By Bisha K Ali and Sadaf Fahim
The podcast currently has 7 episodes available.
Once upon a time, we were both major fantasy geeks. We decided to spend an episode walking down fantasy lane, stopping off at Raymond E Feist, Janny Wurts, Robert Jordan, Ursula le Guin and Neil Gaiman. We also get unexpectedly deep into how fantasy books helped form our identities. Listen to this one!
From Ryu Murakami and Chuck Palahniuk to Maxine Hong Kingston, we delve into dark, dark places and circle back round to our mothers. Shit got weird.
We're back! After an unaccetably long break, we meander from Toni Morrison to Twin Peaks and back round to James Baldwin. Merry belated Christmas folks.
We go from Cocaine to Harry Potter very quickly. Along the way we stop at Russian fiction, likeable villains and reasons why Dutch fiction sucks (in our opinion.)
In Episode 3, we hate on Dickens, fall in love (again) with Shakespeare and get angry about blies. If you don't know what a blie is, you're not alone. Listen and find out.
Reading
Alicia Erian
Towelhead
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre
NPR Morning Edition
“If Literature’s Great Characters Could Text, They’d Charm Your Pantalets Off”
Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Charles Dickens
Penguin Author Page Great Expectations
Oliver Twist cartoon from 1972
George Eliot
Middlemarch
Jane Austen
Official (?) Website
Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider
The Rules
William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
We talk about Dorothy Parker Dorothy Parker Dorothy Parker. We also touch on Geoff Dyer, Robert Burton, Ring Lardner and Robert Benchley. Also Harry Potter.
Further Readings
DOROTHY PARKER!
Biography
The Collected Dorothy Parker
Paris Review interview
Robert Burton
The Anatomy of Melancholy
In Our Time podcast on The Anatomy of Melancholy
Geoff Dyer
Books we talk about:
Zona
Out of Sheer Rage
But Beautiful
Otherwise Known As The Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
Ring Lardner
Short Bio
Lardnermania
Robert Benchley
Bio and Further Info
Edmund Wilson
NY Times
Wilson’s review of Ulysses
Sinclair Lewis
Babbitt
Some incredible books for a credible first show. In our first ever episode, we talk about The Ticking is the Bomb by Nick Flynn, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Marilynne Robinson’s novels Home and Gilead. We also detour into James Joyce and Stalin. You don’t have to have read (or have heard of) any of these books to have a good time with us. And by good we mean interesting and delightful, at the very least.
Further Reading
For the keen beans, here are some further readings and links to buy the novels we mention in the episode. We have linked to Foyles because we think they might pay their taxes, but we encourage you to seek books out at your local indie bookshop. Feel free to tweet us with your favourite local bookshops!
Chinua Achebe
Interview with Achebe in The Paris Review
Achebe and the Great African Novel in The New Yorker
Marilynne Robinson
Interview with Robinson in The Paris Review
Nick Flynn
Interview with Nick Flynn on Fresh Air
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Donna Tartt
Article in Vanity Fair
The Goldfinch
The Secret History
Charles Bukowski
http://bukowski.net
Lionel Shriver
We Need to Talk About Kevin
James Joyce
Ulysses
Henry James
Portrait of a Lady
Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things
The podcast currently has 7 episodes available.