Episodit
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From the “man who invented Christmas,” this is the ultimate Christmas fable. Everyone’s heard of Scrooge, and many could quote his “Bah! Humbug!” And maybe even Tiny Tim’s “God Bless us, every one.” But who knows which Christmas season mega-industry Dickens started, with Scrooge’s parting gift to the Cratchit family? And what was going on in Dickens’s life that drove him to the power and melodrama of this micro-novel?
Sophie makes a foolhardy attempt to link Dickens’ Christmas Carol to our modern wellness and self-care movements, while Jonty takes the moral and spiritual high-road and ties this short novel to Dicken’s interest in social welfare and the Poor Laws. Everyone’s in heated agreement, though, that Dickens has a decidedly creepy relationship to young women, which he channels into the handsy narrator who takes us through this classic tale.
Whether or not you buy into the political messaging and Scrooge’s discovery of “manifesting,” you won’t be able to resist the descriptions of Christmas-time food and drink in merry London, so come ready for Christmas revels.
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Producer: Boyd Britton
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Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - the name of a classic song by Iron Maiden AND a decent-ish poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It’s the latter that’s under the microscope in this episode.
Written in 1798, in a haze of opium smoke and revolutionary fervor, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a long ballad poem describing the supernatural curse against a sailor who shoots an albatross. There’s a ghost ship, angelic spirits, a zombie crew and many unforgettable lines, including ‘water, water everywhere nor any a drop to drink’.
In this episode Sophie and Jonty look at the road to Rime, following Coleridge’s flirtation with anarchism, friendship with William Wordsworth and a particularly unpleasant case of diarrhoea. In so doing, he wrote some of the greatest poems about fatherhood ever (Frost at Midnight) and the orgasmic Kubla Khan.
Sophie does a pretty good job of explaining the complexity of poetical meter in this deceptively simple poem, while Jonty commiserates with Coleridge’s travails as a fellow mouth-breather.
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Sophie and Jonty find themselves a few sandwiches short of a picnic this week when they take on their first Australian classic book, the legendary “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” This 1960s masterpiece achieved global fame with Peter Weir’s hit film in 1975. And it has lost none of its edge with the passage of time. The intrepid hosts of SLoB discover that the joke’s on them – descended as they are from the white colonial families that Joan Lindsay set out to skewer so mercilessly.
With riffs aplenty on Cath and Kim, Sir Les Patterson and other touchstones of Australian culture, Sophie and Jonty drop the “citizens of the world” act and connect with their Australian origins. And in the serious bits they talk about what’s really going on in this surrealist bush-gothic masterpiece, discussing the secrets behind Lindsay’s Picnic. These include Australian independence from Britain in the year the novel was set and the referendum on First Nations sovereignty in the year the novel was written, as well as the painting in the National Gallery of Victoria that inspired the 70 year old Lady Joan to put pen to paper.
The episode is recorded in advance of the publication of the first full biography of Lindsay, and a provocative new Sydney Theatre Company production of Tom Wright’s stage play, directed by Ian Michaels who has been hailed as the “most exciting director of his generation.” Both coming in February 2025.
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Let’s Twist Again! Not the dance, of course, but Charles Dickens’ incendiary second novel, which he began writing at the tender age of 24. With Oliver Twist, Dickens found his voice - a style simultaneously intimate and epic, funny but terrifying, exaggerated but true to life. Millions fell in love with his characters, shared their misfortunes and triumphs, and had their eyes opened to the plight of society’s outcasts.
To write it, Dickens drew on his own experiences as a child of London, including the year he spent as a child labourer in a factory, mentored by an older boy called Bob Fagin. He also filled it with the outrage he developed as a parliamentary reporter, watching the great and good fail to tackle inequality in Britain.
In so doing, he created some of the most beloved (and hated) characters in literary history - the Artful Dodger, Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sykes. He invented the first detective double-act Blathers and Duff (move over Starsky & Hutch - these guys beat you by a century) and captured London as no writer had before, earning the approval of none other than Queen Victoria. Her verdict: ‘excessively interesting’.
