Shelf Life

Send us Fan MailIn the week of her eighty-eighth birthday, and the publication of Frenzy, her latest collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates sat down with her friend and fellow novelist A.M. Homes at the Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, New York. What began as a conversation about time and the short story soon wandered into more unexpected territory, from grief and ghosts to Barbie dolls, the limits of literary imagination, and whether there are stories even their authors find too disturbing to read.Oates has been writing for more than six decades, yet she remains remarkably uninterested in looking back. “When I’m working on something now, it’s completely in the present tense,” she says. In this special episode of Shelf Life, recorded before a live audience, two great novelists  range widely in a conversation filled with insight, revelation, and occasionally pathos (as when Joyce recalls, with startling clarity, the particular light that illuminated the barns she remembers from childhood). 

Send us Fan MailFrancis Spufford’s new novel, Nonesuch, drops us into Blitz London—blackouts, random acts of violence, food rationing—and then, almost imperceptibly, the world acquires another layer. In this episode, Spufford, the author of Golden Hill and Light Perpetual, among others, talks about the “daft mixture of wartime finance, early TV, archangels, Renaissance magic, and falling bombs," that makes Nonesuch such an epic and invigorating read. We talk about the Blitz as a kind of permission slip for a writer: a time of exhaustion and improvisation, when ideals are tested in private, and when the fantasy of a “better” history starts to look like a dangerously tempting bargain. We also trace two companion texts that illuminate the book’s moral weather: John Crowley’s Four Freedoms, a wartime novel about ideals and compromise, and W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” that unsettled poem written as Europe tipped into catastrophe.

Send us Fan MailMadeleine Dunnigan’s fierce, unnerving coming-of-age novel, Jean, is set in the final weeks at Compton Manor, an all-boys school that sells itself as enlightened where desire moves like weather, and cruelty is a kind of social sport.In this episode Dunnigan explains why the boarding-school setting is such a useful framing device; what drew her to the late 1970s punk-era—close enough to the Second World War to feel its aftershocks, but far enough to watch a new, disillusioned generation take shape; and writing queer desire as a woman.The conversation also traces two key influences: Patrick Modiano’s Such Fine Boys, with its atmosphere of postwar drift and compromised authority, and Mavis Gallant’s “Potter,” “Baum, Gabriel, 1935–( ),” and “The Remission”—short stories about outsiders, social comedy, and lives shaped by prolonged waiting. 

Send us Fan MailFew cities lend themselves to myth quite like New York, a city that reinvents itself so often that each generation claims its own version. In this episode, we speak with journalist Jonathan Mahler about The Gods of New York, his sweeping portrait of the 1980s city of ambition and excess, when figures like Ed Koch, Donald Trump, and Al Sharpton weren’t just characters in the story—they were battling, in public, for the city’s soul. Mahler, best known for Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, traces how money, media, race, and power collided in a decade that helped shape the New York we live with now. We also talk about a very different but equally electrified New York dreamscape: Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and the comic-book imagination as a kind of hope machine.

Send us Fan MailBefore you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman, is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for peeling back the myths around “Lady Lindy” to reveal the woman beneath the legend.Shapiro has long gravitated to improbable, irresistible tales. In The Stowaway (2018), she unearthed the story of Billy Gawronski, the teenager who swam the Hudson to join an Antarctic expedition—a book born of her own dogged persistence in tracking down his widow. Before turning to biography, she was an award-winning filmmaker, co-directing the unforgettable documentary Keep the River on Your Right.In this episode, Shapiro traces the arc of her storytelling life back to the notebooks of Harriet the Spy, and to the questions raised in a favorite Grace Paley short story, “A Conversation with My Father,” which wrestles with how to tell the truth about life without reducing it to cliché.

