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This podcast focuses on the use of the term avant-garde in discourse around contemporary art, and particularly on how its application differs with locale. Panelist Nancy Adajania argues that our mythologizing of the idea removes us from its lingering potential.

The Avant-garde as Term and Idea

Cornel West, one of America’s most celebrated and provocative public intellectuals, in conversation with Ben Okri (novelist) and respondent Malachi McIntosh (University of Cambridge) on Literature and the Nation.

Professor Cornel West in conversation with Ben Okri on Literature and the Nation

For nearly 50 years, the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote prolifically, establishing herself as one of the great British fiction writers of the twentieth century. Novelists A.S. Byatt, Bidisha and Philip Hensher, all of them powerfully influenced by Iris Murdoch, reconsider her standing as a writer. Chaired by Anne Chisholm.

Iris Murdoch Revisited (A.S. Byatt, Bidisha, Philip Hensher)

Background, transcript, highlights, and discussion here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/10/the-project-of-literature-susan-sontag-92y/

Recorded live at the https://soundcloud.com/92y

Audio exclusively available courtesy of the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center and the Susan Sontag estate. 

TRANSCRIPT / DETAILS

The Project of Literature: Susan Sontag at 92Y (April 16, 1992)

If Virginia Woolf came back to life today, what would she make of it? How would she feel about what’s happening to books, and to the reputation of her own books, and of the Bloomsbury group?  The acclaimed novelist Maggie Gee, whose thirteen previous books include The White Family, My Cleaner and My Animal Life, this month publishes her new novel, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, which imagines what ensues when an author working in the New York Public Library becomes so passionate about Woolf that she suddenly materialises. In a conversation chaired by Anne Chisholm, biographer of Frances Partridge, the long-lived Bloomsbury diarist who remembered Woolf from her youth, Maggie Gee discusses her novel with Alexandra Harris, author of Romantic Moderns, which explores connections between some of the 20th Century’s greatest writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Eric Ravilious and John Piper, and of a short biography of Woolf. They reflect on her imaginings of both past and future, and ask what she means to readers and writers today. Is she, for women writers in particular, a hard act to follow?

We are grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for sponsoring this event, and to the Bloomsbury Hotel for supporting it.

Virginia Woolf in the 21st Century

Performed by Richmond Hoxie

When The Unbearable Lightness of Being was first published in English, it was hailed as "a work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness" by critic Elizabeth Hardwick and named one of the best books of 1984 by the New York Times Book Review. It went on to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and quickly became an international bestseller. Twenty years later, the novel has established itself as a modern classic. To commemorate the anniversary of its first English-language publication, HarperCollins is proud to offer a special hardcover edition.
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover -- these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel.
Controlled by day, Tereza's jealousy awakens by night, transformed into ineffably sad death-dreams, while Tomas, a successful surgeon, alternates loving devotion to the dependent Tereza with the ardent pursuit of other women. Sabina, an independent, free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals -- of parents, husband, country, love itself -- whereas her lover, the intellectual Franz, loses all because of his earnest goodness and fidelity.
In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel, says the novelist, "the unbearable lightness of being" -- not only as the consequence of our private acts but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
This magnificent novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence. It juxtaposes geographically distant places (Prague, Geneva, Paris, Thailand, the United States, a forlorn Bohemian village); brilliant and playful reflections (on "eternal return," on kitsch, on man and animals -- Tomas and Tereza have a beloved doe named Karenin); and a variety of styles (from the farcical to the elegiac) to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world's truly great writers.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera

Seamus Heaney in conversation with Bernard O'Donoghue about his life and the influences that inform his work , with Nick Laird, Andrew O'Hagan, Jon Stallworthy and Jo Shapcott reading selections of Heaney's work.


A Life in Poetry (Seamus Heaney)

Linda Anderson, an author and academic who has written extensively on twentieth-century women’s poetry and Elizabeth Bishop, marks the centenary of Bishop’s birth by exploring her genius.  Chaired by Fiona Sampson.


Elizabeth Bishop: dwelling without roots (Linda Anderson)

Life and times of Michael K

In this talk, she asks how Eliot tested  a variety of lives in his masterpiece, Four Quartets. How do writers, or risk-takers like his ancestor Andrew Eliot, or Londoners during the Blitz, or members of a religious community, hold up against Eliot's pattern of the perfect life: 'a lifetime burning in every moment'?

TS Eliot and the search for perfection (Lyndall Gordon)

Elaine Showalter discusses the enormous impact of the Brontës - through Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Vilette and Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë - on American women's writing in the 19th century: writers black and white, novelists and poets, from Emily Dickinson to Sarah Orne Jewett, who used the lives and novels of the Brontës as inspirations for American stories.  Chaired by Ion Trewin.