Join Sophie and Jonty as they discover that the real enemy isn’t the criminal underworld, but ‘the system’ (Dickens’ term), come to grips with the awful, snivelling and bullying Mr Claypole (not Jonty, but Noah - one of Dickens’ most despicable villains), and - for reasons only passingly related to Oliver Twist - reveal the cruel nicknames they were tormented by at school. Hardly Oliver levels of suffering, of course, but enough to nurse a lifelong grudge.
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Further Reading:
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, Oxford Worlds Classics, 2003.
Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/02/charles-dickens-life-tomalin-review
The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens, 2022.
https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Handbook-Charles-Dickens-Handbooks/dp/0192855719/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37E72VMAQVSUI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.fnQOHbtdzGpLOEmAFjoj_ZVCVdw3tuuFEQoIP7ARHHsV064k9gkbHPU4h28v-qyvW4yRvrCvFpmelrkipRpWwgshRB_XB7vEVsyre-sBfgzzWjLdSt56PCWjL-p6A4cQ1jxHS24BLyNGp83L-sQQ4w.YGLIBW2Rlqa2PI2jK3jo9TG-I-QLDmBgFobMjHbeH84&dib_tag=se&keywords=Oxford+Handbook+charles+dickens&qid=1733096684&s=books&sprefix=oxford+handbook+charles+dicke%2Cstripbooks%2C360&sr=1-1
Lee Jackson, Dickensland: A Curious History of Dickens' London, 2023.
https://www.amazon.com/Dickensland-Curious-History-Dickenss-London/dp/0300266200/ref=pd_lpo_d_sccl_1/133-3551518-8907113?pd_rd_w=z2d83&content-id=amzn1.sym.4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_p=4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_r=KFQPNN521TYGS56SRCWV&pd_rd_wg=XOtzg&pd_rd_r=48fe60bb-dd16-45f4-b1a6-5cd7577619b1&pd_rd_i=0300266200&psc=1
Judith Flanders, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London, 2015.
https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-City-Everyday-Dickens-London/dp/1250068266/ref=asc_df_1250068266?mcid=789f73a5e274313391651fd60922739e&hvocijid=8362640346023649414-1250068266-&hvexpln=73&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=692875362841&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8362640346023649414&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9007527&Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
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The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving aside these mysteries, what is the Odyssey really about, why is it so violent and why is Odysseus himself - the lord of the lies - such an unlikeable hero?
Who better to navigate this intellectual Scylla and historical Charybdis than the world’s best-loved classicist Mary Beard? Sophie and Jonty listen in admiration as Mary describes discovering The Odyssey aged 14 - a self-proclaimed swot with aspirations to be scruffy and cool (or, in Sophie’s parlance, a ‘dag’). How it - or at least the several incidents in which Odysseus’ wife Penelope is told to shut up and go to her room by her own son - inspired Mary’s best-selling book Women and Power. And how the whole poem, which begins with the word ἄνδρα (man), is a riff on toxic masculinity millennia before Andrew Tate was even in a twinkle in Zeus’ eye.
And listen, pithy mortals, to Jonty as he repeatedly mangles Ancient Greek names, particularly the ‘Laestrygonians’, to Sophie as she - for the first time in this podcast - tries and fails to make a convincing link to The Reformation, and to all of us as we advocate the benefits of an oil rubdown every evening.
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Further Reading:Emily Wilson, trans, The Odyssey
Mary Beard books:
Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2019)Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2013)
The Parthenon by Mary Beard (Harvard University Press, 2002)
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Co-hosts Sophie and Jonty bare all in a bonus SLoB live ep! After months of rummaging through the dirty laundry of the great writers, it is only fair that we turn a critical eye back upon ourselves - and reveal the secret life of the Secret Life of Books.
In this bonus episode, recorded to mark our official launch before a live audience in Sydney’s iconic Gleebooks, Sophie and Jonty get raw. After briefly discussing why we started SLoB and why the classics matter, we get down to the serious questions: which literary character do we most fancy? Who would we least like to be stuck in a lift with? And who, out of Jonty and Sophie, makes the best bolognese?
