The International Anthony Burgess Foundation Podcast

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.In this episode, we’re joined by novelist Adam Roberts, who introduces us to Life in the West by Brian Aldiss.Life in the West tells the story of Thomas Squire, a filmmaker who is attending an academic conference to introduce his new documentary, Frankenstein in the Arts. At the conference he engages in conversations with the other attendees while dealing with the dissolution of his marriage, the trauma of his childhood and the violent years he spent in Yugoslavia as a member of British intelligence. Anthony Burgess calls the novel ‘a rich book, not afraid of thought.’Brain Aldiss was born in 1925. After serving in Burma during World War II he worked as a bookseller in Oxford, which was the inspiration for his first novel The Brightfount Diaries, published in 1955. He went on to become one of the most respected British science fiction writers, writing 41 novels, 26 collections of short stories, 8 volumes of poetry, 5 volumes of autobiography and many more works of literary criticism, drama and edited anthologies. He died in 2017 at the age of 92.Adam Roberts is a writer and an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent novel, Lake of Darkness is available now. A History of Fantasy is forthcoming from Bloomsbury (2025).-----BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEBy Brian Aldiss:Hothouse (1962)Greybeard (1964)Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973)Frankenstein Unbound (1973)Helliconia Trilogy (1982-85)Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986)Forgotten Life (1988)Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith's: A Writing Life (1990)Remembrance Day (1993)Twinkling of an Eye, or My Life as an Englishman (1998)Somewhere East of Life (1994)'Supertoys Last All Summer Long' in The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s Part 2 (2015)By others:Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1955)A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (1980)The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)Small World by David Lodge (1984)-----LINKSLake of Darkness by Adam Roberts (affiliate link)Fantasy: A Short History by Adam Roberts (forthcoming)Adam Roberts's blog at MediumInternational Anthony Burgess FoundationBurgess Foundation's newsletter at SubstackThe theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.In this episode, Will Carr is joined by writer and academic Paul Fagan to discuss At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien.At Swim-Two-Birds is narrated by a young undergraduate student who invents wild stories featuring a host of strange character. The novel consists of three of the student’s seemingly unlinked stories that introduce characters such as Furriskey who is a fictional character created by the equally fictional Trellis, a writer of Westerns. As the narrative progresses, the student’s characters seem to take on a life of their own, and the novel becomes an absurdist brew of Irish folklore, farce, and comedic satire.Flann O’Brien was born Brian Ó Nualláin in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1911. After studying at University College Dublin he joined the Irish Civil Service, during which time he wrote novels in both English and Irish Gaelic, scripts for television and theatre, and newspaper columns as Myles na gCopaleen. He died in 1966.Paul Fagan is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University, where he is working on the Irish Research Council project Celibacy in Irish Women's Writing, 1860s-1950s. He is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society, a founding general editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies. He is the co-editor of Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities, as well as five edited volumes on Flann O’Brien.-----BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEBy Flann O'Brien:An Béal Bocht (1941)The Hard Life (1961)The Dalkey Archive (1964)The Third Policeman (1967)The Best of Myles (1968)By others:The Golden Ass by Apuleius (c. 200)The Fenian Cycle (from c. 600)The Madness of Sweeney (c. 1200)Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605-15)Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1623)A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift (1704)The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)The Crock of Gold by James Stephens (1912)Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)Travelling People by BS Johnson (1963)If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino (1979)Lanark by Alasdair Gray (1981)Blooms of Dublin by Anthony Burgess (1982)A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers by Hugh Kenner (1983)House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (2000)Milkman by Anna Burns (2018)-----LINKSFinnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, edited by Paul Fagan and Richard BarlowInternational Anthony Burgess FoundationBurgess Foundation SubstackThe theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective 

