The Book Club

My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, editors of the new The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a variorum collection of every poem Plath wrote. They tell me what light her juvenilia sheds on her later work, how art and music fed into her poetry, and how deep her poetic partnership with Ted Hughes ran.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophia Smith-Galer, author and researcher on language endangerment, reflects on why languages are vanishing faster than ever. She shares personal links to regional Italian speech and the politics that label dialects. Conversations cover Kurdish standardisation, grassroots revival efforts, tech’s double edge, and how institutional support can make or break a language’s survival.

Caroline Bicks, Shakespeare scholar turned Stephen King archivist and author, digs into King’s early manuscripts and craft. She explores why his early novels frightened her, his radical revision habits, how grief and memory power his horror, and the recurring role of writers and Maine settings in his work. She also recounts revisiting drafts with King and why his language deserves serious attention.

Joe Sacco, reporter-cartoonist known for documentary comics like Footnotes in Gaza, discusses returning to India to report on Hindu-Muslim violence. He describes finding the story, gaining trust, and how comics serve immersive journalism. He also talks about politics, misinformation in villages, censorship issues, and his recent Gaza oral histories.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Mason Currey, author of the new book Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life. He tells me how artists, writers and composers have wrangled through history with the challenge of scraping by, and how that has affected their art, from Baudelaire's lifelong outrage at being forced to live on an allowance and John Berryman's disastrous stint as a door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman to Haydn reinventing the musical idiom of his time because he was so far in the boondocks with his day job that he didn't know what the musical idiom of his time was, exactly.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yann Martel, prize-winning novelist best known for Life of Pi, talks about his new book Son of Nobody and his late discovery of the Iliad. He discusses a two-layered novel form with verse and footnotes, reclaiming common soldiers’ voices from Homeric myth, and his playful use of strange animals as narrative devices.

Stefan Fatsis, author and journalist known for Word Freak and Unabridged, turned reporting into immersive Scrabble reporting and play. He contrasts casual play with tournament strategy. He traces Scrabble’s hustling roots, the rise of software and memorization, memorable characters and rivalry over word lists. He also recounts family ties to the game and its evolving digital and corporate landscape.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson, whose new novel Howl emerges from his rage and despair at the response to the 7 October massacre. He tells me what the novel can do that journalism can’t, why being funny is essential even in the darkest times, and why Zack Polanski isn’t the man he used to be.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lionel Shriver, novelist and Spectator columnist known for provocative fiction, discusses her new novel A Better Life and its hot-button treatment of immigration. She explains the book's premise about a New York hosting scheme. The conversation explores polarized reactions, research into plausibility, character ambiguity, and why topical fiction uses humour and dialogue to tackle big issues.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Jane Rogoyska, whose new book Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War tells the bloody story of the Second World War through the lens of Paris's Hotel Lutetia – following a cast of exiled intellectuals through the febrile 1930s, the increasing horrors of the war and occupation, through to the devastating aftermath as waves of prisoners returned from the camps. She tells me how she came to this unusual approach, how the connections between her cast of characters proliferated, how close Samuel Beckett came to a concentration camp – and about falling a little bit in love with Walter Benjamin. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.