dominican Republic's dictatorship of Trujillo -- nicknamed 'The Goat' -- in Oscar's words the 'dictatingest dictator who ever dictated.' Before speaking to Ramona Koval, Junot Diaz began the session by reading from his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- and be warned that there's a small amount of strong language in this intrview.

Anne Enright in conversation at the Sydney Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

26/05/2008
Anne Enright's short stories make you sigh when you finish them, and each one delivers you to a place you haven't been before -- to a point of view that you may not have considered before. And of course there's her marvellous novel The Gathering, the story of the nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan, and the history that made them what they were. Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for this novel. She was educated in English and Philosophy and was a student of the famed University of East Anglia's creative writing course, taught by novelist, critic and teacher Malcolm Bradbury and the remarkable Angela Carter. She's been a television producer and has written opinion pieces for newspapers, and of course she's now a rightly celebrated novelist and essayist. Before Anne Enright spoke to Ramona Koval last Thursday evening, in Sydney's Recital Hall at Angel Place, she began with a reading from her Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering.

Rowan Somerville and The End of Sleep   Read Transcript

25/05/2008
Rowan Somerville's new novel, The End of Sleep, plunges the reader into the crumbling chaos of Cairo. The shambolic Fin, a recently unemployed journalist, pursues a story that he hopes will resurrect his career. It's a wild clash between western deadlines and the timeless telling of tales.

The great unpublished novels of Australia   Read Transcript

21/05/2008
Unsolicited manuscripts are sent to publishers all the time and they call this the slush pile, but Overland magazine and independent publisher Sleepers have actually been asking for manuscripts from everyone and anyone! As a result they've been sent manuscripts that are verse novels, Christian allegories, sci-fi, Australian historical fiction; some that are sexist and one by a writer who boasts they've never read a novel so their style has not been corrupted by prior exposure! They've witnessed an outpouring of creativity and I expect some noteworthy attempts as well as failures. Jeff Sparrow from Overland and Louise Swinn from the independent publisher Sleepers join Ramona Koval in the studio to talk about the great -- and not so great -- unpublished novels of Australia that they've found in their pursuit of literary gold.

Luke Davies and The God of Speed   Read Transcript

20/05/2008
Howard Hughes had everything -- money, fame, power -- but by the end of his life he was consumed by drug addiction and an obsession with germs that left him confined to a blacked-out hotel room. This is the period in which poet, novelist and screenwriter Luke Davies sets his new novel The God of Speed, in which he explores the decayed mind of this once famous man.

Erotica - is it porn or is it literature?   Read Transcript

18/05/2008
What does a struggling journalist and novelist do to revive his career when times are tough? British author Rupert Smith faced that dilemma when he couldn't find a publisher for his second novel. His solution? Writing erotica under the nom de plume, or what he calls the 'nom de porn', James Lear. In a recent article in the UK Independent, Rupert Smith describes how he came to take up this lucrative genre.

Rotten English: writing in the vernacular   Read Transcript

18/05/2008
'A howl, a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind or a wave', this is how Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite describes writing in the vernacular. While dialect, creole, pidgin, broken English and patois have been thought of as corrupt versions of English, for writers who use the vernacular and who embrace the language of the street and the bars, the creative possibilities can be liberating and even revolutionary. Each colonial outpost of the British empire created its own English and today many Man Booker winners have written in the language of the street. While it may be paradoxical to anthologise writings that are often anti-institutional, Dohra Ahmad has put together an anthology called Rotten English—it's a term taken from the novel Sozaboy by Ken Saro Wiwa, the assassinated Nigerian writer. In her collection of this 'rotten' English literature, she features works from Robert Burns, Irvine Welsh, Rohinton Mistry, and also from the African diaspora. A Caribbean writer in the anthology is M. Nourbese Philip—known as Nourbese—and she joins me this morning from the CBC studios in Toronto, Canada, where she lives; and Dohra Ahmad joins me from a studio in New York.

Wolf Totem: Man Asian literary prize winner (review)   Read Transcript

09/05/2008
The Chinese novel Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong won the inaugural Man Asian prize last year and set a Chinese record for the amount paid for foreign publication rights. Anna Hedigan has been reading the recently released English language translation.

