Literate

What makes a "book of the century"? And who gets to decide which books make the cut? Over the past two seasons of Literate, we have been asking these questions while reading through the New York Public Library's 1995 list of the books of the century. Each episode, we explore one book from that list and why it matters. This week, however, we do something a little different. We look back over our episodes and discuss the criteria that have emerged for what makes a book of the century. Plus, we tackle some tricky questions about the value of literary classics, canons, and "books of the century". It is our great pleasure to also feature two experts on this episode. First, we interview Ankhi Mukherjee, who is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford. She offers erudite insights into why the classic still matters in a world marked by competing cultural values. Ankhi is the author of the award-winning book What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon, and her next book, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, is coming out later this year. Later, we interview Lynn Lobash, who is the Associate Director of Reader Services at the New York Public Library. Lynn gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the process of making reading lists like the one our podcast explores. Having worked at the NYPL for eighteen years, she also explains how the approach to making these lists has changed over time. Today, the reading lists that she makes, and those produced by a staff that she trains across the library's 92 locations, are far more "reader centered".  -- For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com

This week we wander through The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. Written in the aftermath of the Great War, this long poem uses a diverse array of voices to convey a sense of disillusionment with modern life. Those voices range from the parodic to the sacred, as the poem interweaves hundreds of allusions to mythology, major world religions, literary classics, dance hall tunes, a nursery rhyme, and conversations from daily English life. So we discuss what to make of so many fragmentary images and sounds, while also asking how they reflect a postwar moment of dramatic historical and cultural change. Two specialists, both of whom are poets and literary scholars, offer wonderful contributions to this episode. An interview with Gabrielle McIntire, who is Professor of English at Queen's University in Canada and editor of The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land, orients our conversation about this poem. And notably, her own debut poetry collection, Unbound, comes out next month. Later we have a more free-wheeling chat about Eliot and his impact with Hannah Sullivan, who is a Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, and whose debut collection Three Poems was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2018. **WE NEED YOUR HELP! Send us a short audio recording of your answer to the question "What makes a book of the century?" and you might be featured on the final episode of the season!** -- For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com Buy the book from an independent bookstore through our Bookshop affiliate page: https://bookshop.org/lists/literate-books

We step into a world of uncertainty, this week, with The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. In this ghost story, a young woman takes up a new job as a governess, caring for two children who seem almost too good to be true... But while the governess tells a tale of ghostly visitations, her story brims with ambiguity and cause for doubt. As a result, readers have drawn enormously different conclusions about what, exactly, even happens. And the horror of this story really turns on James's super-sensitivity to nuance, as well as his sense of fun. Those qualities have kept readers entertained for over a hundred years, while also fueling major scholarly debates and shaping the genre of horror itself, not least by inspiring a slew of adaptations, like the recent Netflix series, "The Haunting of Bly Manor". What a pleasure it is to hear from this week's two expert guests! In an extended reflection, Dara Downey, who lectures at Trinity College Dublin, tells us about what makes this such a great ghost story. We later learn more about the rich history the book's reception in an interview with Jonathan Warren, who is Associate Professor of English at York University in Canada and editor of the most recent Norton Critical Edition of The Turn of the Screw. -- For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com Buy the book from an independent bookstore through our Bookshop affiliate page: https://bookshop.org/lists/literate-books

Traverse Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys with us! This imaginative prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre gives a history - a life - to the madwoman in the attic of that classic Victorian novel. It depicts the Caribbean past of Antoinette, who is called "Bertha" in Jane Eyre. Although this is a tale about what drives that woman mad, the vivid sensory language and clever shifts in perspective make it a delightful read. And Wide Sargasso Sea has been read the world over. This is a globally renowned Caribbean novel, and it has also changed the way that Jane Eyre is read. The wide-ranging impact of this slim book extends into postcolonialism, feminism, and Victorian studies. We are privileged to hear more about this book and its impact from two expert guests. In an extended reflection, the Trinidadian poet and book blogger Shivanee Ramlochan talks about her own intimate history with Wide Sargasso Sea as a reader and a writer. Later we interview Elaine Savory, who is Associate Professor of Literature at The New School and has published extensively on Rhys. She explains the importance of reading Rhys as a Caribbean novelist. -- For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com Buy the book from an independent bookstore through our Bookshop affiliate page: https://bookshop.org/lists/literate-books

