Personal Landscapes podcast

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Personal Landscapes

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Personal Landscapes: Conversations on Books About Place

56 episode

#Society #Travel #Books #Arts #Ryan Murdock

Personal Landscapes

updated 14 hari yang lalu

Beranda serial•Feed

Personal Landscapes: Conversations on Books About Place

56 episode

#Society #Travel #Books #Arts #Ryan Murdock

Semua episode

Personal Landscapes

1
Paul Theroux on life’s vanishing points 1:35:16

14 hari yang lalu1:35:16

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1:35:16

The stories in The Vanishing Point, Paul Theroux's new collection, span the globe from Hawaii and the South Seas to Africa and New England. They have all the qualities I love in his fiction: a sharp bite of satire that skewers pretension, crisp dialogue, and an eye for the small, clear detail — an action, a pattern of speech, an element of dress — that reveals someone’s deepest character. He describes the things we all see but don’t mention in polite conversation, and he shines a light on thoughts we actively avoid. Paul is the author of some 33 works of fiction including The Mosquito Coast and The Bad Angel Brothers, and 19 travel books including The Great Railway Bazaar and Dark Star Safari, books that cemented his standing as our greatest living travel writer. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the core themes in these stories, including aging, childhood reading, and how taking risks can make you wise.…

Personal Landscapes

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Pamela Petro on the Welsh presence of absence 59:48

27 hari yang lalu59:48

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Pamela Petro is an American writer obsessed with a country she visited by chance. She first went to Wales as a graduate student in her early twenties. The place felt deeply familiar from the moment she arrived, as did the sense of longing that permeates its landscape and stories, both recent and ancient. The Welsh have a word for this acute presence of absence, an untranslatable term that captures the feeling of something left behind or taken away, irretrievable beyond place and time, but that forever saddens, motivates and marks us. It’s a feeling that resonates deeply with me, and I think you’ll recognize it, too. We spoke about her obsession with Wales, the presence of absence, and how the sense of loss and longing drives creativity and invention.…

Personal Landscapes

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Katja Hoyer on daily life in East Germany 1:06:54

6 weeks yang lalu1:06:54

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Eighties movies portrayed East Germany as a vast open-air prison populated by monotonous grey blurs without individuality or agency, but the GDR was not a static land that time forgot. Katja Hoyer's brilliant book Beyond The Wall tells its story through the lives of ordinary people. She also grapples with the ongoing tension between a Germany that sees the GDR as an aberration, and the desire of East Germans to hold on to their memories of a life they lived in colour. We spoke about daily life in East Germany, why the Berlin Wall reduced political tensions, and why tinned soup became a modern political controversy.…

Personal Landscapes

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Julian Evans on Odesa and Ukraine 46:58

8 weeks yang lalu46:58

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa, Ukraine on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994. He fell in love with its distinct personality as a self-contained world. He also fell in love with a local woman, and for nearly thirty years, her city became his city, too. His new book, Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War, weaves memoir with history and literature to give us a haunting portrait of a country struggling against terrible odds to survive. We spoke about the city of Odesa, his visits to front line combat zones, and what Russia’s war means for Europe.…

Personal Landscapes

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Jeffrey Meyers on charting parallel lives 1:00:50

10 weeks yang lalu1:00:50

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . A great biography reveals the raw humanity behind lives of rare genius. In his latest book, Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, Jeffrey Meyers draws on Plutarch’s principle of dual composition to shed fresh light on some of the figures who did so much to shape our world. It’s full of literary feuds, illicit romance, chronic alcoholism and sympathetic attachments between writers, artists, actors, directors, and thinkers —names you’ll recognize, and ‘greats’ you thought you understood. We spoke about Plutarch’s use of mirror images, literary feuds as spectator sport, and Audrey Hepburn’s connection to Anne Frank.…

Personal Landscapes

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Cam Honan on the hiking life 1:24:31

12 weeks yang lalu1:24:31

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Cam Honan has hiked across 56 countries on six continents, logging over 96,500 km in three decades. Backpacker Magazine called him “the most traveled hiker on earth”. I’ve wanted to speak with him for ages about his excellent website The Hiking Life. He's also the author of Wanderlust Nordics, Wanderlust Himalaya, Wanderlust Mediterranean, Wanderlust USA, The Hidden Tracks, and other books. We talked about his favourite Nordic trails, how to go light by ditching your tent and sleeping bag, and why you should see the world at walking speed.…

Personal Landscapes

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Richard Grant: A race to the bottom of crazy 1:06:32