Send us Fan Mail“Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading,” declared Kirkus in its review of her new novel, Crush, a sharp and seductive exploration of midlife desire and the unruly force of infatuation. Calhoun is the author of the acclaimed history St. Marks Is Dead; the memoir Also a Poet, which chronicles her attempt to finish an abandoned biography of Frank O’Hara begun by her father, the critic Peter Schjeldahl; the essay collection Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give; and the cultural study Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis. Alongside her own books, she has ghostwritten more than thirty titles, an apprenticeship that sharpened her instinct for voice, candor, and structure. “There are a lot of ways to tell a true story,” she has said. “I like looking for the most generous and interesting ones.”In this episode, Calhoun discusses her journey from ghostwriter to memoirist to novelist, and the writers who guide her: Thornton Wilder, whose The Bridge of San Luis Rey remains a touchstone nearly a century after its publication, and Audre Lorde, whose essay The Use of the Erotic reframes desire as a source of knowledge and power.

Send us Fan MailFew writers dance across genres with as much wit, irreverence, and intellectual curiosity as Geoff Dyer. From Out of Sheer Rage, about his struggles to write a book on DH Lawrence, to the award-winning jazz meditations of But Beautiful, he's made a career of bending forms to his will. In Homework, his first memoir, Dyer turns that restless mind to his own post-war English childhood and proves that even the most straightforward narrative can't escape his signature style. Homework is quintessential Dyer: wry, digressive and unexpectedly poignant. He reconstructs his working class, childhood—the air fix models, the hand-me-down football kits, his parents quiet sacrifices—with a novelist's eye and a standup's timing.  We also explore some of Dyer's inspirations, including Ernie Pyle's Brave Men, the stark Second World War dispatches that imprinted themselves on his millions of readers, and Ada Collins poem "The News," with its knack for finding unease in the ordinary. 

Send us Fan MailWhat can we learn from Weimar Germany and its rapid unraveling in the 1930s? Lately that question has gained more urgency as the US turns away from the trans-Atlantic alliance that has underpinned European security for the past 80 years. For Katherine Bucknell, no writer was better placed than Christopher Isherwood for understanding the speed with which a country can slide into autocracy. It was his book Goodbye to Berlin that became the basis for the musical, Cabaret. Without Isherwood, no Sally Bowles. But the author’s legacy stretches far beyond Berlin, encompassing gay liberation, spiritual enlightenment, and what may be the 20th century’s most enduring May-December relationship–with his long-time partner Don Bachardy. Now Bucknell,  editor of Isherwood’s voluminous journals and letters, has taken her epic knowledge of the writer and written Christopher Isherwood, Inside Out, an 800-page biography befitting such a lion of literature. In this episode of Shelf Life we discuss the biographer’s craft, and why Isherwood’s slim novel, Prater Violet, resonates down the years.

Send us Fan MailNobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling is among the most derided of 20th century novelists, but in this episode of Shelf Life, the publishing legend Edwin Frank urges us to take a second look. As it happens, taking a second look was the impetus behind Frank's trailblazing publishing imprint, New York Review Books, built on the principle that too many great books had fallen out of print and deserved a second life. At my bookstore, One Grand Books, where titles are selected by celebrated bibliophiles there is hardly a shelf that does not contain an NYRB title, whether it’s CV Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War, chosen by writer and thinker Ta-Nehisi Coates, In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcom, chosen by director and writer Mike White, or Balzac’s The Lilly in the Valley, chosen for us by director Francois Ozon. “I grew up between the pages of novels, and the better part of my adult life has been spent there, too,” Edwin Frank writes in the introduction to Stranger Than Fiction, his newly-published history of the 20th-century novel in which he explores, contextualizes, and interweaves the works of over 30 authors. We talk about Frank’s adventures in publishing, and what the 20th century novel can  teach us.

Send us Fan MailIt's been 40 years since Jeanette Winterson's debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, launched a confident and daring new voice in English fiction, one that wasn’t afraid to take risks in the service of craft. Many books have followed,  including The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and more recently Frankissstein: A Love Story. “I am an ambitious writer,” she has written. “I don’t see the point of being anything; no, not anything at all, if you don’t have ambition for it.”  Winterson's new collection, Night Side of the River, showcases her fascination with AI and technology within the classic form of the ghost story. As she says in this episode, "What's really fascinated me  with the rise of AI and Big Tech is that for the first time since the Enlightenment, science and religion are asking the same question: Is consciousness obliged to materiality, or could we go beyond the body?”. We also talk about one of Winterson’s literary touchstones, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.