Discover why, despite being published by Penguin ‘Classics’, Morrissey’s Autobiography is not and never will be a classic. While Sophie admits to a reading gap so embarrassing it will surely - SURELY - end her career as an English professor. Which book will it be? Listen to find out.
This episode - unashamedly, nay proudly, self-indulgent - is the closest to a mission statement we’ll ever do, so strap yourselves in to discover (drum-roll) the secret life of the Secret Life of Books.
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Recommended reading:
Henry James, Wings of the Dove
Spenser’s Faerie QueeneSupport the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
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Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
Henry Tilney: is he yet another of Jane Austen’s Bad Men, or the stealth MVP with his interest in dress fabrics and interior decorating? Northanger Abbey is Austen’s funniest, most unabashedly joyful and silly novel. It’s also where Jane gets meta – with lots of speeches about what novels are and why we love reading them.
Sophie makes the case that Catherine Morland is the most under-rated heroine in the Austen canon, an upbeat Fanny Price without the sad backstory. Jonty enthuses about the hero Henry Tilney’s interest in gothic fiction, and admits to having a soft spot for the ghastly John Thorpe, the fast-driving, hard-drinking braggart who gets in the way of Catherine’s path to happiness. Despite this, Sophie and Jonty wish him well and will indulge in a side-argument about the likely name of his future wife.
And there’s more! Austen was a secret revolutionary, embedding all sorts of ideas about world revolutions and slave rebellions into this charming novel. We talk about whether Austen's famous satire on gothic novels, the massive bestsellers of the 1790s, is in fact the greatest, and most bestselling gothic novel of them all.
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Further Reading:
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, intro. Claudia Johnson (Oxford, 2003)
Clare Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, (1997)
Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings, (1995). A great book about the female novelists who influenced Austen, discussed in this episode.
Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, (FSG, 2020)
Tom Keymer, Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics (Oxford, 2020)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” (Critical Inquiry 1991)
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Producer: Boyd Britton
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Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
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 with James, a daring, provocative, retelling of Huck Finn through the eyes, mind and heart of Huck’s friend Jim, a runaway slave. What are the untold secrets of Mark Twain’s novel, that Everett brings to light with James? And what should we make of the small but crucial fact that Everett once owned a pet crow, also named Jim?
Everett didn’t train as a literary innovator. He studied biochemistry, philosophy and mathematical logic. And after that he was a horse and mule trainer. Sophie and Jonty speculate about how these career moves provide crucial clues to the secret life of James itself — and why the most important secret of all might be that Everett watched the 1960s TV version of Mission: Impossible while he wrote.
Sophie takes a crack at explaining Everett’s cryptic but alluring statement that all of his work is about “the fact that A is A is not the same thing as A equals A, and even as I say it, it gives me a headache.” And Jonty puts Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained in its place once and for all.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Further Reading:Percival Everett, James (Doubleday 2024)
Percival Everett, The Trees (Graywolf 2021)
Quentin Tarantino Django Unchained (2012)Support the show
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Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
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 literature?
We’ve gone on record saying that The Great Gatsby is #1 Great American Novel - but this week we may have to eat our words. Is it actually The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book Mark Twain published in 1884 but set in America before the civil war. Released on the day of the Harris-Trump Presidential election, this episode is all about why Huck Finn remains what it has always been, a novel of division.Sophie and Jonty talk about why Huck Finn is a novel of divisions and polarizations. A novel for our times. The divisions are between North and South, between slave states and free, between confederates and unionists, between white and Black, between enslaved and emancipated. These are just some of the tensions that Twain took on and even though it’s nearly 150 years old, its themes and ideas are more relevant than ever. But is this book now racist to be readable? Or is it a vision of what America really is, a wake-up call that we must pay attention to?
