Audio Podcast

Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel from exile, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, is the back-story of the shockingly brave green-banded resistance we watched on TV till the regime cracked down on reporting… and Michael Jackson died. Click to listen ...

Ronald Prinn is talking about what was arguably the biggest little news story on earth so far this year. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ronald Prinn (31 , 14 mb mp3) Ronald Prinn: it’s a planet changer It came from MIT’s ...

There is no rescuing this economy from our debt, denial and epic implosions like General Motors and the city of Detroit. The only hope is that our unfinished season of disaster will be inundated (and the new economy floated) by a flood of invention. ...

Maybe Newt Gingrich is right — that Americans are getting used to something like European Socialism in this Bush-to-Obama bankruptcy and bailout era. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alfred Gusenbauer. (38 , 17 mb mp3) Alfred ...

I make two guesses here: that Barack Obama knows almost as little about cricket as I do (which is: zero); and further (much more interesting) that the president has found in Joseph O’Neill’s cricket-in-New York novel Netherland a sort of ...

Baskin’s Thoreau: nickel first-class (1967) Is it too late to celebrate Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) with an honest, unblushing American face? Have we laid too much pavement, built too many Cheesecake Factories in too many malls, imprisoned ...

Sir Ken Robinson does most of the talking, over breakfast here, on the sketchy matter of “creativity” and the teaching of it. John Maeda, in the gossamer blazer and scarf, is the work in progress. Click to listen to Chris’s ...

Jamaican wisdom: “When a black man becomes President of the USA, pigs will fly. And then what happened? Swine flu.” In Philip Womack’s dispatch from Calabash in the London Telegraph, June 2, 2009. Click to listen to Chris’s ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Marlon James. (50 , 23 mb mp3) Poets and writers come to the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica from every corner of the world, and still the overpowering voice in the fiction readings belongs to a ...

Calabash, the Caribbean literary festival, is an outdoor church of the written word, rocking and resonating on the south coast of Jamaica with the voices of poets and writers from Hong Kong, New York, Barbados, Nigeria, London, San Diego and Boston, ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Aleksandar Hemon (25 , 11 mb mp3) Aleksandar Hemon: funny people, sad tales What the Bosnian-American fictionist Aleksandar Hemon loves about being compared to Vladimir Nabokov is not the part about ...

Colm Toibin at the James family graves: “hallowed ground” of novels, diaries, sacrifice. “It’s very rare.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with novelist Colm Toibin. (44 , 22 mb mp3) After The Master, his ...

Colm Toibin at the James family graves: “hallowed ground” of novels, diaries, sacrifice. “It’s very rare.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with novelist Colm Toibin. (44 , 22 mb mp3) After The Master, his ...

In this world of overrated pleasures and underrated treasures, as the songwriter said, I’m glad there is George Scialabba. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with George Scialabba (44 , 20 mb mp3) George Scialabba: ideas as life, not a ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Reif Larsen (45 , 20 mb mp3) Reif Larsen: stories, pictures and margins! Maybe there are two Reif Larsens. One is, at 29, the precocious savior of the collapsing book business — the game-changer, ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Paul Harding (58 , 26 mb mp3) What is the rock drummer thinking? Well, if he’s the dazzling first-novelist Paul Harding of Tinkers, the guy at the drums in the band known as “Cold Water ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Der Derian and Catherine Lutz (46 , 21 mb mp3) We’re taking two fresh measures here of the United States as military colossus — in two new books from the Watson Institute this spring. ...

Twenty five years ago on a human-rights mission to Uruguay, David Kennedy fashioned the legal argument that freed five tortured prisoners (mostly medical students) from prison under a military dictatorship. The odd part is that Kennedy (now Brown ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Amitav Ghosh and Robert Coover (17 , 8 mb mp3) Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover Our conversation draws on the novelist Robert Coover’s exercise of conscience about freedom of expression in the ...