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.In this episode, we’re getting the intel on Catch-22 by Joseph Heller from our guest Spencer Morrison.Catch-22 takes us back to the dying days of the Second World War and introduces us to Yossarian, a US Air Force bombardier who is stationed on an island off the coast of Italy. Yossarian’s traumatic missions are contrasted with his life on the base, which is populated by various oddball airmen who all have their own agendas. They are overseen by commanding officers who are more concerned with abstract bureaucracy and arbitrary rules than the reality of the war. When Yossarian attempts to get out of flying any more missions he is faced with the most insidious rule of all, Catch-22, which states if an airman flies missions he is crazy and doesn’t have to, but if he doesn’t want to fly missions then he is sane and has to.Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1942, he joined the US Air Force and served as a bombardier on the Italian Front, his experiences informing Catch-22. His first published story appeared in Atlantic magazine in 1948 while he was working as a copywriter for an advertising firm. He went on to write seven novels, a collection of short stories, three plays, three screenplays and two volumes of autobiography. In the 1970s he worked alongside Anthony Burgess in the Creative Writing department at City College New York. He died in 1999.Spencer Morrison is an assistant professor of English Language and Culture at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, where he specializes in post-WWII American literature. His writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in journals such as American Literary History, ELH, American Literature, and Genre, and he's currently completing a book manuscript on fifties and sixties American literature and culture that includes a chapter on Joseph Heller. -----BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:By Joseph Heller:Something Happened (1974)By others:The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (1921)Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947)The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney (1950)From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951)Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952)Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)The Organization Man by William H Whyte (1956)On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962)Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty (1996)Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015)-----LINKSInternational Anthony Burgess FoundationThe Burgess Foundation's free Substack newsletterThe theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective. 

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.In this episode, we’re learning about The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, with our guest Joseph Williams.The History Man tells the story of Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at a modern campus university. Howard is a strident and radical political voice on campus who dominates both his fellow lecturers and his students with his opinions and encourages sit-ins and protests for all manner of causes. Howard is also morally compromised: he has affairs with his female students while simultaneously bullying his male students, and his frequent lies destroy his colleagues’ careers even as they bring him success. Burgess calls The History Man ‘a disturbing and accurate portrayal of campus life in the late sixties and early seventies.’Malcolm Bradbury was born in 1932. He wrote six novels, of which The History Man is the most well-known, having been adapted for the screen in 1981. He also wrote a novella, a collection of short stories, several well-respected books of literary criticism and many scripts for television. He also set up the famous MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, which launched the careers of Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro among others. He was knighted for services to literature in 2000 and died the same year at the age of 68.Joseph Williams is finishing a PhD at the University of East Anglia, researching the creative, critical and educational work of Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage, David Lodge, and the journal Critical Quarterly. He has taught at UEA and now teaches for the Workers Educational Association, most recently a course on Ulysses. As a reviewer he has written for Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, and Tribune, and in 2023 he was appointed reviews editor at Critical Quarterly. -----BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEBy Malcolm Bradbury:Eating People is Wrong (1959)Stepping Westward (1965)The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971)The Modern American Novel (1983)The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988)The Modern British Novel (1993)By others:Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)Loving by Henry Green (1945)The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis (1948)Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis (1973)Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975)Gossip from the Forest by Thomas Keneally (1975)Changing Places by David Lodge (1975)How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge (1980)Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)Money by Martin Amis (1984)Small World by David Lodge (1984)White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)Nice Work by David Lodge (1988)The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)-----LINKSInternational Anthony Burgess FoundationBurgess Foundation NewsletterThe theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.In this episode, we’re exploring the complex, controversial and language-rich novel Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux with our guest, writer George Salis.The novel tells the story of Alaric Darconville, an English instructor at an all-girls’ college in Virginia. He is intensely romantic and intellectual, and eventually falls in love with one of his students. He views their relationship as a great love affair, but his romanticism blinds him to reality. Eventually, he meets the mysterious Dr Crucifer, an unrepentant misogynist who attempt to brainwash the younger man to his way of thinking.Alexander Theroux was born in Massachusetts in 1939, and is the author of four novels, four collections of poetry, three collections of short stories and several works of non-fiction. His most recent publication is the collection of poetry, Godfather Drosselmeier’s Tears & Other Poems. George Salis is a novelist, literary critic and editor. His novel Sea Above, Sun Below was praised by Alexander Theroux as having ‘electricity on every page’. He is the editor of The Colliderscope, an online publication that celebrates innovative literature, and the host of its companion podcast. He has recently completed his maximalist novel Morphological Echoes.-----BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEBy Alexander TherouxThree Wogs, including 'Theroux Metaphrastes' (1972)Laura Warholic (2007)By others:Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)Girls at Play by Paul Theroux (1969)Plus by Joseph McElroy (1977)Love in a Dead Language by Lee Siegel (1999)-----LINKSSea Above, Sun Below by George Salis at AmazonThe Collidescope, George Salis's websiteThe Collidescope PodcastInternational Anthony Burgess FoundationThe theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.In this episode, Graham Foster discovers Nadine Gordimer’s 1966 novel The Late Bourgeois World, with guest Jeanne-Marie Jackson.The Late Bourgeois World tells the story of Johannesburg suburbanite Liz Van Den Sandt, who finds out her ex-husband has committed suicide after betraying his comrades in the burgeoning rebellion against apartheid. Though she lives a privileged life with her new partner, she begins to feel drawn towards political action. When she is asked to help the Black Nationalist movement with their finances, she has to choose between her own safe but boring life and the exciting but risky act of rebellion. But does her ex-husband’s failure prove the futility of political action?Nadine Gordimer was born in the Transvaal region of South Africa in 1923. She moved to Johannesburg in 1948 and lived in the city for the rest of her life. She published her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1953 and went on to publish 14 more novels and over 20 books of short stories. Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She died in 2014.Jeanne-Marie Jackson is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focusses on African literature and intellectual history. Her first book, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation was published by Bloomsbury in 2015. Her most recent book, The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She has written for the New York Times, New Left Review, and The Conversation, among others. Her latest book, as editor, is a critical edition of J.E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound.-----BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEBy Nadine Gordimer:The Lying Days (1953)Burger's Daughter (1979)July's People (1981)'Living in the Interregnum' in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988)By others:Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (1862)The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)The Ripley Series by Patricia Highsmith (1955-91)The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer (1959)Muriel at Metropolitan by Miriam Tlali (1975)Edith's Diary by Patricia Highsmith (1977)Amandla by Miriam Tlali (1980)Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)The Theory of Flight by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (2018)The History of Man by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (2019)The Quality of Mercy by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (2022)-----LINKSSouth African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation by Jeanne-Marie JacksonThe African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie JacksonInternational Anthony Burgess FoundationThe Burgess Foundation's free Substack newsletter

