Burning Books

Like a precocious fireballer at top of the prospect rankings … a kid who has shown so much promise and from whom so much is expected … who has three plus pitches and is working on a fourth … whose intangibles are as off the charts as his athleticism … who is putting it all together at AAA and knocking at the door … who will make men look like boys … and who ends up THE OPPOSITE OF ALL THOSE THINGS – that’s this book. Download the mp3 file Subscribe in iTunes From recent débuts to classics, fiction to non-fiction, memoirs, philosophy, science, history and journalism, Burning Books separates the smoking from the singeworthy, looking at the pleasures (and pains) of reading, the craft of writing, the ideas that are at the heart of great novels as well as novels that try to be great, but don’t quite make it. http://litopia.com/shows/burn/  

St Matthew is going to poke out your eyes. Or some such. After what seemed like a millennium of exile from the Motherland, we go back to the heart (and other parts) of Russian literature with a Tolstoy short story. Brilliant.

A novel that says it’s based on Wuthering Heights is taking a risk – because Wuthering Heights is a crazy effective soporific. But the further it strays from the original, the better A True Novel becomes. Don’t underestimate your originality, Minae Mizumura! You’ve produced an eminently entertaining read. In a nice turn, this very long book is actually quite short. Picture by Toshihiro Gamo

Feel like making glove?? That's not a typo. This week we discuss perhaps the best passage in any of Philip Roth's novels, the 'glovemaking scene' (again, not a typo) in American Pastoral. And we do this with American lit scholar and Gloversville, NY native, Menachem Feuer. Also, we discuss the definition of a schlemiel, a person who could never make a glove. And Franz Kafka makes an appearance at the end – another person we can safely assume was not versed in the art of glovemaking, IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD. Get that hand out of your pocket and put your headphones on. *heat*.

The Messiah is coming! His arrival is imminent! That’s the bad news... The good news is his arrival and social schedule are narrated with a combination of enthralled immediacy and distrustful distance by a Nobel Laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer. And yet, is it ‘all that’? Some readers will be super-pumped, others might not catch messiah fever. All the colours of the rainbow.

'They believe what they say in the moment they say it.' And then the moment is gone, and someone's stuck with a desiccated horse's head or a painting of Jesus framed in piss. In this episode we learn about the high prices and low motives of the contemporary art world while schmoozing in Basel, getting lost in Venice, and, once or twice, encountering genius along the way. Going once, going twice, going three times . . . sold!

Did we like this novel? What does it mean to like? What is our past, really, if we continue to relive it? And relieve it? And relive it? And – you get the point, but I'll say it again. And again. And – you have just sampled the experience of reading Javier Marías' massively successful novel. Eat this book! It's good for you! Now, wasn't that satisfying?

Enter the eminently other world of Malte Laurids Brigge – and don't plan on coming back in one piece. The big window shatters and the little pieces giggle. What? You didn't hear that? We talk about Rainer Maria Rilke's one and only novel with literary critic Scott Esposito.

Things are not what they appear to be, and not even what they appear later to be. Foxes are animals that cannot be trusted, and sometimes they are not even animals. This is that in Sjón's slender novel. Intriguing.

Is there anything better than the story of a master forger? If there is, I don't know it. This time we take a trip to the realm of non-fiction, looking into the complex world of Han Van Meegeren, a forger working in the style of Frans Hals and, especially, Johannes Vermeer, who sold his work to Hermann Goering, then tried to convince the world it was in the name of patriotism.

An interview with author, professor and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, spy of our inner selves, examiner of the lies we live, and creator of the smash new meme, '#pervingon'. No secrets, please – we're going English.

Hans Erich Nossack's rare first person account of the 1943 destruction of Hamburg is served with a side of WG Sebald, who employs the word 'should', with grave consequences. BFFs.

King Charles, Oliver Cromwell, a vagrant narrator, hedge mazes and dreaded puritans – Jeanette Winterson goes historical fiction on us again in her 1989 novel that is less than the sum of its parts. For a short book, it's quite long.

Traitor? Spy? Loyal American or self-serving amoralist?  Howard W Campbell Jr tries to write his own get out of jail free card in in Kurt Vonnegut's 'Mother Night'. Vintage.

Canonical fodder about a little boy with a man's mind, who becomes a fully grown man in a little boy's body, born and raised in the foreshadow and shadow of the Second World War. Blechtrommel is one word for it: execrable.

 Review of the 2011 debut novel by Ben Lerner in which a young American goes to Spain on the US government's buck, meets two girls, and learns to fall in love with himself. Excellent book.