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Further Reading:Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (Norton Critical Edition, 4th Edition, 2021)
Jerome Loving, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens (University of California Press, 2010)
William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain (Dover, 1997, reprint of 1910 edition)
Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting, ( NYRB reprints, 2024)
Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford, 2017)There’s a great forthcoming biography of Mark Twain by the celebrated Ron Chernow, publishing May 2025.
Percival Everett, James (Doubleday 2024)
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Producer: Boyd Britton
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Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
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 (spoiler alert: it involves a shed, a kestrel and shelves of bouncing apples, rather than an actual bedroom).
Hamnet was published to critical acclaim in 2020. It brings Shakespeare’s wife - Anne Hathaway (called Agnes in this telling) - out of the shadows, recounting her relationship with a Latin tutor who has an urge to write, the fraught birth of their children, the death of their son Hamnet, the impact this tragedy has on their marriage and, finally, how all this informed the creation of said Latin Tutor’s masterpiece. A play titled - you guessed it - Hamlet.
Most daringly of all, O’Farrell gives Anne/Agnes supernatural powers and suggests that Shakespeare’s meanness in leaving her only his second best bed in his will was in fact an affectionate reminder of the sexy time they had together in said bed.
Sophie and Jonty talk about the long road that brought O’Farrell to this story; the difficulty of bringing historical characters to life; the unique light that O’Farrell’s novel casts on the creation of a literary landmark; and finally ask:does this book about the making of a classic have the potential to become one?
Jonty also confronts Sophie about the sex scenes in her 2007 novel Scandal of the Season, implying a certain gratuitousness, but Sophie ably defends herself on purely intellectual grounds.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020)
Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death (Tinder Press, 2018)
James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (Harper Collins, 2005)
Stephen Greenblatt, Will In The World (WW Norton, 2004)
Sophie Gee, Scandal of the Season (Chatto & Windus, 2007)
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Producer: Boyd Britton
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Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
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 silence.” But who really knows what happens in the world’s most famous play? And why is it so damn long? Jonty confides the intense boredom induced by the unabridged 5.5 hour Kenneth Branagh marathon Hamlet during the 90s.
Jonty and Sophie are in heated agreement that Hamlet is not a nice guy but a bit of an over privileged brat. The Ghost, not Hamlet, gets SLOB’s prize this week for MVP. not to mention lovely Ophelia, the play’s most moving and sympathetic character.
There many unanswered questions in Hamlet and Sophie argues that “to be or not to be?” isn’t even in the Top 10. And also, why do actors speak so slowly when delivering the “to be or not to be” speech? Jonty - at last - concedes that the Protestant Reformation is at the heart of this text! Plus we get a quick primer on political and religious life under Queen Elizabeth I, who was in crisis with a threatened rebellion from the Earl of Essex. The queen wasn’t the only one in a career slump in the late 1590s - Shakespeare was having problems with his work-life balance too.
Why — and how — did he and his business partners dismantle their theater and carry it across the Thames one frosty December night in 1598? Hear why Shakespeare played the Ghost in the first performances of Hamlet, and how this very adult play is also about the death of Shakespeare’s 11 year old son named Hamnet, a few years earlier.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsFurther Reading:
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Folger Shakespeare Library edition. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/
James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (Harper Collins, 2005)
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton UP, 2014)
Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton UP, 2017)
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood (Dover Publications, reprint edition 1997).
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
“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 internet. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is endlessly adapted and readapted. At its heart, it’s a play about the madness and thrill of attraction and love; about how strange it is when one human spots another human to spend their life with.
In this episode there are green fairies who fight and turn flowers into love-potions. Is falling in love always this random and inexplicable? But the really big question is: are the faeries Incredible Hulk Green, or Fungus the Bogeyman Green? Help us decide.Will you side with Jonty that the “Rude Mechanicals” are hilarious and the young lovers are a tedious bore – or do you agree with Sophie that Bottom, Snug and Flute are unfunny and that Hermia and Helena are internet influencers before their time? A queen falls in love with a donkey, and the Duke of Athens compares lovers, poets and madmen.
Join the SLOB team in a moonlit Athenian wood for love and laughs, and a moment of nostalgia for Robert Sean Leonard as Puck in the 1980s hit film Dead Poets’ Society.
