It's time for our usual Year in Review show, but seeing as this is also our last EVER episode (sob!), we're shaking things up a little to bring you a bit of a decade in review as well, so we can look back over our highlights from ten wonderful years of Literary Friction. This show is stuffed full of recommendations, including our favourite reads from this year and books we're looking forward to reading in 2024, but also the books we're happiest to have found through the show. So, if you need ins...
Dec 19, 2023•1 hr 21 min
What does it mean, to pursue a life of your own? And what is art and literature's role in figuring out what that might look like? This month we're delighted to be talking to writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, whose latest book Radical: A Life of My Own is both a personal lexicon and a memoir, which thinks deeply about what it would mean to truly forge a life of one’s own. As we announced on our last minisode, we’re wrapping up Literary Friction at the end of this year, so this is our last author i...
Nov 30, 2023•59 min
Our theme this month was suggested by our patron Maral, who asked us to do an episode about our friendship, because she’s interested in how our (very!) different personalities align. We thought it might be a little self-indulgent to spend a whole episode talking about us specifically, so we’re also going to return to the theme of friendship more broadly, and talk about some of our favourite books about friends. We also make a pretty big announcement on this episode: after ten wonderful years of ...
Nov 16, 2023•47 min
How do the people and things we desire shape our identities? And how do you render the physical intensity of desire on the page? Author K Patrick joins us in thinking about desire this month - we spoke to K about their debut novel Mrs. S, which tells the story of a young Australian who arrives at an elite English all-girls boarding school for a job and ends up having a life-changing affair with the headmaster's wife. It's a sensual portrait of queer desire, and the transformative power of lust a...
Nov 02, 2023•1 hr
Last year we made a minisode about mothers, and one about fathers, both of which began an ongoing conversation about parenthood and literature that we wanted to pick up this month. Is fiction a good form for exploring the experience of parenthood? And beyond the ubiquitous parenting manuals, what does non-fiction about parenthood have to offer? Adulthood lasts far longer than childhood, so what about books that look at parent-child relationships in later life? Tune in for this and more, plus all...
Oct 19, 2023•47 min
What is it about doppelgangers that's so endlessly compelling? Who better to answer this question than the one and only Naomi Klein, who joined us to talk about her latest book, Doppelganger. This riveting and intellectually rigorous journey begins with a mix-up: people kept confusing Naomi Klein with another Naomi, author Naomi Wolf (known for The Beauty Myth), who got lost in the world of right wing conspiracies during the pandemic. Klein uses the trajectory of the other Naomi to examine the r...
Oct 05, 2023•59 min
Our theme this month was suggested by our patron Mary, who asked us to talk about so-called 'sad girl novels', and it turns out we have some strong opinions! So, listen in as we get to grips with what the term 'sad girl' really means - is it just reductive and misogynistic, or is it getting at something? Was Madame Bovary the original literary sad girl? Is it simply a marketing term or has it become problematic trope in publishing? Have we moved on from book covers with women face down in cakes ...
Sep 21, 2023•46 min
What makes a brilliant short story? Are they better read as part of a collection or as a sharp shot on their own? How do you render fully formed characters in very few words? We're thrilled that this month, Arinze Ifeakandu joined us to talk about his short story collection Gods Children Are Little Broken Things, a beautiful, artful collection of nine short stories about queer lives and love in Nigeria. One of the great pleasures of reading this book is savouring the art of the short story, but ...
Sep 07, 2023•1 hr 2 min
We first aired this episode back in July 2019, and it was recorded in the studio when Ocean was on the international tour for his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It’s a really rich and beautiful conversation, full of the kind of thoughtful insights Ocean is known for, but also a lightness and optimism that feels right for summer. And we also thought it would coincide nicely with the publication of Ocean’s latest book, a poetry collection called Time is a Mother, which is out now. But we d...
Aug 10, 2023•57 min
Are you a techno-optimist or a techno-pessimist? Or even a total Luddite? Does Chat GPT excite you or completely freak you out? Our theme this month was suggested by our patron Elisse, who asked us to talk about Chat GPT in particular. We thought this was a great jumping off point for a bigger conversation about the relationship between art and technology, the moral panic that always accompanies developments in Artificial Intelligence, and our relationship to new technologies in general. Listen ...