Erotica - is it porn or is it literature?   Read Transcript

08/05/2008
What does a struggling journalist and novelist do to revive his career when times are tough? British author Rupert Smith faced that dilemma when he couldn't find a publisher for his second novel. His solution? Writing erotica under the nom de plume, or what he calls the 'nom de porn', James Lear. In a recent article in the UK Independent, Rupert Smith describes how he came to take up this lucrative genre.

Rotten English: writing in the vernacular   Read Transcript

07/05/2008
'A howl, a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind or a wave', this is how Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite describes writing in the vernacular. While dialect, creole, pidgin, broken English and patois have been thought of as corrupt versions of English, for writers who use the vernacular and who embrace the language of the street and the bars, the creative possibilities can be liberating and even revolutionary. Each colonial outpost of the British empire created its own English and today many Man Booker winners have written in the language of the street. While it may be paradoxical to anthologise writings that are often anti-institutional, Dohra Ahmad has put together an anthology called Rotten English—it's a term taken from the novel Sozaboy by Ken Saro Wiwa, the assassinated Nigerian writer. In her collection of this 'rotten' English literature, she features works from Robert Burns, Irvine Welsh, Rohinton Mistry, and also from the African diaspora. A Caribbean writer in the anthology is M. Nourbese Philip—known as Nourbese—and she joins me this morning from the CBC studios in Toronto, Canada, where she lives; and Dohra Ahmad joins me from a studio in New York.

Rowan Somerville and The End of Sleep   Read Transcript

06/05/2008
Rowan Somerville's new novel, The End of Sleep, plunges the reader into the crumbling chaos of Cairo. The shambolic Fin, a recently unemployed journalist, pursues a story that he hopes will resurrect his career. It's a wild clash between western deadlines and the timeless telling of tales.

Translating Tolstoy   Read Transcript

01/05/2008
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the Paris-based couple who have taken the Russian translation world by storm, have won many prizes for their work. They specialise in English translations of Russian authors such as Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In 2000 their translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina won a PEN Book of the Month Translation Prize. Now they've tackled another Tolstoy work, War and Peace.

Travis Holland's The Archivist's Story   Read Transcript

27/04/2008
The Archivist's Story dramatises the Stalinist era purges of writers like Isaac Babel and Mandelstam. The novel is based on the fanciful idea that maybe unknown writings of these authors escaped the incinerator. And that maybe an archivist at the Lubyanka prison, where these writers were interrogated, hid the banished works of purged writers. In his debut novel, Travis Holland imagines that an archivist, Pavel, in a moment of moral courage, has rescued a manuscript of Isaac Babel's. Pavel is charged with burning the works of great Russian writers out of favour with the regime. This is particularly painful for him, as he used to be a literature teacher at a prestigious school before he wrongly denounced a fellow teacher who then committed suicide. Out of favour with the school, he is given a lowly job at Lubyanka prison in Moscow, ordering the documents of confiscated works to make their destruction more efficient. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Travis Holland about his novel, The Archivist's Story.

Travis Holland's <i>The Archivist's Story</i>   Read Transcript

22/04/2008
The Archivist's Story dramatises the Stalinist era purges of writers like Isaac Babel and Mandelstam. The novel is based on the fanciful idea that maybe unknown writings of these authors escaped the incinerator. And that maybe an archivist at the Lubyanka prison, where these writers were interrogated, hid the banished works of purged writers. In his debut novel, Travis Holland imagines that an archivist, Pavel, in a moment of moral courage, has rescued a manuscript of Isaac Babel's. Pavel is charged with burning the works of great Russian writers out of favour with the regime. This is particularly painful for him, as he used to be a literature teacher at a prestigious school before he wrongly denounced a fellow teacher who then committed suicide. Out of favour with the school, he is given a lowly job at Lubyanka prison in Moscow, ordering the documents of confiscated works to make their destruction more efficient. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Travis Holland about his novel, The Archivist's Story.

Linda Grant and the humanity of monsters   Read Transcript

14/04/2008
In her new book The Clothes on their Backs British novelist and journalist Linda Grant explores the humanity of people cast as monsters, like her character Sandor Kovacs. He was brutalised by the Nazis in Hungary, but when he went to England he became a social pariah for being a slum landlord with an army of thugs.

