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.

-----

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)

-----

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).

-----

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)

-----

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.

-----

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)

-----

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.