The Minor Books Podcast

Nikhil and Raph are joined by the writer and translator Joshua Billings to talk about Bruno Schulz's 1934 collection Sklepy Cynamonowe, translated from the Polish by Celina Wieniewska in 1963.

Raph and Nikhil are joined by Lucy Jackson, Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University, to talk about the American writer Tillie Olsen's 1961 collection of short stories, Tell Me a Riddle.

Nikhil and Raph are joined by Peter Cherry of the British Institute at Ankara in the first episode of a new series about short story collections. In this episode, they discuss Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe's translation of selected stories by the Turkish writer Sait Faik: A Useless Man (2014).

Raph and Nikhil talk to Peter Huhne about Ernesto Sabato's El Túnel (1948, tr. Margaret Sayers Peden) and Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac's D'Entre Les Morts (1954, tr. Geoffrey Sainsbury).

Nikhil and Raph talk to Henry Eliot about Yūko Tsushima's Territory of Light (1977/78, tr. Geraldine Harcourt, 2018) and Sonallah Ibrahim's That Smell (1966, tr. Robyn Cresswell, 2013).

Raph and Nikhil talk to novelist and critic Anjum Hasan about Anita Desai's In Custody (1984) and Dag Solstad's Shyness and Dignity (1994, tr. Sverre Lyngstad 2006).Errata: We give the wrong date of publication for both books at points during the episode. In Custody was published not in 1988 but 1984; Shyness and Dignity was published not in 1999 but 1994. At 5:48, when Anjum Hasan talks about the Urdu language’s relationship with the Indian state, the sentence should have been ‘Urdu is not patronised to the extent that Hindi is’.

Nikhil and Raph are joined by writer and translator Arshia Sattar to discuss Magda Szabo's The Door (1987, tr. Len Rix 2005) and Margaret Forster's Lady's Maid (1990).

Raph and Nikhil are joined by Richard Foster, teacher and museum curator at Winchester College, to talk about Hisham Matar's A Month in Siena (2019) and T. J. Clark's The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006).

Nikhil and Raph are joined by Peter Cherry, author of Muslim Masculinities in Literature and Film: Transcultural Identity and Migration in Britain and Assistant Director of the British Institute at Ankara, to discuss Yusuf Atılgan's Motherland Hotel (tr. Fred Stark, 1973/2017) and Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac (1984).