Helen Garner's return to fiction with The Spare Room   Read Transcript

13/04/2008
Helen Garner's award-winning books include novels, short-stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction, like The First Stone (1995) and Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004). Her new book is The Spare Room, her first novel in 15 years. Nicola is coming to Melbourne from her home in Sydney with what turns out to be a stage-four cancer. That's the fourth of four stages. She is very sick. But she's coming to stay in her old friend Helen's spare room, while she undergoes what she believes is a sure-fire cure for cancer conducted at an alternative clinic. So is this art imitating life?

Siri Hustvedt's The Sorrows of an American   Read Transcript

10/04/2008
Siri Hustvedt's latest novel is The Sorrows of an American and, as with her previous novel What I Loved, she writes from the first person perspective of a man -- in this case New York psychiatrist Erik Davidsen, who is mourning the death of his father and the end of his marriage. Radio National's Peter Mares spoke to Siri Hustvedt for The Book Show.

Upton Sinclair

10/04/2008
The success of the film There Will Be Blood has brought the work of American writer Upton Sinclair back to public attention. There Will Be Blood is loosely based on Sinclair's book Oil!, written in 1927. Well known in the early part of the 20th century, Upton Sinclair wrote more than 90 books, the most famous of which was his 1906 novel The Jungle, which dealt with conditions in the US meat packing industry and caused a public uproar. Don Anderson joins Ramona Koval to discuss this early 20th century writer who once had a much more prominent literary and public profile.

Paul Auster and the writer's mind   Read Transcript

09/04/2008
Coincidence is a strong theme in Paul Auster's screenplays and fiction. In his novel, The Brooklyn Follies, we follow the lonely character Nathan Glass as he writes a book about human follies. As a life insurance salesman, he's certainly been exposed to many examples of folly. While he's collecting the material for his book, he wanders the streets of Brooklyn and he bumps into his beloved nephew. And through a series of coincidences his life takes a new shape. The novel begins with Nathan Glass saying he was looking for a place to die and someone recommended Brooklyn. But he doesn't die there, in fact he finds life. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Paul Auster when he was in Melbourne recently, and asked him what it is about Brooklyn that helps Nathan rediscover life.

Helen Garner's return to fiction with The Spare Room   Read Transcript

08/04/2008
Helen Garner's award-winning books include novels, short-stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction, like The First Stone (1995) and Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004). Her new book is The Spare Room, her first novel in 15 years. Nicola is coming to Melbourne from her home in Sydney with what turns out to be a stage-four cancer. That's the fourth of four stages. She is very sick. But she's coming to stay in her old friend Helen's spare room, while she undergoes what she believes is a sure-fire cure for cancer conducted at an alternative clinic. So is this art imitating life?

Joan London's The Good Parents   Read Transcript

07/04/2008
Joan London came rather later to writing novels, but what she did she certainly packed a punch. She wrote two prize-winning collections of stories, Sister Ships, which won The Age Book of the Year in 1986, and Letter To Constantine, which won the Steele Rudd Award in 1994 and the Premier's Award for Fiction. Then her first novel, Gilgamesh, was published in 2001 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, as well as a host of other awards, and chosen as The Age Book of the Year for Fiction in 2002. It was also long-listed for the Orange Prize and the Dublin Impac. Gilgamesh has been published in Europe, the UK and the US, where it was a New York Times Notable Book in 2003, and an Editor's Choice Book. So her second novel is The Good Parents, in which we meet 18 year Maya De Jong a country girl from Western Australia who arrives in Melbourne and starts an affair with her boss - a married man with a son and a dying wife. Her parents Toni and Jacob come to stay, and Maya has left her share house leaving no word. Joan London joins Ramona Koval from the ABC studios in Perth.

Brock Clarke's mock memoir: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England   Read Transcript

06/04/2008
To many of us, book burning is a crime against history, ideas and liberty, but where does setting fire to writers' homes fit in to this literary crime? In Brock Clarke's novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, writers' homes go up in smoke at an alarming rate. He doesn't have anything against the writers, but it's a way for him to question the way we mythologise writers and the way we revere stories. The novel is told as a mock memoir by Sam Pulisfer, who is writing a book also called An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. He's a self-confessed bumbler who went to jail for 10 years for setting fire to the American poet Emily Dickinson's house -- he said it was an accident, the sort of thing a bumbler would do, but two people died in the blaze. While he's in jail, letters are sent to his parents' house from people asking him to burn other famous writers' houses down -- like Mark Twain's and Robert Frost's. When he comes out of prison, these houses start going up in smoke and Sam sets out to discover who's responsible for the arson. He becomes a detective...and in the journey to uncover the mystery, Sam ends up asking a lot more questions about his life and family and about the role of stories and how they affect people. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Brock Clarke about his novel.

