Palm trees swingin
Wind breezin
Car cruisin
Shawty sleepin
This that after summer season
My time's creepin
Im getting high
Aint got a reason

I just love to get to geekin
Aint stoppin now
Aint droppin down to nobody  
Rolling mids
When Im out here rolling loud
But I be humble enough 
To take an L when I fumble a dub


And I don't wanna be the one that they believe in
When Id prolly be the one who's out here scheming
Cuz i'm shady like a canopy on beaches
I can give you 13 reasons why
I aint ever been that guy
Who got to live that life 

Grew up an only child
Who had no one to struggle with
I had to fake my smile
Moms had enough trouble as it is
She told me its gonn be a while
Before We make it through this shit
So I make my momma proud
Dont give a fuck who tryna diss

Now back to why Im shady 
Had a bitch I woulda called my old lady
Prolly woulda had my babies
Till she played me
Now I look at every bitch
And I just think that its so crazy
How anyone can love
To me love is so outdated

Damn fuck this generation 
shoulda been born in the 80s 
Oh well cant do nun about it 
I cant even let it phase me 

So I hop up in my whip
I roll the windows down
And When you looking out
all you really see is

Palm trees swingin 
wind breezin 
Car cruisin 
shawty sleepin 
This that after summer season
My times creepin
Im getting high
Aint got a reason 
I just love to get to geekin
Aint stopping now
Aint dropping down to nobody 
rolling mids
When Im out here rolling loud
But I be humble enough to Take an L
When o fumble a dub

NO CAP!

SHADY (Prod. Luka Burr)

Swim City - ZXY? (prod. djunivrse)

The second novel by by literary wunderkind, Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods is probably the most challenging book we’ve yet featured on Backlisted. Usually described as a satire on American capitalism, it is the diasarmingly upbeat and funny tale of Joe, a struggling salesman, who develops a new office product that he believes serves an urgent need in modern corporate life. Quite what that product is and how it works requires a delicacy in description and a warning for listeners: this is not one for family listening. We are joined by returning guests, novelist and playwright Marie Philips and writer and performer, Ben Moor. The episode also features Andy rediscovering a lost folk horror classic from the 1970s - The Autumn People (also known as The Autumn Ghosts) by Ruth M. Arthur while John is blown away by the force of Sarah Churchwell’s incandescent and incisive account of an American classic: The Wrath to Come:  Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells.

Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)
13:21 - The Autumn Ghosts by Ruth M. Arthur. 
18:34 - The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells by Sarah Churchwell. 
24:42 - Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt.

* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.
* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm
*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted

Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt

North and South is Elizabeth Gaskell’s fourth novel and considered by many to be her best. It tells the story of Margaret Hale, a principled young middle-class woman from the rural South whose family are obliged to re-settle in the Northern industrial town of Milton. Joining us to discuss the novel’s contemporary relevance, are two new guests: Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and Nell Stevens, author of the memoir, Mrs Gaskell & Me. We cover the books presentation of labour relations at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the changing position of women in society, the reasons for Elizabeth Gaskell’s uncertain reputation, her unsentimental treatment of death and – spoiler alert – whether the novel’s ending works. Also in this episode, Andy is impressed by No Document, Australian writer Anwen Crawford’s ground-breaking work of elegiac non-fiction and John enjoys the exquisite imagination on display in Chloe Ardijis’s Dialogue with a Somnambulist, the Mexican novelist’s recent collection of stories, essays and pen portraits.

Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)
04:20 - No Document by Anwen Crawford. 
10:40 - Dialogue with a Somnambulist by Chloe Aridjis. 
16:42 - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.
* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm
*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Roadside Picnic, first published in 1972, is the best-known work of Russia’s most famous modern science fiction writers, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, together the authors of 26 novels and scores of short stories. To discuss it we are joined by the writer and radio presenter Jennifer Lucy Allan, and the publisher and translator Ilona Chavasse. The book is based on the premise that Earth has been briefly visited by an alien civilisation that have left behind them six ‘Zones’, places strewn with their debris, some of it lethal to humans; all of it fascinating and perplexing. The Zones feed a black market in artefacts supplied by ‘Stalkers’ who are prepared to risk their lives and sanity by entering the forbidden areas to retrieve them. We consider why the book is still considered one of the greatest of all SF novels, how it came to be read as a dark foreshadowing of the Chernobyl disaster and why it has proved itself so ripe for adaptation, both as a series of video games and, most famously, as the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic 1979 film, Stalker. This episode also finds Andy returning to a haunting novel he read earlier this year: The High House (Swift Press) by former guest Jessie Greengrass, while John is carried away by Everybody (Picador), Olivia Laing’s magnificent book about freedom and the human body.

Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)
08:17 - The High House by Jessie Greenglass. 
17:04 - Everybody by Olivia Laing. 
23:32 - Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.
* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm
*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted

Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

This Hallowe’en episode of Backlisted focusses on the collection of ‘uncanny’ stories by Henry James, first gathered together under the title The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales to form the seventeenth volume of the New York Edition of his Collected Works in 1917. We are joined, as ever, by our resident spook-master Andrew Male, and by acclaimed novelist and Henry James aficionado Tessa Hadley. We each choose a story to present and read from - these are tackled in chronological order to better trace the evolution of James’s famously dense and challenging late style . Before that Andy confesses his admiration for I Used to Live Here Once, Miranda Seymours’ new biography of Jean Rhys and reads a short Jean Rhys ghost story, while John revisits Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel’s haunting (and haunted) memoir.

Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)
5:49 - I Used to Live Here Once by Miranda Seymour
12:19 - Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
19:38 - The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales by Henry James

* If you'd like to purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.

* For more information about the show visit www.backlisted.fm 

* If you'd like to support the show and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/backlisted

The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales by Henry James

Welcome to our first Backlisted special of 2023. Today we’re joined by the award-winning novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, an official friend of Backlisted, who returns for the first time since his appearance on the Christmas 2021 episode on The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit, one of our most popular shows. These specials are designed to fill the gap until the show proper returns in April. They differ from the usual Backlisted format in that they feature just one guest choosing a number of books in an area they know and care about. The discussion covers examines what inspired Frank’s love of reading when he was growing up, and includes favourite books by T.H. White, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joan Aiken, Tim Hunkin and Richmal Crompton.

* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.
* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm
*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted

Image Credit: Archives New Zealand from New Zealand, CC BY-SA 2.0

Backlisted Special - The books of our childhood

Taste the Rain

dead or alive

CNN has a new article out titled “Newly declassified US intel claims Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners,” and it's pretty much exactly what you’d expect if you’ve been critically observing the western mass media over the last several years. An anonymous source making vague and unevidenced claims of an unverifiable nature about a longtime target of the US intelligence cartel, based solely on information provided by that same intelligence cartel.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Another Day, Another CIA Press Release Disguised As News

The most distinctly American fact you will ever learn is that the piercing cry you associate with the bald eagle is actually a Hollywood invention. The long, powerful cry you likely heard in your mind's ear when asked to imagine the call of a bald eagle is actually the call of a red-tailed hawk, whose voice Hollywood studios have been dubbing over footage of bald eagles for generations.

You simply cannot fit more America into a unit of information than this. The symbol of the nation which sits atop a globe-spanning empire held together by mass-scale propaganda, and the sound of its voice is itself a complete construct of propaganda.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Even The Bald Eagle's Call Is Propaganda

The literary podcast presented by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller. Brought to you by Unbound. Visit www.backlisted.fm

The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales by Henry James

Backlisted Podcast

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