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youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsFurther Reading:
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The New Cambridge Shakespeare.” (2003).
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, (Norton, 2004).Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare, Princeton University Press, 2019.
Leonard Barkan, Reading Shakespeare, Reading Me, (Fordham UP, 2024)Bart van Es, “Captive children: John Lyly, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and child impressment on the early modern stage,” Renaissance Studies, 33;2, 2019.
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Producer: Boyd Britton
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Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
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 navigates his way through an ordinary day in 1930s Harlem. Baldwin showed readers life as he knew it as a black, working-class gay teenager in a racist society.
Baldwin disliked what he called ‘protest’ novels. His interests ranged from classic white writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James to many of the giants of Harlem Renaissance, like Countee Cullen and Richard Wright. He counted Miles Davis and Toni Morrison amongst his friends, but also Norman Mailer and ultimate playboy Hugh Hefner. To write a book about New York, he ultimately needed to leave America - first to Paris, then to a Swiss village, where he - against a backdrop of Alpine hills and the tinkling of cowbells - he brought it to a close.
Go Tell It On the Mountain was respected on publication, but hardly sold like hotcakes. Sophie and Jonty ask why it is that Baldwin, who wrote his greatest works in the 1950s and 1960s, and died in 1987, has become only more relevant in the last decade, with intellectuals, novelists and film-makers adapting or responding to his work.
Content warning: discussion of violence, domestic abuse, racism; mention of rape.
Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forumFurther Reading and Watching:
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, (Penguin, 2002 edition, first pub. 1953)
James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Classics 2015)
David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography, (Skyhorse, 2015)
Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, (New York Review of Books Classics, 2024)
Colm Tóibín, On James Baldwin (Brandeis University Press, 2024)
Eddie Glaude, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, (Crown, 2020)New Yorker article about Baldwin and Richard Avedon’s collaboration Nothing Personal: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/richard-avedon-and-james-baldwins-joint-examination-of-american-identity
Barry Jenkins’s film adaptation of “If Beale Street Could Talk”
Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro”
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
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. There are love affairs, exotic cocktails (a ‘gin rickey’ anyone?), no less than three car crashes and, of course, the famous party scenes. It has been adapted at least eight times for film and television, yet the road from publication to becoming considered one of Great American Novels was a slow burn. Fitzgerald died believing his life a failure.
The Great Gatsby has some of the most famous final lines in literary history. But what exactly is the ‘green light’ and can the future really be ‘orgastic’ or did Fitzgerald make a typo? Sophie and Jonty wrestle with these questions while asking how a book so specifically rooted in the 1920s has proven so timeless. In the process, Sophie shows off her detailed knowledge of the landscape between Manhattan and Long Island, and Jonty confirms Tom Buchanan’s claim that Jay Gatsby can’t be an Oxford man because ‘he wears a pink suit’.
We also look at Fitzgerald’s life. His determination not to end up a failure like his father (a former salesman at Proctor & Gamble), his turbulent relationship with Zelda Sayre and the long road to Gatsby via a disastrous play called The Vegetable.
Content warning: discusses alcoholism, racism, scenes of violence. And Sophie uses a swear word.
Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forumFurther reading:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Norton Critical Edition, ed. David Alworth (2022)
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F Scott Fitzgerald by Matthew J Bruccoli (Open Road Media, 2022)
Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Cambridge UP, 2023).
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
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 that captured the public imagination at the time - and to this day?
Harper Lee mined her own childhood in Alabama for this coming-of-age story of personal and social justice against a backdrop of Depression-era America. She worked and reworked several earlier drafts before achieving the crystal precision of what would prove her masterpiece. Harper imagined the book would be just the first in an illustrious career; that she would fulfil her dream of becoming, in her own words, ‘the Jane Austen of South Alabama’. But she never wrote another novel.