Brock Clarke's mock memoir: An Arsonists Guide to Writers Homes in New England

02/04/2008
To many of us, book burning is a crime against history, ideas and liberty, but where does setting fire to writers' homes fit into this literary crime? In Brock Clarke's novel, An Arsonists Guide to Writers Homes in New England, writer's homes go up in smoke at an alarming rate. He doesn't have anything against the writers, but it's a way for him to question the way we mythologise writers and the way we revere stories. The novel is told as a mock memoir by Sam Pulisfer who is writing a book also called An Arsonists Guide to Writers Homes in New England. He's a self confessed bumbler who went to jail for 10 years for setting fire to the American poet Emily Dickinson's house - he said it was an accident, the sort of thing a bumbler would do, but two people died in the blaze. While he's in jail, letters are sent to his parent's house from people asking him to burn other famous writers houses down - like Mark Twain's and Robert Frost's. When he comes out of prison, these houses start going up in smoke and Sam sets out to discover who's responsible for the arson. He becomes a detective...and in the journey to uncover the mystery, Sam ends up asking a lot more questions about his life and family and about the role of stories and how they affect people. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Brock Clarke about his novel.

Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions (review)   Read Transcript

31/03/2008
Hari Kunzru's new novel My Revolutions explores the complexity of modern day identity politics through a former radical wanted for bombings as a youth. David Astle reviews it for The Book Show.

David Mitchell at Writers and Readers week, New Zealand.   Read Transcript

30/03/2008
A genius, a magician, one of today's most compelling fiction writers -- all words that have been used at various times to describe British novelist David Mitchell. He talks to Ramona Koval during Writers and Readers week in Wellington, New Zealand. David Mitchell's first book Ghostwritten was described by AS Byatt as 'the best novel I have ever read'. His second, Number9dream, was shortlisted for the Booker and the James Tait Black Memorial prizes, and his third, Cloud Atlas, was hailed as spectacular by critics and general readers alike; another Booker nominated work. His latest novel is Black Swan Green, the story of 13 months in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor -- the year his parents split up. A lot happens to him that year: he survives another year in the schoolyard (and a boy with a stammer doesn't have it easy) and he emerges as a young poet, although he publishes under an assumed name. That description is really very one dimensional and as usual this David Mitchell book is very much multidimensional. We start by discussing Cloud Atlas and the different languages that appear in the book.

Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book   Read Transcript

30/03/2008
In Geraldine Brooks's new novel People of the Book a young Australian book conservator travels to Bosnia to begin restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book. In trying to discover the story of its miraculous survival, Hanna Heath sets in motion a series of events that will profoundly affect her life.

Vendela Vida: Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name (review)   Read Transcript

21/03/2008
One writer who is fascinated by modern rituals and rites of passage is Vendela Vida. She wrote her first non-fiction book, Girls On The Verge, about American women's initiation rituals (sorority rushes, debutante balls and gang inductions). Since then she has been writing a trilogy about the dark side of rites of passage -- a sort of female version of Catcher In The Rye. She says she 'set out to write a trilogy about violence and forgiveness, to explore those themes through various angles and plots'. The first novel in the trilogy was And Now You Can Go and her latest is Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name. In this novel, the central character is searching for her father, after she discovers that the man who raised her was not her biological father -- the search takes her to Lapland. And reviewer Ryan Paine was dazzled by the Northern Lights.

Below Tree Level - Hobart Mountain Festival

20/03/2008
Moss, mulch, ferns, fungus, lush, green -- what do you imagine when you think of the rainforest? Do you idealise nature or are you disturbed by the decay and rotting logs? Going for a walk in the forest can be a welcome relief from our busy lives, but there's also a murky side to nature. Below Tree Level is an illustrated story that plays on the uneasiness that we can feel when we go bush. While the story has been published as a book, at the moment you can also read it on the wilderness interpretation signs on a Mount Wellington walking track in Hobart. It's part of Hobart's Mountain Festival. The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to the author Benny Walter and the illustrator, Leigh Rigozzi, about the moody story they created.

Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book   Read Transcript

20/03/2008
In Geraldine Brooks's new novel People of the Book a young Australian book conservator travels to Bosnia to begin restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book. In trying to discover the story of its miraculous survival, Hanna Heath sets in motion a series of events that will profoundly affect her life.

David Mitchell at Writers and Readers week, New Zealand   Read Transcript

18/03/2008
A genius, a magician, one of today's most compelling fiction writers -- all words that have been used at various times to describe British novelist David Mitchell. He talks to Ramona Koval during Writers and Readers week in Wellington, New Zealand. David Mitchell's first book Ghostwritten was described by AS Byatt as 'the best novel I have ever read'. His second, Number9dream, was shortlisted for the Booker and the James Tait Black Memorial prizes, and his third, Cloud Atlas, was hailed as spectacular by critics and general readers alike; another Booker nominated work. His latest novel is Black Swan Green, the story of 13 months in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor -- the year his parents split up. A lot happens to him that year: he survives another year in the schoolyard (and a boy with a stammer doesn't have it easy) and he emerges as a young poet, although he publishes under an assumed name. That description is really very one dimensional and as usual this David Mitchell book is very much multidimensional. We start by discussing Cloud Atlas and the different languages that appear in the book.

Damien Wilkins   Read Transcript

13/03/2008
New Zealand novelist, short story writer and poet Damien Wilkins has received the Whiting Award for promising young writers and his work is winning wide praise. He's also known for his astute literary reviews and critical essays. Damien Wilkins talks to Ramona Koval from the New Zealand Post Readers and Writers Festival in Wellington.

Christopher Koch: The Memory Room (review)   Read Transcript

10/03/2008
Christopher Koch has written seven novels, two of which, The Doubleman and Highways to a War, won the Miles Franklin Award. In 1995 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature and this year received an Australia Council for the Arts writers' emeritus award. Brendan Gullifer, a fan of Christopher Koch's work, relished the chance to read and review Koch's latest novel The Memory Room.

Friday Nights with Joanna Trollope   Read Transcript

02/03/2008
English writer and publishing phenomenon Joanna Trollope has been dismissed as Queen of the Aga Sagas for her depictions of middle-class, middle-brow English life but she just keeps on writing and keeps on selling and millions of people love her books. Her new book is Friday Nights and is about women's friendships and the way they change when a new man enters the arena.

Should Nabokov's unpublished manuscript be burned?   Read Transcript

24/02/2008
Dmitri Nabokov is 73, and he has a difficult decision to make: he has fragments of an unpublished manuscript by his father, Vladimir, that the father wanted burned after his death. Vera Nabokov, Vladimir's wife, couldn't do it and Dmitri Nabokov has been the literary executor of Vladimir Nabokov's estate since his mother died in 1991 and he hasn't carried out his father's wishes either. What should he do?

Searching for novel writers

21/02/2008
In the 1950s the journal Overland published novels and distributed them to subscribers. The rationale at the time? Big Australian publishers weren't set up to deal with Australian writers. Sounds very like some of the arguments we're hearing now about the difficulties facing literary writers in the current publishing climate. With that in mind, two independent publishers who are not usually associated with novels have decided to get into the novel publishing business.

Garrison Keillor on Lake Wobegon   Read Transcript

17/02/2008
Listeners to Radio National on Sunday nights will be familiar with today's guest -- Garrison Keillor, creator and star of the popular radio program A Prairie Home Companion. He is also the author of over a dozen books and wrote for The New Yorker magazine for 25 years. He's a remarkable storyteller and his new novel, Pontoon, is set in the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where things are really more or less the way they were in his last book, when he casts his mind back to the town in the summer of 1956: the Whippets are still playing baseball; the Chatterbox Cafe and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery remain open; and the monument to the Unknown Norwegian continues to stand a block or so from Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. Evelyn Peterson, the central character, is dead from the first sentence, and what's more, Evelyn turns out to have been not quite the woman she was thought to be...a widow for 19 years and a church regular, she is discovered to have had an affair with Raoul Olsen, whom she met in 1941 and with whom she rekindled the flame after her husband died. Raoul took her to dance-floors and hotels from Las Vegas to Branson. And it turns out that she wanted to have her ashes sealed in a bowling ball and dropped into Lake Wobegon.

