Podcast
Shelf Life
Hosted by Grand Journal · EN
Shelf Life is a show about books and the people who love them. In each episode, we invite a celebrated bibliophile (think Alan Cumming, John Waters, and Joyce Maynard) to select two of their favorite books, and then we chat about them, drawing connections between their lit choices and their lives and careers.
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Episodes
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Francis Spufford on Blitz London, archangels, and the temptation to change history.
Mar 200:54:52Tap to summarizeSend 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.
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Madeleine Dunnigan on heated rivalries, women writing desire, and boyhood’s pressure systems
Feb 900:52:24Tap to summarizeSend 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.
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Jonathan Mahler on the 1980s New York that made Trump — and Michael Chabon’s comic-book Gotham
Jan 2600:51:27Tap to summarizeSend 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.
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Laurie Gwen Shapiro on Amelia Earhart, Harriet the Spy, and the art of rewriting legend
Sep 1600:54:17Tap to summarizeSend 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.
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Ada Calhoun on Ghostwriting, Thornton Wilder, and the audacity of desire
Aug 2900:51:37Tap to summarizeSend 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.
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Geoff Dyer on Bad Food, Jazz Renegades, and the "Soviet Resignation" of Post-War Britain
Jul 1700:52:03Tap to summarizeSend 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.
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Biographer Katherine Bucknell on Christopher Isherwood's Odyssey from Weimar Berlin to California
Mar 4, 202500:52:07Tap to summarizeSend 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.
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Legendary Publisher Edwin Frank in Praise of Rudyard Kipling — and Why the 20th Century Novel Matters
Jan 21, 202500:50:40Tap to summarizeSend 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.
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Jeanette Winterson on ghosts, tech bros, and what her success taught her about class in Britain
Dec 31, 202400:51:26Tap to summarizeSend 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.
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Jennifer Kabat on America's forgotten populist uprising and the politics of place
Nov 6, 202400:51:32Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailMemoir meets history meets politics in Jennifer Kabat’s book, The Eighth Moon, a fascinating account of moving to the Catskills in 2005, and stumbling on a history of America’s forgotten populist uprising, the Anti-Rent War, that culminated in 1845 with the murder of a police officer, Osman Steele. Drawing on archives, conversations, and her many hikes through the countryside, Kabat favors a writing style that feels akin to an overflowing mind, moving back and forth between eras and observations, daring the reader to keep pace. You could say something similar of Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, the 2020 novel that Kabat has chosen to discuss for this episode. Her other pick is “Culture and Anarchy,” by the poet Adrienne Rich.
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