American women writers & the Brontes (Elaine Showalter)

http://www.92Y.org/VPC - Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing reads selections from The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels.

Recorded March 15, 2004 at 92nd Street Y


Doris Lessing: The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels | 92Y Readings

Preoccupied with memory and place, both physical and emotional, Michael Ondaatje was recently described by the Guardian as 'one of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time'. In a conversation interwoven with readings, he talks to Fiammetta Rocco, editor of Books and Arts for The Economist about his life and work. 


Time Around Scars (Michael Ondaatje)

Excerpt from Jeff Goldsmith's Q&A with Ray Bradbury, recorded at Comic Con 2010. Discussion and other highlights here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/04/ray-bradbury-comic-con-interview/

Full audio here: http://www.theqandapodcast.com/2012/06/ray-bradbury-q.html

Ray Bradbury on Predictions and the Secret of Life

Ray Bradbury on Libraries

Ray Bradbury on (Not) Growing Up

through the tunnel by Doris Lessing (audio book)

Stirling University hosted an evening with perhaps one of the best known Nobel winning poets, Seamus Heaney. Thanks to Stirling for recording the event.

Seamus Heaney at Stirling University

David Harsent, who recently won the Griffin International Poetry Prize for his tenth collection, 'Night', discusses and reads from the work of Seamus Heaney, accompanied with recordings of the Nobel Laureate.

Portraits of Writers Series - David Harsent on Seamus Heaney

Paula Johnson, the RSL's Awards Administrator, chairs the V S Pritchett Memorial Prize 2012, an evening in celebration of the short story. Acclaimed author Jackie Kay discusses the genre of the short story, and the themes within her own work, before reading from her latest short story collection, 'Reality, Reality'. Afterward, Chair of the RSL Anne Chisholm presents Martina Kay with her award for Best Short Story, before the author reads her winning piece.

The V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize Reading 2012 - Jackie Kay & winner Martina Devlin

October 21, 2012 Sean Campbell on Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child

In the first of her two tanner lectures, Rebecca Goldstein discusses the overlap and conflict between philosophy and the literary arts, and whether novels can be philosophically justified.  Ms. Goldstein’s career bridges the divides between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. Equally comfortable discussing physics or fiction, she is also an important voice in the current active debates between religion and science.  A Koret International Book Award winner, a multiple time National Jewish Book Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award winner, in 2008 she was designated Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism and was named Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association. Her books include Finding Spinoza, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Incompleteness, Mazel, and The Mind Body Problem. Nov 17, 2011

The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature, Part One

In the second of her two Tanner lectures, Rebecca Goldstein discusses the overlap and conflict between philosophy and the literary arts, and whether novels can be philosophically justified.  Ms. Goldstein’s career bridges the divides between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. Equally comfortable discussing physics or fiction, she is also an important voice in the current active debates between religion and science.  A Koret International Book Award winner, a multiple time National Jewish Book Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award winner, in 2008 she was designated Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism and was named Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association. Her books include Finding Spinoza, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Incompleteness, Mazel, and The Mind Body Problem. Nov 17, 2011

The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature, Part Two

THE T.S. ELIOT MEMORIAL MEETING

For Alice Oswald, a poet committed to the live performance of her work, the role of poetry is to go "lower than rhetoric, lower than conversation, lower than logic, right down to the very faint honest voice at the bottom of the skull". Noted for her visionary precision and love of nature, she won the T.S. Eliot Prize for 'Dart' (2002), her poem about the Devon river and the people who live and work on it. But in her most recent work, 'Memorial', she leaves England for the killing fields of Troy, in a reworking of the Iliad described by Andrew Motion as "an elegy of quite extraordinary power". The Classics, and especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses, have also been a lodestone for Robin Robertson. The first person to win the Forward Poetry Prize in all three categories - 'A Painted Field' (1997) was Best First Collection, 'Swithering' (2006) Best Collection, and ‘At Roane Head’ (2010) Best Single Poem - Robertson has been praised by John Banville for his "genius for exact and gorgeous imagery, his dazzling metaphorical gift". In the newly published 'Hill of Doors', he combines loose retellings of stories of the shape-shifter Dionysus with poems about his childhood on the north-east coast of Scotland. It is his most powerful book to date.

We are grateful to Old Possum's Practical Trust for sponsoring this reading.

Alice Oswald & Robin Robertson - March 2013

Doris Lessing in conversation with Margaret Drabble

Founded in 1820, the RSL acts as a voice for the value of literature, honouring and supporting emerging and established writers whilst creating a bridge between authors and audiences of all backgrounds and experiences to engage as many people as possible with the wealth of literature in the UK.

Doris Lessing in conversation with Margaret Drabble

Royal Society Literature