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, we’re learning about The Vendor of Sweets by R.K. Narayan with writer, editor and academic Claire Chambers.

The Vendor of Sweets tells the story of Jagan, a Hindu sweetmaker who strictly follows the principles of Mahatma Ghandi. When his layabout son, Mali, decides he wants to study creative writing in America, Jagan initially supports him, but when a newly westernised Mali returns to India with an American wife and a plan to manufacture novel-writing machines, Jagan’s patience wears thin.

R.K. Narayan was born in Madras (now Chennai), India in 1906. His first novel, Swami and Friends, was published in 1930 and introduced the world to Malgudi, the fictional Indian town in which many of Narayan’s subsequent novels, including The Vendor of Sweets, are set. In 1958, his novel The Guide, won him the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy. Narayan wrote 15 novels, 9 books of non-fiction, and 6 collections of short stories. He died in 2001.

Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She specialises in literature from South Asia, the Perso-Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of ​several books, including ​​​Britain Through Muslim Eyes (2015), ​​​​Rivers of Ink​: Selected Essays​ (2017)​, and ​​​Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (2019)​. She edited Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (2021), co-edited ​​A Match Made in Heaven (2020), and co-authored Storying Relationships (2021)​​. Her forthcoming book is Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health, and Pathogenic Novels and will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2026.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By R.K. Narayan:

Malgudi Days (1943)

The Guide (1958)

By others:

Rayamana by Valmiki (c. 500 BCE)

Mahābhārata by Vyasa (c. 400 BCE)

Hind Swaraj by Mohandas Gandhi (1909)

Kanthapura by Raja Rao (1938)

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

'Toba Tek Singh' in Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition by Saadat Hasan Manto (1955)

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (2023)

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (2023)

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LINKS

Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels by Claire Chambers (affiliate link)

Translation and Decolonisation, edited by Claire Chambers and Ipek Demir (affiliate link)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The 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.

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, novelist and academic Norman Ravvin joins us to talk about Cocksure by Mordecai Richler, a novel Anthony Burgess called ‘grimly funny’.

Cocksure tells the story of Mortimer Griffin, a publisher whose routine life collides with the world of the Star Maker, a grotesque Hollywood movie producer who buys Mortimer’s publishing house and sets his life on a downward spiral. Mortimer suffers a breakdown of his marriage, has to contend with a school teaching the children the work of Marquis de Sade, and begins to question his identity as a Canadian Anglican. Eventually Mortimer uncovers the Star Maker’s horrific secret to making blockbuster movies.

Mordecai Richer was born in 1931 in Montreal, Canada. After working for the Canadian Broadcasting Service in the 1950s, he moved to London where he wrote seven of his novels, including Cocksure. Returning to Montreal in 1972, he wrote three more novels, including Barney’s Version, which was adapted into a film in 2010. Richler died in 2001.

Norman Ravvin is a writer, critic, and teacher. His publications include the novels The Girl Who Stole Everything, Café des Westens and Lola by Night. In 2023 he published Who Gets In: An Immigration Story, which blends memoir, history and archival work to tell the story of his grandfather's efforts to bring his family after him from Poland in the early 1930s. A native of Calgary, he lives in Montreal, where he teaches at Concordia University in the Department of Religions and Cultures.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Mordecai Richler:

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)

The Incomparable Atuk (1963)

St. Urbain's Horseman (1971)

Barney's Version (1997)

By others:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West (1939)

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)

Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964)

Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano (1997)

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)

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LINKS

Norman Ravvin Online

Who Gets In: An Immigration Story by Norman Ravvin (affiliate link)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

International Anthony 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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, we’re joined by novelist Adam Roberts, who introduces us to Life in the West by Brian Aldiss.

Life in the West tells the story of Thomas Squire, a filmmaker who is attending an academic conference to introduce his new documentary, Frankenstein in the Arts. At the conference he engages in conversations with the other attendees while dealing with the dissolution of his marriage, the trauma of his childhood and the violent years he spent in Yugoslavia as a member of British intelligence. Anthony Burgess calls the novel ‘a rich book, not afraid of thought.’

Brain Aldiss was born in 1925. After serving in Burma during World War II he worked as a bookseller in Oxford, which was the inspiration for his first novel The Brightfount Diaries, published in 1955. He went on to become one of the most respected British science fiction writers, writing 41 novels, 26 collections of short stories, 8 volumes of poetry, 5 volumes of autobiography and many more works of literary criticism, drama and edited anthologies. He died in 2017 at the age of 92.