Jul 31, 2023•48 min
Dark humour - do you love it or hate it? Do you find it cathartic or macho? Can humour ever be too dark, and is it a useful political tool? This month our guest is the one and only Lorrie Moore, who joined us to talk about her latest novel, I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home, a story about grief and ghosts and history that is equally funny as it is philosophical. It follows Finn, who in 2016 is visiting his dying brother in a hospice in New York. Finn's stay is interrupted by the news that his...
Jul 20, 2023•59 min
Octavia has been away on her book tour, so today we’re bringing you a re-run of one of our earliest minisodes from April 2019. It was a fun one, inspired by a viral tweet about literary red flags, in which we got into books as cultural capital, literary snobbery, and whether it’s ever ok to judge a person by there reading habits. Plus, the usual cultural recommendations, which are all still accessible to you in some fom even though it's four years later. Enjoy, and we'll be back soon with a bran...
Jun 29, 2023•29 min
From Pride and Prejudice to Detransition, Baby, the romcom can be an enduring source of great pleasure, fun and comfort. This month we’re thrilled to welcome the American writer Curtis Sittenfeld to talk about her latest novel Romantic Comedy, a smart and funny story about how love can upend all kinds of preconceptions and expectations. It also gave us the perfect opportunity to think about the possibilities of the genre more generally, and whether it can ever escape the imprint of the patriarch...
Jun 15, 2023•59 min
Today’s show is an author special, and in the hot seat is our very own Octavia Bright. You probably know by now that Octavia’s first book This Ragged Grace is coming out - and is published today in fact! So Carrie couldn’t resist the chance to grill her about it. This Ragged Grace tells the story of Octavia's journey through recovery from alcohol addiction, and the parallel story of her father's descent into Alzheimer's. Looking back over this time, each of the seven chapters explores the feelin...
Jun 01, 2023•46 min
Do you like reading about writers? What does good writing about the act of writing do? And what happens when you write a real writer into a novel? Our guest this month is Tan Twan Eng, who joined us to talk about his third novel The House of Doors. Based around the writer W. Somerset Maugham’s stay on the Island of Penang, in what was then Malaya, in 1921, it's also about the stories he learns from the couple he stays with there, and the interplay between their fact and his fiction. We’ll be tal...
May 18, 2023•58 min
How do you feel about cities? Do you love the thrust and thrum of them, or are you more interested in escaping it? Do you like to read urban histories, or stories set in the heady metropolis? Our theme this month was suggested by our patron Alycia, who asked us to talk about cities in literature, so listen in for our favourite literary cities, captivating cities we've only encountered in the pages of a book, plus all the usual recommendations. Also, very excitingly, O's memoir This Ragged Grace ...
May 04, 2023•46 min
What's the relationship between feminist writing and feminist activism? What does it mean to be a feminist killjoy, and what can we learn from her? This month, we're joined by scholar and writer Sara Ahmed to answer these questions and more, as we talk about her brilliant latest book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. In it, Sara shows how although the label ‘killjoy’ has often been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes unhappiness, in fact, assuming the identity of the feminist killj...
Apr 26, 2023•1 hr
Today our theme is… kinda judgy! Everyone says you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but we all know everyone does. So, this month we thought we'd get into it - we partly covered (lol) this topic in our Rediscovery episode for Picador with Jamaica Kincaid and cover designer Stu Wilson, but we wanted to come back to it because there was so much more to say. What makes a book cover good or bad? Have you ever been totally put off reading a book by its cover? What are your major turn-offs, and wh...
Apr 06, 2023•47 min
Dancing can be about escape, about pleasure, but it can also be about protest. It can be a powerful means of expression, but how does writing capture all that movement and rhythm? And what does good writing about dancing do? With us this month is Jaqueline Crooks to talk about her dynamic first novel, Fire Rush, an intoxicating story about the dub reggae scene in 70s and 80s London. Told from the perspective of a young Black woman named Yamaye, it’s also about love, loss, freedom and finding fam...
Mar 23, 2023•58 min
Our theme this month was inspired by a recent story in New York magazine about, as they described it, “How to text, tip, ghost, host, and generally exist in polite society today.” The idea behind this list of 140 rules is that the last three years have completely changed the way that we live and work, and also that everyone seems to have forgotten how to be in society, so we need a new code of conduct. This got us thinking about etiquette, advice more generally, and how it relates to literature....
