James: National Book Award global hit; a Huck Finn rewrite the world needed; plot twists you'll never guess
It took 140 years for someone to write back to Mark Twain’s brilliant but troubling masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now the celebrated American novelist Percival Everett has done it wi...
12 Nov 202448min
Huckleberry Finn: but wait, maybe THIS is the great American novel?
What makes a trip down the Mississippi river so famous - and so notorious? Why did it need to be rewritten in the 2024 novel James by Percival Everett? Is Huck Finn the most famous character in world ...
5 Nov 202458min
Hamnet: sexy witches replace skulls and soliloquies
Ever wonder what Shakespeare got up to in the bedroom? Well, whether you do or not, you’ll find out - along with many other things - in this episode devoted to Maggie O’Farrell’s superb novel Hamnet (...
29 Okt 202450min
Hamlet: Shakespeare's secret double or pain in neck?
Hamlet is jammed with famous quotes like “to be or not to be,” “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” “time is out of joint,” “the play’s the thing,” “get thee to a nunnery,” and “the rest is ...
22 Okt 20241h 11min
Midsummer Nights Dream: are true love and sexual attraction magic tricks?
“The course of true love never did run smooth.” It certainly did not in Shakespeare’s psychedelic fantasy about cross-dressing, polyamory, speaking truth to power and tik-tok – centuries before the in...
15 Okt 202454min
Go Tell It On The Mountain: growing up Black, poor and gay in 1930s New York
Go Tell It On The Mountain is one of the great incendiary debuts of the 20th Century. Published in 1953, James Baldwin’s autobiographical novel follows a fictionalised avatar of his younger self as he...
8 Okt 202452min
The Great Gatsby: is this THE great American novel?
Few novels capture a moment and place in time as The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece captures a generation determined to live and party hard in the aftermath of the First World War...
1 Okt 20241h 10min
To Kill a Mockingbird: racism, gun violence and coming of age in the 1930s South
Within a year of its publication in 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird sold 2.5 million copies and has remained a much-loved classic by adults and children alike. What was it about this book tha...
24 Sep 202452min
