In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction.

In this episode, Graham Foster explores the mysterious castle of Gormenghast, the setting of Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, with writer and editor Rob Maslen.

Titus Groan begins with the birth of an heir to Lord Groan, the ruler of the castle of Gormenghast. As baby Titus comes into the world, the castle is beset by scheming and violence, primarily at the hands of Steerpike, an exceptionally clever, but malevolent, teenager. As he manipulates the other residents of the castle, his plotting threatens the traditions and rules that govern life within its walls, bringing madness and death to the Groan family.

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in China, where his father was a medical missionary. After returning to England in 1922, he studied at the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy of Art. After building a reputation as an artist and illustrator during the Second World War, he published the novels that make up the Gormenghast Trilogy between 1946 and 1959. He died in 1968.

Rob Maslen is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow. In 2015 he founded Glasgow’s MLitt in Fantasy, the first graduate programme in the world specifically dedicated to the study of fantasy and the fantastic, and from 2020 to 2022 he served as Co-director, with Professor Dimitra Fimi, of the Glasgow Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. He has written three books: Elizabethan Fictions (1997), Shakespeare and Comedy (2005), and The Shakespeare Handbook (2008), and has edited Mervyn Peake’s Collected Poems (2008), as well as co-editing Mervyn Peake’s Complete Nonsense (2011). He has published many essays on early modern literature and twentieth-century fantasy and science fiction.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Mervyn Peake:

The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1949)

Gormenghast (1950)

Titus Alone (1959)

Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (2008)

By others:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-67)

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

Peter Pan/Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie (1911)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

In Parenthesis by David Jones (1937)

The Aerodrome by Rex Warner (1941)

The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola (1952)

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-5)

The Famished Road by Ben Okri (1991)

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (2000)

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng (2017)

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

Babel by R.F. Kuang (2022)

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LINKS

The City of Lost Books, Rob Maslen's blog.

Mervyn Peake: Collected Poems, edited by Rob Maslen

Mervyn Peake: Complete Nonsense, edited by Rob Maslen and G. Peter Winnington

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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In this episode, Anthony Burgess's friend and colleague Ben Forkner, who met Burgess at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1969 and went on to have a lasting friendship with him over the subsequent years. Here, Ben Forkner looks back on this friendship and shares a tape of Burgess reading the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins which he recorded at his home in Angers.

Narrated by Andrew Biswell with readings from Ben Forkner's introduction to One Man's Chorus by Graham Foster.

Ben Forkner's interview was recorded in December 2024 over the telephone.

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LINKS

Read Ben Forkner's introduction to One Man's Chorus in full

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation free Substack newsletter

Burgess Foundation Bookshop

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In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

In this episode, writer and academic Sarah Graham leads Graham Foster through the 1940s Manhattan of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

Published in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye follows Holden Caulfield, a bereaved teenager who recalls a weekend spent in Manhattan after he is expelled from boarding school. As he tells his story of wandering the streets looking for some form of connection in seedy hotels, bars, and nightclubs, he gradually reveals his own state of mind and his desire to rebel against the society that he doesn’t understand.

J.D. Salinger was born in New York in 1919. After participating in some of the most consequential battles of World War II, he began writing short stories for the New Yorker, many of which centred around the Glass family. After publishing the short story collections Nine Stories (1953) and Franny and Zooey (1961), and the volume of two novellas Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), he retired from public life. He died in 2010.

Sarah Graham is Associate Professor in American Literature at the University of Leicester. Her most recent publications are A History of the Bildungsroman (CUP, 2019) and reviews of American fiction for the Times Literary Supplement. She published a reader’s guide to The Catcher in the Rye in 2007 (Continuum), edited a collection of essays on the novel for Routledge (2007), and has contributed to magazines, conferences and programmes discussing Salinger’s work, including ‘J. D. Salinger: Made in England’ for BBC Radio 4.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By J.D. Salinger:

Nine Stories (1953)

By others:

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

The Kit Book for Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines (1943)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)

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LINKS

Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: A Reader's Guide by Sarah Graham

A History of the Bildungsroman, edited by Sarah Graham

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation's Free Substack Newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.