With Toby Lichtig and Lucy Dallas – London has a brand-new theatre: the Bridge, the latest venture by Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr, based in Southwark and dedicated to original writing. And it starts its life with a new play by Richard Bean and Clive Young: Young Marx features Rory Kinnear as a delinquent Karl Marx, with a dash of Monty Python thrown in. The TLS’s Michael Caines joins us in the studio to discuss it; The “common view” of atheists is that religion is a combination of cosmology (a theory of the universe) and morality (or how best to behave) – but for the TLS’s Philosophy Editor Tim Crane this conception seems “deeply inadequate”. Crane identifies a third category, too often ignored: religious practice itself. He joins us on the line to discuss the religion of belonging, along with this week’s other philosophy pieces; The Austrian author Marianne Fritz was hailed in the late 1970s as a literary wunderkind, for a debut novel that described the descent into madness of a young mother in post-war Vienna. But as the decades progressed, her work grew increasingly obscure: brilliant for some, maddening for others. Jane Yager offers her insights into the author often dubbed, perhaps unfairly, “the female James Joyce”.
Georgina Colby joins us in the studio to discuss our growing recognition of the punk writer Kathy Acker, an experimental late-modernist; Alev Scott on 'Weinsteining' in publishing and what we should do about it; Tove Jansson is best known as the creator of the Moomins, but there is a great deal more to her oeuvre than those strange hippopotamus-like creatures – TLS Arts editor Lucy Dallas visits a new retrospective of Jansson's work
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – The Mexican-born novelist Valeria Luiselli joins us to discuss her new book, Tell Me How It Ends: An essay in 40 questions, about America's role in an ongoing immigration crisis where tens of thousands of Mexican and Central American children arrive at the border, unaccompanied and undocumented; Is Matthew Arnold responsible for the worst opening line of a sonnet in English? Seamus Perry gives an impassioned defence of the poet's dissonant and awkward verse; "If you are transgender, and if you come out as an adult in a position of authority (a tenured professor, say), non-trans people may treat you as an expert." So argues Harvard Professor Stephanie Burt, who has reviewed two accounts of being a trans person, Trans Like Me, by C. N. Lester and The Gender Games by Juno Dawson. She joins us to discuss.
The Mexican-born novelist Valeria Luiselli joins us to discuss her new book, Tell Me How It Ends: An essay in 40 questions, about America's role - and her own - in an ongoing immigration crisis where tens of thousands of Mexican and Central American children arrive at the border, unaccompanied and undocumented.
Joining Stig Abell and Lucy Dallas this week: Muriel Zagha, to discuss the redolent funk of French cinema; and James O'Brien, to summarise the rancid political mess of Great Britain. Meanwhile, Sam Graydon goes to see the National Poetry Library in London.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – As a new anthology of stories brings the thrills-and-chills of genre writing to bear on the experiences of the "wrongfully convicted", the author and essayist Leslie Jamison discusses competing impulses in the writer–convict–reader relationship, why we need to talk about guilt rather than innocence, and her own correspondence with three prisoners; Federico García Lorca is well-known as a modernist, avant-garde poet and playwright, but what of his proficiency in haiku? And how does this Japanese tradition relate to the Spanish art of flamenco? We're joined by Paul Chambers, himself a haiku poet who has translated a number of Lorca's poems for the first time
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – "For every competent feminist book”, Camille Paglia wrote in 1995, “there are twenty others shot through with inaccuracies, distortions, and propaganda.” Charlotte Shane runs us through a clutch of recent books by, among others, Laurie Penny, Rebecca Solnit and Paglia herself; How do we account for the extraordinary and enduring popularity of the French theorist Roland Barthes? Might it have something to do with his incurable boredom? Samuel Earle joins us in the studio to discuss the bundle of contradictions that was, and is, Barthes
A bonus episode: Stig Abell hosts a debate at the Brooklyn Literary Festival in which the New Yorker's Jelani Cobb, the New York Times' Michelle Goldberg and Pen America's Suzanne Nossel consider what is going on in American universities and beyond when it comes to debates about race, gender and identity.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Would you take fashion advice from Beckett? Was John Updike an early advocate of "norm-core"? We're joined in the studio by Laura Freeman to discuss a new book, Legendary Authors and the Clothes they Wore; addiction represents the height of paradox: the quest for fulfilment of individual desire that embraces the destruction of the individual self. Eric Iannelli considers a clutch of studies and memoirs that seek to describe the causes and consequences of the addict's “self-perpetuating vortex”; Charlottesville, the college city in Virginia, has impinged on the global consciousness in recent weeks, since a rash of neo-Nazi-instigated violence spread from the University of Virginia's campus into the streets. Krishan Kumar, a sociology professor at UVA, reflects on the institution's legacy, and that of its founder Thomas Jefferson