Buchi Emecheta's novel The Bride Price takes us back to Nigeria! It tells the tragic story of Aku-nna, a city girl, whose childhood in Lagos is cut short by the unexpected death of her father. Unable to afford urban life, her family then returns to their ancestral village of Ibuza. But Aku-nna finds herself frequently estranged by the customs there. As she comes of age in this new context, The Bride Price offers a glimpse into wider matters of gender and culture. Yet especially through her marriage and death the book highlights the impact of one tradition: the bride price, a payment made by a male suitor to marry a girl. While this is a story very much rooted in its Nigerian setting, at its best, it also raises more transcendent themes. Indeed, it displays a wry, intimate knowledge of the tragedy and comedy of human life. This week we are privileged to feature two formidable expert guests. An extended reflection is offered by the poet and scholar Abena Busia, who is soon to be Emerita Professor of Rutgers University. She is also currently Ghana's Ambassador to Brazil. Then, we interview the publishing legend Margaret Busby, who was Britain's first black woman publisher, as well as the publisher and editor of The Bride Price. -- For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com Buy the book from an independent bookstore through our Bookshop affiliate page: https://bookshop.org/lists/literate-books

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is the most widely read African novel, and we're exploring some of the reasons why. We follow its main character, Okonkwo, from childhood to death. From the start, it's an enthralling story of striving and courage as he surmounts various challenges to establish himself as an Igbo elder and warrior in Umuofia, during the late 1800s. However, this novel from Nigeria does not end with his rise to wealth and power. It ends, instead, with Okonkwo's final reduction to death and disgrace by the colonial British government. And there is as much poignancy in the way this story is told as there is in the story itself. From its complex cultural portraiture, to its delicious use of language and its sophisticated engagements with the tradition of the English novel: Things Fall Apart offers a powerful, pleasure-filled read. Two scholars expand our own readings of Things Fall Apart this week. We hear an extended reflection from writer and literary critic Wamuwi Mbao, who lectures in the Department of English at Stellenbosch University. He offers an erudite critical lens, shaped by his wide-ranging literary knowledge and his own experience as a writer. Wamuwi has a new book out this month, Years of Fire and Ash: South African Poems of Decolonisation. We also interview Terri Ochiagha, who is a Lecturer in World Literatures at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her fine-grained knowledge of Achebe, this book, and its reception is informed by numerous relevant publications, not least of which is A Short History of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (2018). -- For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com  Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com Buy the book from an independent bookstore through our Bookshop affiliate page: https://bookshop.org/lists/literate-books

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is next on our list! This novel explores the life of Anna Wulf. Like Lessing, Anna is a writer, but the similarities between author and character don't end there. Although Anna lives in the UK, her memories take us to southern Africa and her imagination to the USSR. Across the book, she grapples with such diverse themes as colonialism, communism, the life of writing, and what it means to be a "free" woman in the 1940s and 50s. What holds these varied themes – and the related parts of Anna's life – together is The Golden Notebook's fascinating form. Inspired by Lessing, we have attempted a small formal experiment and shaped this episode around contributions from three expert guests. First up is Alice Ridout, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film at Algoma University. Alice, who has published widely on Lessing, highlights The Golden Notebook's enduring social and historical significance. Then, at the heart of this episode, we hear from Roberta Rubenstein on certain crucial ways that this novel's form contributes to its literary value. She is Professor Emerita in Literature at American University, and among her numerous publications on Lessing is a full monograph on form. To round things off, we interview Susan Watkins, who is a Professor in the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University. She draws on her expertise in Lessing's genre-crossing oeuvre, but also in feminist theory, to discuss whether The Golden Notebook truly is a feminist novel. --  For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com  Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com  Buy the book from an independent bookstore through our Bookshop affiliate page: https://bookshop.org/lists/literate-books