Should Nabokov's unpublished manuscript be burned?   Read Transcript

15/02/2008
Dmitri Nabokov is 73, and he has a difficult decision to make: he has fragments of an unpublished manuscript by his father, Vladimir, that the father wanted burned after his death. Vera Nabokov, Vladimir's wife, couldn't do it and Dmitri Nabokov has been the literary executor of Vladimir Nabokov's estate since his mother died in 1991 and he hasn't carried out his father's wishes either. What should he do?

Marketing Lady Chatterley: origins of spin in publishing with Jonathan Rose   Read Transcript

12/02/2008
Writers are often thought of as demigods and the words they create are considered sacred, so it's easy to forget that their work is still marketed to the public, that they have to deal with agents, lawyers and designers. Jonathan Rose is a book historian who's looked at the origins of publishing spin and how the works of Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence were originally marketed.

Charlotte Wood's novel The Children

11/02/2008
Going back home, at whatever age, can reignite those sibling rivalries and jealousies we thought we'd outgrown, can't it? In Charlotte Wood's new novel The Children, this is what confronts Mandy, a foreign correspondent who's witnessed war in Bosnia and Baghdad. She returns home to be with her father who's in hospital, but finds herself reimmersed in the tensions of her childhood.

Peter Hoeg's The Quiet Girl (review)   Read Transcript

08/02/2008
Peter Hoeg has worked on ships, he's been a ballet dancer, he's into fencing and mountaineering, and he's also the noted Danish writer who came to prominence after his Arctic thriller hit the best-seller shelves about 10 years ago. Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow is a thriller with elements of magical realism thrown in and his latest book, The Quiet Girl, also has these elements. The Danish critics were split on The Quiet Girl: some dismissed it for being too postmodern; others think it's innovative writing. So what does our reviewer Anna Hedigan think about it?

Writing numbers -- Rachel Robertson and Toni Jordan

06/02/2008
What is it like to write about numbers? To tell a story through characters who count? To make numbers almost another character of the work? Two writers who have written about people with numbers obsessions are Rachel Robertson and Toni Jordan. But neither Toni nor Rachel are obsessive themselves. Rachel Robertson is the co-winner of the Australian Book Review's Calibre essay award for her piece called 'Reaching One Thousand' about her autistic son who's fixated on numbers and measurements. And Toni Jordan's debut novel called Addition has just been published. It's about Grace Vandenburg, who's witty, attractive, but numbers obsessed to the point where she can't make a decision if it disrupts her numbers routine. While both these writers deal with the subject differently: one from experience, the other from her imagination, there is a lot of crossover between their works.

Friday Nights with Joanna Trollope   Read Transcript

05/02/2008
English writer and publishing phenomenon Joanna Trollope has been dismissed as Queen of the Aga Sagas for her depictions of middle-class, middle-brow English life but she just keeps on writing and keeps on selling and millions of people love her books. Her new book is Friday Nights and is about women's friendships and the way they change when a new man enters the arena.

William Gibson's Spook Country (review)   Read Transcript

05/02/2008
Do you ever get the feeling that the future is already here? In the high-tech society we live in, all those futuristic fantasies and gadgets we were told about when we were growing up have become part of our everyday lives -- except maybe the fridge that does everything. Science fiction writer William Gibson, who is known for his futuristic novels, feels the same way, so he's taken to writing novels set in the high-tech present. His latest book, Spook Country, is billed as a sequel to his earlier book Pattern Recognition. Spook Country is a spy-novel-cum-thriller that engages with the paranoid politics of our time and is peopled with strange characters like Bobby Chombo who doesn't sleep in the same place twice, and a Russian-speaking Cuban-Chinese criminal. Simon Cooper reviews Spook Country for the Book Show.

