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Adam Levin joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Backbone,” by David Foster Wallace, which was published in The New Yorker in 2011. Levin, a winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, is the author of the story collection “Hot Pink” and the novels “The Instructions,” “Bubblegum,” and “Mount Chicago.”

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One year after the election of 2024, On Point news analyst Jack Beatty has analysis of what happened that day and why.

‘A lot of the fantasy that I have read is unsatisfactory for me because it's not interested in psychology, it's not interested how people think or feel’

Katie Razzall speaks to renowned British author Sir Philip Pullman as he publishes his latest, and final book in the series, The Rose Field.

Pullman was a part-time English lecturer when the first instalment in the series was published thirty years ago. Tens of millions of copies have been sold across multiple continents, and the stories have been translated into 40 languages.

The commercial and critical success spawned a follow-up series, The Book of Dust, which came out nearly a decade ago. The 79-year-old has now picked up his pen to publish this latest and final instalment.

Although loved all over the world, the stories have also attracted controversy for their criticism of religion. Pullman, who once described himself as a ‘Church of England atheist’, is outspoken on a number of modern-day issues - such as politics, free speech, and indeed faith - with his views regularly influencing his writing.

Thank you to the Culture team for their help in making this programme.

Presenter: Katie Razzall

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(Image: Sir Philip Pullman. Credit: Massimiliano Donati/Awakening/Getty Images)

This is a catch-up version of James O'Brien's Mystery Hour. To join the game, call 0345 60 60 973, Thursdays at 12pm.

Earlier this month, a woman from west London was fined £150 for pouring the dregs of her morning coffee down a street drain! So in this weeks sustainability slot Jo Linehan shares the best way to manage liquids at home, the do’s and don’t of disposal.

What was the inspiration behind Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights series? How does he want readers to feel on Lyra’s final adventure in The Rose Field? Has his demon changed now that he has got to the end of this writing journey, and how do you say goodbye to characters you love?

In this special edition of Ask Penguin, host Rhianna Dhillon visits Philip Pullman at his Oxford home, surrounded by books (and barking cockapoos), to mark thirty years since the world met Lyra Belacqua in Northern Lights. The two reflects on a lifetime of storytelling and returning to Lyra’s world one final time in the conclusion of The Book of Dust series, The Rose Field.

Discover all the books mentioned in this episode here: here

To put a question to future podcast guests, and for exclusive content and book giveaways, join our Broadcast channel on Instagram: @PenguinUKBooks  

Philip Pullman is one of the most highly respected children's authors writing today. Winner of many prestigious awards, including the Carnegie of Carnegies and the Whitbread Award, Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials has been acclaimed as a modern classic. It has sold 17.5 million copies worldwide and been translated into 40 languages. In 2005 he was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. He lives in Oxford.

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Join us for what promises to be an unmissable evening with bestselling author R.F. Kuang, as we celebrate the publication of her much-anticipated new novel, Katabasis.The internationally bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface returns with Katabasis: a sublimely dark and unputdownable tale of two rival Cambridge academics who must join forces on a rescue mission in hell itself.R.F. Kuang is now the author of six novels, with her debut novel The Poppy War written on her gap year in China and released in 2018. This was followed by The Dragon Republic (2019), The Burning God (2022), Babel (2022) and most recently Yellowface (2023).

In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham ( Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A and frequent RTB visitor) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International (1999) and Where Are We Now? but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016).

Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places--and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering "the one word that gets you killed"?

But Troubles that go cold also have a way of heating up again, if we forget, as Glenn puts it, that you can choose who you are. China Mieville's brilliant novel The City and the City is, says Glenn, an allegory for places like Belfast itself, where you have to learn to “unsee” residents of "the other city" even in shared areas. That kind of unseeing, in fiction and in real life, leads to distorted mental maps.

Glenn sees the so-called “softening” of the peace walls as among the most pernicious occurrences of the last 40 years, since softening coupled with notion that you simply belong to one of two "communities" is what makes real traffic, real conversation, harder to achieve. He and David agree that all over the world, in ways the echo Belfast although it is rarely spelled out, all sorts of invisible architectural extensions of the security and segregation apparatus hover unobtrusively. Glenn also riffs on the names people dream up for what might lie beyond a Belfast wall's other side, spinning off writer Colin Carberry's proposal: Narnia.

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Jasmin grew up as one of the few Black girls in a mostly white town. Senior year, she was voted Homecoming Queen and she finally felt accepted. But then, at the dance, they announced someone else's name. Jasmin has always wondered… What happened?

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Susan Orlean writes nonfiction books that read like fiction, sort of working in the style of Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe. But what makes her different is how intentional she is about her writing process.

About the host

Hey! I’m David Perell and I’m a writer, teacher, and podcaster. I believe writing online is one of the biggest opportunities in the world today. For the first time in human history, everybody can freely share their ideas with a global audience. I seek to help as many people publish their writing online as possible.

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