This episode takes us through the lamentation of Anna Akhmatova's Rekviem / Requiem. In this poem, or cycle of poems, Akhmatova speaks out against the Great Purge under Stalin. We are struck by its evocative power as the poem draws upon intensely personal grief to convey the suffering of thousands of Russians during the Soviet Great Terror. This is also a work that pronounces its political dissidence from its very form down to its use of religious imagery. Although it is an incredibly compelling read, we are left feeling that the power of its poetics – its rhyme scheme and use of meter, for instance – gets somewhat lost in translation. Nevertheless, if something has been lost in its journey out of Russia, we learn that international connections also play an important role in the poem's fascinating transmission history. Two expert guests tell us more about Akhmatova's Requiem. The extended reflection comes from translator Alex Cigale, whose translation of Requiem was published by the Hopkins Review and can be found here. He also gives the reading in English at the start of the episode, following Akhmatova's own reading in Russian. Later, we interview Alexandra Harrington, who is a Professor in the Department of Russian at Durham University and has published widely on Akhmatova. --  For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com  Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com  Buy the book from an independent bookstore through our Bookshop affiliate page: https://bookshop.org/lists/literate-books

We start Season 2 with a boom – the Latin American Boom, that is – by reading Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad / One Hundred Years of Solitude! This book gives a glimpse into an important moment for Latin American literature and world literature. And it does that by telling the story of a single family across several generations. We get to know the members of the Buendía family and follow their lives in the Colombian village of Macondo, until the village and the family both come to an end. Before they do, however, magic intersects with modernization, and community with solitude, for just over one hundred years. This week it was our great pleasure to hear from two more guests. The extended reflection was provided by Professor Ilan Stavans, who is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is also the Publisher of Restless Books. Then, we interviewed Professor Philip Swanson, who is the Hughes Professor of Spanish at the University of Sheffield. He has published widely on Latin American literature, especially the New Narrative of the Latin American Boom and Post-Boom. --  For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com  Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com  Buy the book from an independent bookstore through our Bookshop affiliate page: https://bookshop.org/lists/literate-books

Let your imagination set sail in this discussion of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse in the final episode of our first season. It's a story about love, family, loss, and growing up. It's also a story about the fluidity of perspective, drawing readers into the perceptions and interior lives of its characters as they relate to one another and the world. Through a language at once impressionistic and precise, Woolf depicts currents of thought and feeling, while raising questions about patriarchy, tradition, and the woman as artist. We could not be more delighted to introduce this week's expert guests. Dr. Urmila Seshagiri is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has published on literary modernism and Woolf. Currently, she is preparing the first scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf's memoir A Sketch of the Past. Professor Dame Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. She is one of the most highly acclaimed literary biographers in the English-speaking world. In 1996, she published a landmark biography of Virginia Woolf, and her most recent biography, Tom Stoppard: A Life, came out last month. -- Literate will be back in January with a new season! For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com

Join us in experiencing W. B. Yeats's striking images and evocative sounds in The Wild Swans at Coole. We compare the 1917 and 1919 editions of this collection of poems. And we revel in the mastery of fit between form and content throughout. This is a book that absolutely rewards close reading! For that reason, we dive into the details of how the Irish Nobel laureate handles prominent themes, such as aging and love, as well as his subtler, intensifying focus on politics and war. Since we discuss certain poems at length, they are included in the notes below: "The Wild Swans at Coole", "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", "The Fisherman", and "Tom O'Roughley". What a pleasure to also hear from two experts on Yeats. The episode begins with Bernard O'Donoghue reading of "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death". He is a highly acclaimed poet, Emeritus Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford University, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Later, he provides an extended reflection on how this collection of poems fits within Yeats's larger body of writings. We are also delighted to hear from Dr. Lauren Arrington, who is a Professor of English at Maynooth University and a director of the Yeats International Summer School: check it out! She highlights Yeats's tricky - even devious - use of personae, and shows how a single word in his poems may brim with significance. -- For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com