Bernhard Schlink's Homecoming   Read Transcript

04/02/2008
Homecoming is German writer Bernard Schlink's long awaited novel after his book the Reader made such an impression on readers the world over. That was about a young boy's affair with an older woman who turns out to have been a concentration camp guard and is on trial for war crimes. He has published short stories since and a few more of his crime novels but Homecoming is very much in the same territory that made the Reader a compelling book. As you'll hear in my conversation with Bernard Schlink, Homecoming is very much an autobiographical book. At its heart is young Peter Debauer, half-Swiss half-German, a boy without a father, who spends his holidays with his Swiss grandparents. He is socially isolated, shy -- they are publishers and give him scraps of pages to draw and write on. His grandfather tells him not to read the stories on the pages but of course he turns them over and reads a fragment of a story about a young German soldier who escapes from a Russian prison camp and embarks, like Ulysses, on a fabulous journey home to his wife. When he knocks on his wife's door she opens it and stands there with a child and another man. Peter is obsessed with finding how the story ends. When Ramona Koval spoke to Bernard Schlink from his home in Berlin, she asked about this idea of setting up a story and having the character do all he can to find our more. All writers do this, don't they -- they ask what next?

Garrison Keillor on Lake Wobegon   Read Transcript

31/01/2008
Listeners to Radio National on Sunday nights will be familiar with today's guest -- Garrison Keillor, creator and star of the popular radio program A Prairie Home Companion. He is also the author of over a dozen books and wrote for The New Yorker magazine for 25 years. He's a remarkable storyteller and his new novel, Pontoon, is set in the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where things are really more or less the way they were in his last book, when he casts his mind back to the town in the summer of 1956: the Whippets are still playing baseball; the Chatterbox Cafe and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery remain open; and the monument to the Unknown Norwegian continues to stand a block or so from Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. Evelyn Peterson, the central character, is dead from the first sentence, and what's more, Evelyn turns out to have been not quite the woman she was thought to be...a widow for 19 years and a church regular, she is discovered to have had an affair with Raoul Olsen, whom she met in 1941 and with whom she rekindled the flame after her husband died. Raoul took her to dance-floors and hotels from Las Vegas to Branson. And it turns out that she wanted to have her ashes sealed in a bowling ball and dropped into Lake Wobegon.

Robert Silvers, editor, New York Review of Books

30/01/2008
Noel Coward corresponded with some of the mightiest pens in literature and show business throughout the 20th century. Today, Robert Silvers from the New York Review of Books reviews the publication of the personal letters of the actor and dramatist which expressed the hopes and fears of a society and of an age. He also talks about Wernher von Braun - the American rocket scientist, born in Germany, who served as an SS officer during the second world war but was taken in by American's to assist in the big space race. And he reflects on a wonderful piece in the Review by Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra, who met, in Beijing, with the dissident writer who goes by the name of "Woeser", and whose voice the Chinese authorities are trying their best to silence.

Writing for grown-ups: Glyn Parry's novel Ocean Road

29/01/2008
Western Australian writer of young adult fiction and children's books Glyn Parry has made the move to writing for grown-ups with his haunting novel Ocean Road. The story is told through the eyes of a 17-year-old boy called Toby. It's the summer of 1976 in a coastal town in Western Australia. When Toby's father Frank is called away to the US where he's from, Toby's mother Laura takes up with an old acquaintance, Myron Abbott. Even though the main character is a young man, this book is definitely for adults.

Patrick Gale: Brisbane Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

24/01/2008
Patrick Gale was at the Brisbane Writers Festival with me in September last year with his 13th novel 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 2007 Brisbane Writers' Festival Patrick Gale began with a reading from Notes from an Exhibition.

Armistead Maupin: Brisbane Writers' Festival   Read Transcript

23/01/2008
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 2007 Brisbane Writers' Festival is Armistead Maupin. And a warning: there's sexually explicit language and adult themes in what you're about to hear.

Pat Barker: Edinburgh International Book Festival   Read Transcript

22/01/2008
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?

Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist   Read Transcript

21/01/2008
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.

From zines to books ... zinester Vanessa Berry goes hi-fi

17/01/2008
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.

Andrew Hutchinson's Rohypnol

15/01/2008
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.

Arthur Boyd's artist book: Sangkuriang, a mythical Indonesian story

11/01/2008
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.

Napoleon's Double by Antoni Jach (review)   Read Transcript

10/01/2008
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.

Re-reading DH Lawrence: Tim Parks

07/01/2008
Author, essayist, critic and translator Tim Parks is based in Italy. Tim was asked by a newspaper journalist about the books and authors that he, as a writer, keeps returning to. He considered this question and realised that the work of DH Lawrence loomed large for him.

Andrei Makine's The Woman Who Waited   Read Transcript

03/01/2008
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 2007 Sydney Writers' Festival, where he talked with The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.

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