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.In this episode, Andrew Biswell talks to Brian Boyd about Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, which Anthony Burgess called ‘a brilliant confection’.Pale Fire is unlike any other novel. The first section of the novel takes the form of a 999-line poem, by a murdered poet called John Shade. The second section concerns the discursive commentary and notes by Shade’s supposed editor, Charles Kinbote. Seemingly unconnected to the poem, Kinbote’s notes describe his belief that he is Charles the Beloved, the exiled king of a country called Zembla. Can this be true, or is Kinbote a fantasist? Does Shade’s poem really reference the revolution in Zembla? Is Shade even real? These are just some of the questions raised by this rich and puzzling novel.Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg in 1899, and being of aristocratic heritage, was exiled from Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power. Having studied in Britain, he settled in America in 1940, lecturing in Russian literature at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and Cornell University in New York State. His novel Lolita, published in 1955, brought him fame, and was filmed by Stanley Kubrick, from Nabokov’s own screenplay, in 1962. Nabokov died in Switzerland in 1977.Brian Boyd is University Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and one of the leading experts in Nabokov’s work. His writings about Nabokov include Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, and two volumes of biography subtitled The Russian Years and The American Years. He is currently working on a biography of the philosopher Karl Popper, along with a follow-up to his On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction; a book on Shakespeare’s plays; two books on Lolita; and a continuation of his annotations, a chapter at a time, to Ada, already almost 2500 pages, with about 500 to go. He is also co-editing Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Poetry, Prose, and Drama.-----BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEBy Vladimir Nabokov:The Defense (1930)Lolita (1955)Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)Transparent Things (1972)'The Vane Sisters' in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1995)By others:Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Joseph Fux (1725)Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)The Joy of Gay Sex by Edmund White (1977)A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk (2015)-----LINKSNabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian Boyd (affiliate link)International Anthony Burgess FoundationInternational Anthony Burgess Foundation NewsletterThe theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective. 

In this episode, Andrew Biswell talks to writer and publisher Richard Cohen about his memories of working with Anthony Burgess in the 1980s.Richard Cohen is the former publishing director of Hutchinson, and was instrumental in publishing some of Burgess’s best known novels of the 1980s, beginning with The Pianoplayers in 1986. After working at Hutchinson, Richard moved to Hodder, and eventually set up his own company Richard Cohen Books. During his time in publishing he worked with authors as varied as Jeffrey Archer, John Le Carre, Kingsley Amis, Fay Wheldon. Sebastian Faulks, and Rudy Giuliani.As a writer, Richard has published four books of non-fiction: By the Sword, a history of swordplay; Chasing the Sun, an epic history of the Sun; How to Write Like Tolstoy, a guide for writers; and Making History, a history of historians from Herodotus to the present day.Richard was also an Olympic fencer, competing in Munich, Montreal and Los Angeles between 1972 and 1984. He won both a gold and bronze medal for fencing at the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh.-----LINKSMaking History: Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star that Gives Us Life by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)How to Write Like Tolstoy by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)International Anthony Burgess FoundationSubscribe to the Burgess Foundation's free newsletter for weekly news, event listings and writing by and about Anthony Burgess.