This week we're putting Franz Kafka's slim novella, The Metamorphosis, under the microscope. It's a famous story about one character, Gregor Samsa, transforming from a human into something decidedly not-human. An insect, or a "vermin", some kind of bug! As it turns out, the question of what he has become is even trickier to narrow down in the original German than it seems in English, so we compare several translations. We also discuss Gregor's wretched family, and their response to his metamorphosis. They may be the characters with human bodies, throughout the story, but they act in shockingly inhumane ways! As a result, Gregor's becoming a bug may offer a counterintuitive form of freedom from a terribly dreary life. There's a lot going on in this small story, as our experts explain. Dr. Mark Harman, who is an acclaimed translator of Kafka and Professor Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, talks about the challenges and pleasures of rendering Kafka's German into English prose. Later we interview Dr. Carolin Duttlinger, who is an Associate Professor of German at Oxford University and co-director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre. She shows how popular ideas of the "kafkaesque", as dark and claustrophobic writing, certainly have something to them, but have also obscured certain aspects of his works, such as its comedy. Dr. Franziska Kohlt, who is a Research Associate at the University of York, gave the readings at the start of this episode. After reading the book's first paragraph in its original German, she read out her own translation into English. -- For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com

Follow your wanderlust through Jack Kerouac's On the Road. This iconic novel of the Beat Generation takes us to 1950s America. It's a dizzying trip filled with jazz, poetry, friendship, betrayal, and the open road. We revel in the book's relentless momentum and scintillating language. But we also critique the troubling ways that it handles race and gender, and idealizes self-absorption. Two expert guests expand our view of the book. Jerry Cimino, Founder and Director of the Beat Museum in San Francisco, makes Kerouac's post-war context come alive. He also describes the impact that On the Road had on counterculture movements like the hippies in the 1960s, and its enduring appeal for readers today. We also interview Dr. Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He tells us about Kerouac's often-overlooked French Canadian background. That in turn challenges us to view this quintessentially American novel in a broader international context. The clip of David Carradine reading from Jack Kerouac's On the Road comes courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio. For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com

In this episode, we venture into the labyrinth of Jorge Luis Borges's collection of short stories, Ficciones. We explore his use of the short story, as a genre, while following apparently endless allusions across this philosophically rich and deceptively simple collection. The globally acclaimed novelist and translator Alberto Manguel provides writerly insights on Borges, in the form of an extended reflection. He explains that Borges-the-writer was always first and foremost Borges-the-reader, and how this is crucial to his writing craft. We also hear from Cristóbal Pérez Barra, who is a novelist, translator, and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. He highlights the power of Borges's literary legacy, by describing his impact on successive writers from South America, and far beyond. The audio clip of Jorge Luis Borges is excerpted from a recording of one of his Norton Lectures, "A Poet's Creed", delivered at Harvard University on 10 April 1968 (https://library.harvard.edu/poetry/listeningbooth/poets/borges.html). -- For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com

In this episode, literary scholars Alicia Broggi and Erica Lombard discuss Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. The episode also features an extended reflection on the book by Dr. Dana Williams (Howard University), who is President of the Toni Morrison Society, and an interview with Dr. Tessa Roynon (Oxford University). The clip of Toni Morrison reading Song of Solomon comes courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio. For more on the show visit literatepodcast.com Get in touch: @literatepodcast (Twitter) or literatepodcast@gmail.com

Listen to the trailer for Literate, a new podcast about the "best" books. Each episode, literary scholars Alicia Broggi and Erica Lombard discuss one book on the New York Public Library’s 1995 “Books of the Century” list. They learn about its author and history, talk to experts, and ask whether it really is one of the books of twentieth century. Episodes drop every two weeks, starting on September 3, with the first episode on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.