Adam Roberts is a writer and an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent novel, Lake of Darkness is available now. A History of Fantasy is forthcoming from Bloomsbury (2025).

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Brian Aldiss:

Hothouse (1962)

Greybeard (1964)

Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973)

Frankenstein Unbound (1973)

Helliconia Trilogy (1982-85)

Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986)

Forgotten Life (1988)

Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith's: A Writing Life (1990)

Remembrance Day (1993)

Twinkling of an Eye, or My Life as an Englishman (1998)

Somewhere East of Life (1994)

'Supertoys Last All Summer Long' in The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s Part 2 (2015)

By others:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1955)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (1980)

The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)

Small World by David Lodge (1984)

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LINKS

Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts (affiliate link)

Fantasy: A Short History by Adam Roberts (forthcoming)

Adam Roberts's blog at Medium

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation's newsletter at Substack

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.

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, Will Carr is joined by writer and academic Paul Fagan to discuss At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien.

At Swim-Two-Birds is narrated by a young undergraduate student who invents wild stories featuring a host of strange character. The novel consists of three of the student’s seemingly unlinked stories that introduce characters such as Furriskey who is a fictional character created by the equally fictional Trellis, a writer of Westerns. As the narrative progresses, the student’s characters seem to take on a life of their own, and the novel becomes an absurdist brew of Irish folklore, farce, and comedic satire.

Flann O’Brien was born Brian Ó Nualláin in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1911. After studying at University College Dublin he joined the Irish Civil Service, during which time he wrote novels in both English and Irish Gaelic, scripts for television and theatre, and newspaper columns as Myles na gCopaleen. He died in 1966.

Paul Fagan is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University, where he is working on the Irish Research Council project Celibacy in Irish Women's Writing, 1860s-1950s. He is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society, a founding general editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies. He is the co-editor of Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities, as well as five edited volumes on Flann O’Brien.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Flann O'Brien:

An Béal Bocht (1941)

The Hard Life (1961)

The Dalkey Archive (1964)

The Third Policeman (1967)

The Best of Myles (1968)

By others:

The Golden Ass by Apuleius (c. 200)

The Fenian Cycle (from c. 600)

The Madness of Sweeney (c. 1200)

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605-15)

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1623)

A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift (1704)

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

The Crock of Gold by James Stephens (1912)

Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

Travelling People by BS Johnson (1963)

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)

Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino (1979)

Lanark by Alasdair Gray (1981)

Blooms of Dublin by Anthony Burgess (1982)

A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers by Hugh Kenner (1983)

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (2000)

Milkman by Anna Burns (2018)

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LINKS

Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, edited by Paul Fagan and Richard Barlow

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation Substack

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.

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, we’re getting the intel on Catch-22 by Joseph Heller from our guest Spencer Morrison.

Catch-22 takes us back to the dying days of the Second World War and introduces us to Yossarian, a US Air Force bombardier who is stationed on an island off the coast of Italy. Yossarian’s traumatic missions are contrasted with his life on the base, which is populated by various oddball airmen who all have their own agendas. They are overseen by commanding officers who are more concerned with abstract bureaucracy and arbitrary rules than the reality of the war. When Yossarian attempts to get out of flying any more missions he is faced with the most insidious rule of all, Catch-22, which states if an airman flies missions he is crazy and doesn’t have to, but if he doesn’t want to fly missions then he is sane and has to.

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1942, he joined the US Air Force and served as a bombardier on the Italian Front, his experiences informing Catch-22. His first published story appeared in Atlantic magazine in 1948 while he was working as a copywriter for an advertising firm. He went on to write seven novels, a collection of short stories, three plays, three screenplays and two volumes of autobiography. In the 1970s he worked alongside Anthony Burgess in the Creative Writing department at City College New York. He died in 1999.

Spencer Morrison is an assistant professor of English Language and Culture at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, where he specializes in post-WWII American literature. His writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in journals such as American Literary History, ELH, American Literature, and Genre, and he's currently completing a book manuscript on fifties and sixties American literature and culture that includes a chapter on Joseph Heller.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

By Joseph Heller:

Something Happened (1974)

By others:

The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (1921)

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)

The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947)

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)

The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney (1950)

From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951)

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952)

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)

The Organization Man by William H Whyte (1956)

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962)

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty (1996)

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015)

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LINKS

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The 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.