Summer podcast update A short note to let you know what’s happening with the Personal Landscapes podcast this summer. Most of the podcasts I listen to tend to take a short break in summer. I don’t. My ‘short breaks’ happen when I’m traveling. There will only be one episode in July, rather than the usual two, and probably no episodes in August. I prepared for several more but unfortunately I...
Not following Personal Landscapes on Substack? You’re missing out on a pile of exciting book-related content, like my recent long form piece What I Learned From Paul Theroux. I’ve also published a growing archive of book reviews, including: The Longest Way Home by Andrew McCarthy, The Riverbones by Andrew Westoll, Mongolia: Travels in an Untamed Land by Jasper Becker, and The Saddest Pleasure by...
I hate ads. I hate listening to them when I listen to podcasts, and I don’t want to inflict them on you, either. I want to keep my conversations with the world’s most interesting writers both free — no paywalls — and ad-free, so I’ve moved Personal Landscapes to Substack. New episodes will be emailed to subscribers automatically, so please sign up to the free tier on my new Substack to stay...
Clair Wills Clair Wills was in her twenties when she learned she had a cousin she’d never met. It wasn’t as though their families drifted apart. She’d never been told of this person’s existence. It was shrouded in shame and secrecy, and she wanted to understand why. She pieced the story together from forgotten anecdotes, dim memories and institutional archives spanning four generations of...
Deborah Lawrenson What would you do if someone you knew your entire life — your mother — suddenly revealed that she’d been a spy? Deborah Lawrenson turned her story into a novel. The tangled web of espionage she weaves in The Secretary is fiction, but the background to the story is authentic, drawn in part from a seemingly innocent diary her mother wrote in 1958 while working at the...
New podcast appearance Do you miss me? Wait… maybe it’s better if you don’t answer that. I was going to ask if you missed the velvety tone of my voice, but I’m missing it, too. What I hear instead is the cracked, sleep-deprived voice of an introvert who spends too much time alone in a room. If you’re looking for a dose of THAT, you’re in luck. I spoke with Chris Braucks about Malta and my book A...
Michael Asher In 1986, Michael Asher and his wife Mariantonietta Peru set out to cross the Sahara from west to east, by camel and on foot. Asher was already a seasoned desert traveler who’d learned his camel skills in Sudan’s Darfur region. He met his wife — an aid worker and photographer — in Khartoum, but they’d only been married for five days when they ventured into the sands. Their...
Charles Nicholl Arthur Rimbaud turned French poetry on its head in his late teens. He took the Baudelairean medium of the prose poem, injected adolescent rage, slang and a remarkable inventiveness with language to create his visionary masterpiece A Season in Hell and a shimmering collection of Illuminations. His work influenced everyone from the modernists and the Beats to Bob Dylan and Jim...
Paul Theroux Nearly all of Paul Theroux’s fiction is about a person — usually male, often a writer — trying to solve a problem. In several of the stories from The Vanishing Point, his new collection, that problem doesn’t have a solution. He describes a vanishing point as a moment when seemingly all the lines running through one’s life converge and one can see no further, yet we must deal...
Pamela Petro 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...