14 weeks yang lalu1:06:32

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Richard Grant has lived in Arizona for more than twenty years, and his latest book — A Race to the Bottom of Crazy — is a fascinating blend of memoir, history, local issues and encounters with strange characters. It’s a place where social guardrails are weak, and outlandish behaviour is the order of the day. Arizona doesn’t just reflect national trends, it exaggerates them. Is it a bellwether for the world to come? We spoke about the lure of the desert, Arizona’s southern border, water shortages, and the world’s biggest machine gun shoot.…

Personal Landscapes

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Lesley Downer on poetry in Japan’s deep north 1:19:17

16 weeks yang lalu1:19:17

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Lesley Downer's fascination with Japan's most famous poet took her from Tokyo's drab industrial concrete into what was then a seldom-visited part of Honshu. It was a place of sake-drenched poetry sessions in thatched-roof highland villages, and holy mountains where modern ascetics continued to roam between their past and future lives in search of atonement. Her book about this journey, On The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was reissued by Eland in 2024. We spoke about Matsuo Basho’s haiku, mountain ascetics and Japan’s undiscovered north.…

Personal Landscapes

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Thomas Swick: Life in Cold War Poland 1:12:02

18 weeks yang lalu1:12:02

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. His newest book Falling Into Place is a memoir of his life behind the Iron Curtain, but it’s also a writer’s coming of age in the heyday of post-Watergate journalism. We spoke about life in the Eastern Bloc, Polish films, and the ten sins of travel writing.…

Personal Landscapes

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Ian Fleming with biographer Nicholas Shakespeare 1:27:08

28 weeks yang lalu1:27:08

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Ian Fleming was overshadowed by the fictional character he created in the final decade of his life, but his own story is far more interesting. Biographer Nicholas Shakespeare joined me to talk about Fleming’s troubled childhood, his wartime intelligence work, and how an American president made James Bond a bestseller.…

Personal Landscapes

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Kapka Kassabova: Europe’s last nomadic pastoralists 1:04:17

33 weeks yang lalu1:04:17

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Kapka Kassabova writes about marginal places and the interdependence of humans and animals in traditional societies. In her last four books, she has made the Balkans her subject — a region I love visiting for its rugged geography and people. She’s one of today’s most interesting writers on place, and one whose work will stand the test of time. We spoke about her newest book Anima: A Wild Pastoral , the interdependence of humans and animals, and what it’s like to live as a shepherd in a vertical world.…

Personal Landscapes

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Eric Cline: Why civilization ended in 1177 B.C. 1:26:15

36 weeks yang lalu1:26:15

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . The Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a surprisingly interconnected place. Trade flourished, interrupted by the odd embargo, and military conflicts used disinformation for strategic gain. And then something terrible happened that brought it all to an end. Large empires and small kingdoms that had been flourishing for centuries all collapsed at around the same time. It was as though civilization itself had been wiped away. What caused it? And could it happen to us? Eric Cline joined me to talk about the globalized Bronze Age world, why some civilizations vanished and others thrived, and why future historians might look at 2020 in the same way we look at 1177 B.C.…

Personal Landscapes

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Paul Theroux on Orwell and Burma Sahib 1:31:48

38 weeks yang lalu1:31:48

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Long before he wrote 1984 — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen year old policeman in Burma. Biographies skirt over this five year period, but it was the making of the writer he would become. Today’s guest set out to imagine those years in a wonderful new novel called Burma Sahib. I've read all of Paul Theroux's books over the last 30 years. They were a crucial influence on me as a young traveller and writer, and I’ve gotten enormous enjoyment from them. We spoke about George Orwell and Burma, of course. But this was also a conversation about reading and the life of a writer. I hope you enjoy it.…

Personal Landscapes

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Jonathan Raban: one of our greatest writers on place 55:23

40 weeks yang lalu55:23

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . Jonathan Raban wrote about human landscapes rather than uninhabited ones, and the borderlands between what a place professes to be and what they are. An Englishman who emigrated to Seattle at the age of 47, his status as an outsider gave him a unique perspective on America as the land of perpetual self-reinvention. Many of his books involved water — from the coastal UK to the Mississippi and the Inside Passage — and all contain interior as well as physical journeys. Julia Raban and editor John Freeman joined me to talk about Jonathan's fascination with sailing, the emigrant experience and reading landscape.…

Personal Landscapes

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James Salter: with biographer Jeffrey Meyers 1:08:19

42 weeks yang lalu1:08:19

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Donate to Personal Landscapes . James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, and a successful screenwriter. His sentences are fractured jewels. The details are closely observed, the imagery poetic. Every page contains an observation I want to write down. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers joined me to talk about Salter’s remarkable prose style, his core themes of love and loss, and why this giant of American fiction isn’t more widely read today.…

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