This week, I spoke with the Irish-Canadian author Joanna Pocock, whose new memoir, Greyhound, absolutely blew me away. The story follows Joanna as she recounts two journeys – one from 2006, and one from 2023 – that she took across the United States of America. However, unlike the classic ‘roadtrip’ novel, Joanna undertook the entirety of both journeys by Greyhound bus. What follows is an incredible portrait of a nation and its people: a feminist, ecological, anti-capitalist, profoundly humanist elegy that left me desperate to buy a ticket and head for the open road.

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Joanna’s four books were:

• Bear, Marian Engel (1976)

• Silent Spring, Rachel Carsen (1962)

• Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Terry Tempest Williams (1991)

• America Day by Day, Simone de Beauvoir (1948)

My guest today is Tash Aw, the acclaimed author of The South, a moving coming-of-age novel set during the 1997 Southeast Asian financial crisis. The story follows 16-year-old Jay as he spends a summer on his family’s orchard in southern Malaysia, navigating family tension, economic uncertainty, and a tender relationship with another boy. It’s a quiet, potent emotional journey, as both wrestle with identity, desire, and belonging. In addition to The South, Tash is the author of several award-winning novels, including The Harmony Silk Factory and Five Star Billionaire, the latter of which was longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize.

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Tash Aw’s four books were:

• Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin (1956)

• The Buru Quartet, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1980-1988)

• The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)

• Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov (1897)

My guest today is artist and writer Gethan Dick, an Irish-born author, living in Marseille, who has written a very interesting book about survival in a post-apocalyptic world. Specifically, how pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing interface with a desperate quest for humanity’s continuation. In the episode, we talk about the emotional and philosophical questions that arise when survival becomes the only goal, and Gethan shares her inspirations, her writing process, and how her journey through various creative mediums (film, radio, zines, and eventually visual arts) helped her arrive at the story she wanted to tell.

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Gethan Dick’s four books were:

• Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban (1980)

• Strandloper, Alan Garner (1996)

• The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut (1959)

• La Trilogie de Pan, Jean Giono (1929-1930)

In this episode, I sit down with celebrated South African novelist and playwright Damon Galgut, a literary voice I’ve admired for years. Damon Galgut is the acclaimed author of The Promise, winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, and has been shortlisted for the prestigious literary award three times over the course of his writing career.

We discuss his lifelong relationship with literature, his unique approach to fiction writing, and how his novels grapple with themes of identity, morality, and the political realities of South Africa. Whether you're a passionate reader, a writer yourself, or simply someone who loves discovering new books, this conversation offers rare insight into the creative mind behind some of the most powerful contemporary literary fiction.

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Damon Galgut’s four books were:

• Pig, Roald Dahl (1960)
• In the Heart of the Country, by J.M. Coetzee (1977)
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (1985)
• The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald (1992)
  

Sometimes you meet a person who seems to have done it all – and today’s guest is definitely one of those guys. Ed Park is an American writer, journalist and general man of letters, born in New York, of Korean extraction. And, along with writing truly remarkable fiction, over the last few decades, he’s been involved with all sides of the literary sphere. We met on a rainy morning in New York City where we recorded this interview to discuss his latest book An Oral History of Atlantis, which is coming out on July 29th and well worth looking out for. He had absolutely fascinating things to say, and picked some incredible, off the beaten track books for this discussion – I know you’re going to enjoy listening to it.

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Outro:

Ed Park’s four books were:

• 56 Water Street, Damion Searls (2010)

• Last Act: The Madhouse, Rachel Ingalls (1992)

• Li Fan, Alexandra Chang (2016)

• The Problem of Atlantis, Lewis Spence (1924)

It was an incredible honour to interview an author I have been following for a long time, and itching to get on the show. Sue Prideaux is an acclaimed Anglo‑Norwegian biographer and novelist. Her works include I Am Dynamite!, a biography of Friedrich Nietzsche I read and reviewed last year, and more recently Wild Thing, a biography of French artist Paul Gauguin. I Am Dynamite! was named The Times Biography of the Year for 2018, and won the Hawthornden Prize for ‘imaginative literature’, and Wild Thing was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for non-fiction, and won the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for non-fiction. It’s also fair to say that I absolutely loved them both, so I strongly recommend you go out and pick yourselves up copies. 

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Sue Prideaux’s four books were:

• The Story of Babar The Little Elephant, Jean de Brunoff (1934)

• The Summer Book, Tove Jansson (1972)

• Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbon (1932)

• Shelley: The Pursuit, Richard Holmes (1974)

My guest today is someone I’m lucky enough to have known personally for many years, so getting the chance to interview him today was a real treat. Aastish Taseer is a writer and thinker who straddles many cultures – Indian, American, British – and this cultural journey infuses his writing with refined and penetrative insights. I first met him in India, when I was living in Delhi and he took me under his wing and introduced me around & gave me some great tips on how to navigate this massive city.

In the past, I’ve really appreciated his work and always recommended it, such as his novel “The Way Things Were”, a multi-generational Indian family saga, and his non-fiction work, like “The Twice Born” where he wrote about contemporary challenges to the ancient ways of the Brahmin caste in the holy city of Varanasi in India. When I heard that he had a new book out called “A Return to Self”, where his travels to sacred and remote sites around the world would be viewed through his own complex sense of identity, I could not wait any longer and immediately called him to get an interview.   In our chat today, we dig into some questions surrounding belonging, identity, exploration and exile. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Aatish Taseer’s four books were:

• Survivors in Mexico, Rebecca West (2011)

• In Light of India, Octavio Paz (1995)

• A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul (1979)

• My Friends, Hisham Matar (2024)

To kick off the new season, I’m joined by the brilliant Lee Cole, whose writing captures the heart, complexity, and contradictions of contemporary America. Raised in rural western Kentucky, Lee’s fiction explores themes of identity, class, and belonging with a rare mix of tenderness and clarity. In this episode, we talk about the power of literature to reveal lives and landscapes we might never otherwise encounter, and why writing about home can be both fraught and freeing.

If you love stories that dig deep into the cultural and emotional terrain of modern life, you won’t want to miss this conversation.

As always, Lit with Charles loves reviews — if you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving one and help spread the word. You can also follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles for more literary takes and behind-the-scenes extras.

Lee’s book picks from the episode:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Raymond Carver (1981)
A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor (1953)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America – Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
The End of Vandalism – Tom Drury (1994)

Time to close another season of the Lit with Charles podcast! During this second season, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to some truly amazing authors about the books that have influenced them, the books they’ve written, and how they approach their work. For this episode, I've gone through the archive of interviews to shine a spotlight on a few of my favourite moments. It's an eclectic mix of authors sharing their thoughts on a varied list of subjects and books, and I hope you enjoy it!

Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let’s get more people listening – and reading!

Gertrude Stein is a name that inspires equal amounts of both awe and fear in prospective readers. An absolute icon in her time, she was an unparalleled tastemaker: collecting work from Picasso and Matisse when they were unknown local painters; mentoring Hemingway and Fitzgerald as bright-eyed, unpublished hopefuls; and hosting ‘talk of the town’ salons at her Parisian abode. However, when it comes to her writing, things have always been a bit more complicated.

To help me unpack the life, legacy, and ‘afterlife’ of this fascinating figure, today I have the pleasure of speaking with biographer, author and journalist Francesca Wade. Her new book, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, is set to hit shelves in the upcoming month. It was a great chat, and I hope you enjoy it.