The Book Club

My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, editors of the new The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a variorum collection of every poem Plath wrote. They tell me what light her juvenilia sheds on her later work, how art and music fed into her poetry, and how deep her poetic partnership with Ted Hughes ran.

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Sophia Smith-Galer, talking about her new book How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Sophia tells me why languages are vanishing faster than ever before, why it matters, how we can resist it and what her Italian-born nonna gave her.Visit fleetstreetquarter.co.uk to book your tickets.

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Caroline Bicks, who tells me how she put her academic work on Shakespeare to one side to produce her new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. She tells me why she thinks King’s work is worthy of critical attention, what we can learn from the radical way he revised his early work, what it is like dealing with the man himself – and how there are some parts of his early novels that he even scared himself with.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the reporter – cartoonist Joe Sacco, talking about his most recent book The Once and Future Riot, about Hindu/Muslim violence in rural India. He tells me how he knows when he’s onto a story, what cartooning can do for reportage, and why he draws himself so differently.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Mason Currey, author of the new book Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life. He tells me how artists, writers and composers have wrangled through history with the challenge of scraping by, and how that has affected their art, from Baudelaire's lifelong outrage at being forced to live on an allowance and John Berryman's disastrous stint as a door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman to Haydn reinventing the musical idiom of his time because he was so far in the boondocks with his day job that he didn't know what the musical idiom of his time was, exactly.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Yann Martel, talking about coming late to Homer, definitely not being influenced by Pale Fire, why he can’t resist a silly animal, and his new book Son of Nobody.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Stefan Fatsis, whose classic Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble is 25 years old this year. Stefan tells me how a journalistic project turned into a quarter-century obsession, how dramatically tournament Scrabble differs from the living-room game, why we’re still having the same arguments over word lists … and how it has become a family story for him.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson, whose new novel Howl emerges from his rage and despair at the response to the 7 October massacre. He tells me what the novel can do that journalism can’t, why being funny is essential even in the darkest times, and why Zack Polanski isn’t the man he used to be.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Lionel Shriver, whose new novel A Better Life offers among other things a savage send-up of liberal pieties on immigration. I asked Lionel what she was trying to do with the book (why make the argument, for instance, in a novel rather than an op-ed?), whether New York's immigration law really is as nutty as her story paints it, and how she reacts to the opprobrium that this sort of to-the-moment writing stirs up.