Mar 09, 2023•45 min
When journalists write books, how do they balance the potentially tricky relationship between weaving a compelling narrative and sticking to the facts? What's the role of storytelling in reportage? And what are the ethics of reporting on other peoples' lived experiences? This month our guest is Tania Branigan, foreign leader writer at The Guardian and author of Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution. Tania was a correspondent in China for seven years, and Red ...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr
Money makes the world go round: it's an inescapable presence in our lives, and yet in a lot of cultures it's still a pretty big conversational taboo. Here in the UK right now there’s a serious cost of living crisis after years of terrible Conservative rule, the newspapers are full of often extremely patronising articles about how to ‘tighten your belt’, and it feels like everyone is talking about money without necessarily really talking about money. Are all books to some extent about money? Does...
Feb 09, 2023•47 min
Portraits of real people abound in books. There are novels that use transcribed conversations, like Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be, or fiction based on historical or even living people, like Curtis Sittenfield’s Rodham. Our guest this month is the writer Kathryn Scanlan who joined us from the States to talk about her riveting new novel, Kick the Latch, which is based upon a series of conversations that Kathryn had with a woman named Sonia about her joyful and brutal life as a trainer for r...
Jan 26, 2023•58 min
Our January theme is heavily influenced by this time of year. Because the winter months are full of different feast days and celebrations, and because generally in the northern hemisphere it's a time where you just want to cocoon inside and feel warm, cosy and nurtured, we thought we’d talk about food and feasting in all kinds of literature. Whether in fiction or non-fiction, does reading about food make your mouth water? What can good food writing open up for a reader? And what about the politi...
Jan 05, 2023•47 min
We're on our end of year break, but didn't want to leave you without some LF to keep you company while you cook up your leftovers and potter around in your new socks. So, inspired by one of our new listeners, Charlotte, who tweeted to tell us how much she enjoyed an old episode, we’re re-running one of our favourite conversations from way back: in 2016 we met with Chris Kraus to talk about her book I Love Dick, which was being published in the UK for the first time. It's a classic of feminist li...
Dec 29, 2022•59 min
Somehow it's already our last Literary Friction of 2022, which means as usual it's time for our year in review show, packed full of recommendations just in time for your holiday shopping. We've got you - and your Uncle Joe - covered, so listen in for some of our favourite reads from the last year, the usual gentle check in on how our reading revolutions from 2021 went (clue: still patchy), plus books we're looking forward to in 2023. We've posted a list of all the recommendations from this year ...
Dec 15, 2022•1 hr 5 min
When it comes to fiction, why are people so obsessed with authenticity and so appalled by literary deception? Does it matter who tells a story? And what do novels that confront these ideas have to tell us? Our guest this month is the writer Yiyun Li, whose latest novel The Book of Goose is about an intense friendship between two girls in rural postwar France. When Agnes and Fabienne write a book of stories together, a simple lie about the book’s authorship sends Agnes’ life in an unexpected dire...
Nov 11, 2022•1 hr 1 min
In this show we're getting to grips with graphic novels. What's the history of this kind of storytelling? What narrative possibilities does the form open up? We first explored this theme with the artist Nick Hayes all the way back in 2014 before this show was even a podcast, and we're returning to it now because our guest this month is the writer and artist Lizzy Stewart, whose debut graphic novel Alison was published this year. Alison is a subtle and beautiful story of a young woman who leaves ...
Oct 20, 2022•59 min
This month we’re delighted to welcome Gabrielle Zevin to Literary Friction. Gabrielle’s latest novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is an engrossing and moving story of a multi-decade creative partnership between two video game designers, so we thought it only appropriate to make our theme today ‘playing games’. Listen in as we explore how games function in books like The Queen’s Gambit or Mansfield Park, the allure of choose your own adventure novels and the unique art of a game. Recommen...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr
For this minisode we’re doing something a little different - this episode is sponsored by publisher Picador, who this year have launched a new list of contemporary classics, called The Picador Collection, to coincide with their 50th anniversary year. With the aim of bringing seminal titles to a new generation of readers, the Picador Collection combines the gravitas of a modern classics list with the eccentric, boundary-pushing spirit of cult paperback publishing. To celebrate the collection, we ...
Sep 22, 2022•56 min