With Stig Abell and Lucy Dallas - we are in the studio with Ian Thomson discussing the unlikely collaboration between a Neo Dadaist and Dante; we talk to Mark Ford about Weldon Kees, the American poet you should have heard of; and Michael Caines delves into the theatrical mind of the great Peter Brook.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – The meaning of the 15th-century Voynich manuscript – a strange compendium of undecipherable signs, astrological symbols and pictures of nude bathing women – has long eluded scholars. We're joined by bibliographical sleuth Nicholas Gibbs, who appears to have discovered the manuscript's secret; to mark the double anniversary of one of America's greatest poets, Robert Lowell (1917-1977), Paul Muldoon – himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and Poetry editor at the New Yorker – reads his new poem 'Robert Lowell at Castletown House'; finally, TLS Fiction editor Toby Lichtig discusses the latest releases from established writers (including John le Carré and Salman Rushdie) and debut novelists (Gabriel Tallent and Fiona Mozley)
With Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas – Alexander van Tulleken on what makes popular science books – including Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry – so popular, and is there a hidden danger in making science the subject of water-cooler conversations?; Clair Wills joins us in the studio to discuss the forgotten stories of Punjabi migrants who came to England in the 1950s and early 60s, and introduces us to the fascinating, genre-blending works they composed and performed in pubs; and finally, the TLS's History editor David Horspool explains how Oliver Cromwell’s embarrassingly messy attempts to conquer the Caribbean in the mid-17th century nonetheless set the stage for modern overseas expansion – as well as giving us an early instance of fake news
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – We're joined in the studio by Sam Leith, Literary editor of the Spectator and self-professed rhetoric geek, discusses the problem of fake news in a post-truth world, with recourse to Aristotle and economic theory; we're running an extract, in this week's summer double issue, from My Absolute Darling, the new American novel everyone seems to be talking about – we'll discuss the dark material at its centre with the author himself, Gabriel Tallent; "Walid Jumblatt has the air of quiet dignity which befits a retired warlord with nearly half a million Twitter followers", so begins Alev Scott's essay on her experiences among the Druze of Lebanon, one of the country's eighteen recognised minorities. Alev joins us to describe an enlightening and troubling encounter. The podcast will take a break and return on August 31; keep up with the TLS at the-tls.co.uk
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Novelist Neel Mukherjee discusses the vexed state of Modern India and the legacy of Partition 70 years on; Frances Wilson considers a problematic clutch of books that look to describe a "sisterhood" of female writers from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf and beyond
With Lucy Dallas and Toby Lichtig. The TLS critic David Collard explores the idiosyncratic worlds of Ian Nairn – architectural critic, psychogeographer, “a cross between Anthony Burgess and Tony Hancock” – and describes Nairn’s influence on a generation of authors, including Simon Okotie, whose new novel he’s also reviewed in this week’s TLS. The paper's biography editor Catharine Morris tells the story of Tuco, the African grey parrot, and his influence on the life and work of the novelist Brian Brett. Lisa Hilton explains why the Marquis de Sade is a progressive moral satirist and a “rotten pornographer”.
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Former US Government consultant Edward Luttwak explains how the rising cost of cars in the US lies behind Donald Trump's election, and why the Democrats' sustained failure to address the problem may lead to consecutive terms for The Donald and his progeny; Humans are, more or less, logical and rational beings, aren't they? Cecilia Heyes, Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences and Professor of Psychology, discusses the irrationality of human thought and why it's easier to reason together; Michael Hoffman, the German-born poet, translator and, most recently 2018 Man Booker International judge, reads his new translation of a poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Female, 33"
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – We're joined in the studio by Claire Harman, author of Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen conquered the world, to discuss the life and legacy of this perhaps most-loved of all authors: what makes her so special, so alive in the modern world? And will there be no end to (stranger and stranger) adaptations of her work?
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi: Politicians – Theresa May foremost among them – always begin their obfuscations and delusional self-justifications by pretending to offer clarity. Journalist James O'Brien joins us to discuss the past thirty-odd days in the world of Prime Minister May, from the flunked general election to the travesty of Grenfell Tower, in a quest for that most elusive of things – a clear and concrete plan; TLS Visual Arts editor Anna Vaux brings us a preview of Tate Modern's new exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, an examination of the role of black artists in the Civil Rights movement; historian Roy Foster considers the fraught new relationship between the Conservative Party and the Irish Democratic Unionist Party, finding parallels, and missed warnings, dating back more than 100 years
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi: David Bromwich dips into the newly published letters, spanning 1920–8, of Robert Frost, the farmer-cum-teacher-cum-giant of American poetry who believed that a master writer should 'invade' younger writers 'to show them how much more they contain than they can write down'; 'Conversations around race and racism tend not to happen as much in Britain as in America', says Bernardine Evaristo in a discussion of the state of race relations in Britain and the importance of a provocative new book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race Book by Reni Eddo-Lodge
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