The NEW Torchlight List podcast

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22:08

Host Francesca Amiker sits down with directors Joe and Anthony Russo, producer Angela Russo-Otstot, stars Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, and more to uncover how family was the key to building the emotional core of The Electric State . From the Russos’ own experiences growing up in a large Italian family to the film’s central relationship between Michelle and her robot brother Kid Cosmo, family relationships both on and off of the set were the key to bringing The Electric State to life. Listen to more from Netflix Podcasts . State Secrets: Inside the Making of The Electric State is produced by Netflix and Treefort Media.…

The NEW Torchlight List

Professor Jim Flynn talks with Wallace Chapman about his controversial list of the best modern books.

10 episodi

#Arts #New Zealand #RNZ

The NEW Torchlight List

updated 8 anni fa

Pagina principale della serie•Feed

Professor Jim Flynn talks with Wallace Chapman about his controversial list of the best modern books.

10 episodi

#Arts #New Zealand #RNZ

Tutti gli episodi

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List: Best Books & Authors 13:42

8 years fa13:42

13:42

It's Jim's final countdown and he rates the authors from the very best, through to those he wants to read more of, promising authors, those not quite good enough, the unpromising - and the just plain awful. He tells Wallace he still loves reading - but he won't do another book like this again: "When you are recommended 400 books you often encounter an author like Knausgard who has been much hailed but you can't damn him without reading about four of his books. So you've read one book and you absolutely hate it and he kills your pleasure in reading for the next fortnight because you now have to go on reading four horrible books and I don't think I could put myself through that again."…

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List - Asia and the Middle East 15:31

8 years fa15:31

15:31

This chapter of The New Torchlight List takes in a big geographical area and a variety of cultures.

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List: Africa 14:42

8 years fa14:42

14:42

Jim agrees with Wallace's love for Disgrace, by South African writer J.M. Coetzee - though Jim says Coetzee's "not brilliant". He describes the Cairo trilogy by Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz as "a landmark work". Jim recommends Somalian writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali "for an unparalleled insight into what Islam means for those who interpret the Koran literally". She was subjected to female circumcision at the age of five and over the years turned away from Islam. Jim tells Wallace about the value of entering another culture in a novel: "You only know what human nature is capable of if you read what's happened to it in a variety of societies."…

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List: New Zealand & Australia 14:52

8 years fa14:52

14:52

Jim Flynn and Wallace Chapman discuss Australasian literature. Wallace takes on Jim over Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries - too long, says Jim. Not so, says Wallace. Jim says Catton can write but she needs to get her talent under control - "too much good material". He says Janet Frame also can write "but a lot of it is spoiled by schoolgirl emotive prose". Among Australian writers Jim rates Thomas Keneally with Schindler's Ark, Peter Carey and Hannah Kent - a writer with an impressive first novel, Burial Rites, that has won nine literary awards. "Watch for Kent's next novel."…

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List: Europe 15:06

8 years fa15:06

15:06

Jim Flynn tells Wallace Chapman that Italian Umberto Eco's best work is The Name of the Rose but this comes with a warning as Eco "loves to demonstrate his learning. The plot is interrupted by long essays which interest me because I teach medieval theology ..." Of best-selling Norwegian author Jo Nesbo, Jim assures Wallace that he doesn't hate him - "but he's not as good as Stieg Larsson". Later in his book, The New Torchlight List, Jim places Larsson in a list of three "awful" writers. Also on Jim's "awful" list is a writer called a "titan of modern literature" by The New Yorker, Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgard. Where, he asks, do they find these critics?…

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List: Ireland 14:30

9 years fa14:30

14:30

Jim Flynn and Wallace Chapman discuss modern Irish literature. Jim rates John Banville's "wonderful style", but is less enamoured with John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The sex in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (which was banned in Ireland in 1960) he deems "incredibly tame stuff".

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List: Britain 14:24

9 years fa14:24

14:24

Some of Jim's favourite writers feature in this episode - V.S. Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro who, he says, is "perhaps the greatest novelist of our generation. His work is going to make him one of few novelists writing today who will be read throughout this century." Jim also rates Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell: "She captures Henry the eighth who is really a gigantic baby." Jim and Wallace heartily disagree over A.S.Byatt and Jim surprises Wallace by recommending Ruth Rendell - "I don't despise people just because they write in the detective genre."…

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List: South America 13:59

9 years fa13:59

13:59

Jim and Wallace discuss South American writers, including the politics and the passion reflected in the great writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez - recommending the memorable Love in the Time of Cholera but urging readers to avoid The Autumn of the Patriarch at all costs. This book, written in one paragraph is, Jim says, "really terrible". Jim also reveals his attitude to magic realism: "I'm dead against it when it takes over. When someone disappears in a puff of smoke when they could just have easily been run over by a truck."…

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List: North America 14:37

9 years fa14:37

14:37

Jim Flynn discusses North American authors and tells Wallace Chapman that everyone must read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. He also highly rates Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, but Wallace and Jim agree that Don DeLillo's Underworld, which received "extravagant praise", isn't really up to snuff. As Jim says: "It is hard to write the great American novel when you are trying to write the great American novel."…

The NEW Torchlight List

1
The New Torchlight List: The Need to Read 14:10

9 years fa14:10