Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Episode 125: Weird Era feat. Yann Martel
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Episode 125: Weird Era feat. Yann Martel
About Yann Martel:
YANN MARTEL is the author of Life of Pi, the global bestseller that won the 2002 Man Booker Prize and was adapted to the screen in the Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada.
About Son of Nobody:
Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.
In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea, but known to all as son of nobody.
As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the two-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love, and grief.
In this masterpiece of myth, history, and domesticity, Son of Nobody explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live—then, now, and always.
View all episodes
By Weird Era
4.4
77 ratings
About Yann Martel:
YANN MARTEL is the author of Life of Pi, the global bestseller that won the 2002 Man Booker Prize and was adapted to the screen in the Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada.
About Son of Nobody:
Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.
In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea, but known to all as son of nobody.
As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the two-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love, and grief.
In this masterpiece of myth, history, and domesticity, Son of Nobody explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live—then, now, and always.
More shows like Weird Era
View all
This American Life
90,998 Listeners
Ask Penguin
147 Listeners
Bookends with Mattea Roach
247 Listeners
Otherppl with Brad Listi
533 Listeners
Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry
473 Listeners
On the Media
9,229 Listeners
The Gray Area with Sean Illing
10,736 Listeners
Death, Sex & Money
7,712 Listeners
The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker
2,123 Listeners
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
1,474 Listeners
Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel
14,896 Listeners
City Arts & Lectures
395 Listeners
Culture Gabfest
444 Listeners
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
653 Listeners
Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud
269 Listeners