Happy Ballard Day everyone! It seems every year we celebrate this holiday, the world has become more Ballardian. This year’s (hopefully) going to be hard to beat, with the scientific community announcing the dawn of the Anthropocene, a 24 hour news cycle that makes it nigh on impossible to discern fact from fiction, and a reality TV star becoming President of the USA.
In 4 Books, we ask an author to answer 4 questions on the books that made them — on those books that made a significant impact at distinct junctures of their lives.
It might be the book that guided them through a break up, the one that they press urgently into a friends’ hand, the book that best articulates love, or the book that opened up the world in a startling new way.
We only ever stray away from the 4 Books podcast format to bring you something truly brilliant, and this week, we have a corker of a podcast for you. Joanna Blythman, Britain’s leading investigate food journalist, is in the studio answering your questions on all things food. The good, the bad, and the truly frightening. Read more…
‘I hope that it adds up to a new way of thinking about who we have been, and who we are now’
Andrew Marr’s new book, We British: The Poetry of a People is out now, published by 4th Estate Books. The British have never had a musical tradition to rival that of Russia or Germany; or the gloriously exuberant architecture of Paris or Rome; or the coherent worldview of classical China. What they have had is the richest and most remarkable tradition of poetry of any major culture. This book is an attempt to use British poetry as the framework for a kind of alternative epic, the story of what it was like to be British, told through poetry, and sometimes through the stories of the poets.
Until 2013, the name Gabriele D’Annunzio was known only to students of Italian history, devotees of Decadent poetry and fashionistas with an interest in turn-of-the-century menswear. Now the name of this repulsive yet compelling man rings many more bells, thanks to the thrilling Samuel Johnson prize-winning biography The Pike by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
She details D’Annunzio’s evolution from an idealistic poet who allied himself with the Romantic aesthetic to an instigator of radical right-wing revolt against democratic authority, who eventually declared himself the Commandante of the city of Fiume in modern-day Croatia, intending to establish the utopian modern state upon his muddled fascist and artistic ideals and create a social paradigm for the rest of the world. Read more…
In this podcast, we were more than lucky enough to speak to T. Geronimo Johnson about his novel ‘Welcome to Braggsville’, his writing processes, his persona; soundtrack, the challenges that he faces as a writer, and how egotistical penning a novel really is. We touched upon character development, the subversion of stereotypes, and why making his main character, who he’d always envisaged as Black,White.
We spoke about the superficial progression of race in the U.S., and we asked if the inauguration of President Obama has done anything for Black culture. One thing we dreaded asking, but did anyway, was how the Ferguson movement and the ‘I Can’t Breathe’ campaign dedicated to the memory of Eric Garner impacts how he feels as a Black male in America. Read more…
In this podcast, 4th Estate interviews the sublime and recently Grammy nominated Scott Blackwood, the author of the sublime new novel ‘See How Small’, which is based on the real life murders of three young girls in Texas. We speak about the soundtrack behind the book, potential film versions, and why it should be the next Serial. Enjoy. Read more…
To celebrate the publication of Mainlander, 4th Estate were lucky enough to sit down with its author Will Smith (screenwriter of the Thick of It, VEEP and more). We spoke about The Thick of It, VEEP, the politics of the UK versus the US, working directly under the Messiah of satire Armando Iannucci, and the novel writing process. Listen to and download what we thought might be a fairly typical author interview, but very quickly descended into a laugh-a-minute chat about creativity, the anomaly that is Jersey, and accidentally writing feminist characters. Read more…