Sophie and Jonty argue that the success of To Kill A Mockingbird rested on the way it optimistically presented a path of reconciliation through what was, at the time, a subject of deep national division - segregation and civil rights. Harper’s Mockingbird, like Martin Luther King’s famous dream, contained a message of hope. But was it a realistic one?
At the very end of her life, and in controversial circumstances, an earlier draft of what became To Kill A Mockingbird was published. Titled Go Set A Watchman, this book presented a more pessimistic view of American society. It’s less convincing as a work of art, but - in many ways - a more truthful one.
Content warning: discusses gun violence, racism, domestic and sexual violence.
Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forumFurther Reading:
Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird, (Harper, 2010)
Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman, (Harper, 2015)
Charles J Shields, I Am Scout (Square Fish, 2008)
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, ed. Sharon Monteith, (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Neal Dolan, “The Class Dynamics of Antiracism in Go Set a Watchman.” (Twentieth Century Literature, [s. l.], v. 69, n. 2, p. 121–146, 2023)
W.D. Kim, "Animal Imagery in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird," (ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, [s. l.], v. 35, n. 2, p. 161–166, 2022)
J. C. Ford, “Birds of a Feather: Gay Uncle Jack and Queer Cousin Francis in To Kill a Mockingbird,” (ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, [s. l.], v. 36, n. 3, p. 418–433, 2023).
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Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
Hello Thomas Cromwell. And Hello Lev Grossman, best-selling author of The Magicians trilogy, the Silver Arrow children’s books, and now The Bright Sword, who joins Sophie and Jonty as THEIR FIRST EVER GUEST to talk about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
Published in 2009 to immediate acclaim, Wolf Hall reinvented historical fiction and changed the way we see Henry VIII and the Tudor court of 16th Century England. Mantel’s idea was to tell the story of Henry VIII and his disastrous marriages through the eyes of his right-hand man Thomas Cromwell. Traditionally thought of as mysterious and Machievallian, Cromwell, in Mantel’s hands, becomes a heroic survivor, navigating his way through a treacherous world.
Behind this irresistible story lies Mantel’s own unique philosophy of history, her belief in ghosts and her experience of chronic pain (through endemetriosis). Lev Grossman shares his insights as an author profoundly influenced by Mantel’s use of character, dialogue and perspective; an author who is also, in his view, a master of ‘the title-drop’.
Personal revelations abound too. In a shock reveal, Sophie discloses that she is married to Lev, while Jonty manages to trace his personal ancestry back to Thomas Cromwell’s brutal father Walter - raising the alarming possibility of a Putney-style rampage through the SLOB studio.
Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forumFurther Reading:
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 2009)Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety (Harper Perennial, 2009)Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost (Harper Perennial, 2009)Listen:
The Reith Lectures, Hilary Mantel (BBC)Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
Twenty-first century vampires are the brooding, sparkly anti-heroes of Twilight and Ann Rice— all pointy teeth and hair-product. But they used to be much weirder, scarier and sexier than that. Bram Stoker’s world-changing 1897 novel Dracula is one of the most erotic and thrilling novels in English literature—despite having the most boring opening pages—and it’s crammed with secrets, including the fact that Dracula had a long white mustache, and he made the beds and did the cooking at his at his ultra-scary castle in Transylvania. Stoker himself was a brilliant dancer, a champion fast-walker and a theatrical impresario who was married to—wait for it—Oscar Wilde’s ex-girlfriend.
So whatever you’re imagining, we promise you, you’re not ready for this. Join Jonty and Sophie as they dig up the story behind the story of Dracula, which includes Jack the Ripper, Wilde’s trials for homosexuality, Kodak cameras, immigration, industrialization, decapitation, Macbeth, gobs of sex, King James’s Demonologie and a serious case of Victorian-era trainspotting.
Oh, and vampires caused World War I. You’ve been warned!
Content warning: some references to emotional and physical abuse, mental illness and suicide.
Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forumFurther Reading:
Bram Stoker, Dracula, Penguin Classics, (2011)David J. Skal, Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula (Liveright, 2016)Elizabeth Miller & Dacre Stoker, The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker: The Dublin Years (Hellbound Books 2024)Philip Ball, The Modern Myths, Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination (Chicago UP 2021).Luckhurst R, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dracula. Cambridge University Press; 2017.Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
Frankenstein is English literature’s great myth about Artificial Intelligence, 200 years before A.I. existed.
But the world’s most famous monster is nothing like you imagine. Who knew that he chops wood and reads Milton’s Paradise Lost? And who remembers if Frankenstein is the name of the monster, or the mad inventor who made him? Sophie and Jonty explain how and why a brilliant scientist's breakthrough in creating artificial life ends in high drama and rare seabird-sightings in the Arctic circle.
Frankenstein’s own creator, the young Mary Shelley, was English literature’s first nepo-baby. She was the daughter of two celebrity intellectuals, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical William Godwin. At age 8, hiding behind the sofa in her parents' living room, Mary heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge read aloud The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. She and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley would become the Brad and Angelina of Regency England, entangled with Lord Byron's circle. Come for the insightful literary analysis – stay for the sex scandals and family dramas.Content warning: references to emotional and physical violence, incest, mental illness and suicide.
Further Reading:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Penguin Classics, 2018.Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation (Farrah, Strauss and Giroux, 2010).Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley (Random House, 2015)The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, ed. Andrew Smith, (Cambridge UP, 2016)Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
A ghostly face in the dark, a child’s hand through the window, a doleful cry: “I’d lost my way on the moor! - I’ve been a waif for twenty years!” Are we talking about Kate Bush’s 1978 hit single “Wuthering Heights”? No! It’s Emily’s Bronte’s 1847 novel of the same name, back as never before.
Heathcliff and Catherine are the doomed lovers in a novel that defied the rules of both realism and fantasy, and redefined the genre for post-Romantic readers.
An intergenerational love story of passion, trauma and violence, Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous tales about undying obsession of all time. Sophie and Jonty explain how this masterpiece came to be written by a young woman who barely left her family home in Yorkshire, living with her sisters and brother her whole life. Find out why Wuthering Heights a daring rewriting of the Bronte family’s own tragic secrets, and how a book set on a wild and windy moor, with no buildings or townships for miles on every side, came to be a novel not just about England, but a wider world of revolution and rebellion.
Content warning: some references to emotional and physical abuse, mental illness and suicide.
Further Reading:
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Alexandra Lewis (2019).(includes letters, diary-entries, Charlotte Bronte’s introduction to the 1850 edition, contemporary reviews and critical assessments.)Juliet Barker, The Brontes: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family (Pegasus, 2013).Catherine Reef, Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne (2015).Christine Alexander (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Brontës. (Oxford University Press 2003).Deborah Denenholz Morse, 'The House of Trauma': The Influence of Frederick Douglass on Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 12/2021, Volume 140, Issue 1. Emma Soberano,“Heathcliff as Bog Creature: Racialized Ecologies in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 03/2023, Volume 45, Issue 2.Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. -
It should have taken a year. It took thirty. In writing Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys endured several mental breakdowns, was arrested numerous times for verbal and physical violence, served time in prison, lost two husbands and suffered a heart attack. All the time, she came to increasingly identify with her heroine, making the inevitable tragedy of the ending all the harder to write. With the aid of ‘pep’ pills (probably amphetamines), supplied by a local vicar, she finally completed the novel in 1966 at the age of 76. It went on to become one of the most revered novels of the 20th Century.
Join Sophie and Jonty as they look at Jean Rhys’ agonising but ultimately heroic road to greatness and examine the ways in which she subverts Jane Eyre, taking the literally dehumanised mad woman in the attic and turning her into one of the most psychologically complex characters in 20th century literature.
Further reading: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, with introduction by Edwidge Denticat, (Norton, 2016); Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (Norton, 2022) is a superb piece of detective work, excavating the forgotten years of Rhys’ life as well as those which are recorded. For landmark writing about race, empire and the novel see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” (Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 243–61) and Edward Said Orientalism (Vintage, first pub. 1979).Support the show
Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. - Näytä enemmän
