Literary Friction - City of Voices with Zadie Smith

Literary Friction

Arts

4.9 • 593 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2019

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This month's show is called City of Voices in honour of our very esteemed guest, author Zadie Smith. We met Zadie for a live event in Sheffield to talk about her first short story collection, Grand Union, a playful, ambitious symphony of different voices, styles and forms. Listen in to hear about why we should all embrace our inner chaos, the ways our voices get co-opted by Big Technology, and for a more general chat about literature by authors like William Faulkner and Yaa Gyasi that encompasses a range of different voices. Plus, of course, all the usual recommendations.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Literary Friction on NTS. I'm Carrie Plitt, here as always with my co-host, Octavia Bright.
0:19.3	Hello, Octavia.
0:21.7	How are you doing?
0:26.3	Hi, Carrie. I'm good. I think I ate too many biscuits on the train.
0:29.7	I think you ate just enough biscuits.
0:32.0	I'm feeling a little sugary.
0:37.2	No, I'm good. I'm tired, but I'm well. I'm really excited about today's show actually. Yeah, well, we'll get into
0:38.6	why we're both tired today, won't we? Okay. Yeah, we stayed in a hotel in Sheffield's in separate rooms.
0:48.6	Again, more on that later. But first, I'm going to tell you about today's show. So today we're
0:53.6	going to be talking about literature that encompasses a range of different voices, from the ensemble novels of authors like William Faulkner, Jennifer Egan, and Yagiyasi, to short story collections that directly engage with the perspectives of different people or even animals or things. We have a very exciting guest today, Zadie Smith, who has just published her
1:14.4	first short story collection, Grand Union, which I think could be described as a playful,
1:19.3	ambitious symphony of different voices. Would you say so? Definitely. And also styles and forms.
1:25.4	Yes. It's very playful. Yeah. And you could say that about her novels as well. So we thought this theme really fit with her body of work, not just this collection. We were both supposed to interview Zadie in Sheffield's last night, in fact. My train was delayed. Octavia did it solo. She killed it. I came in at the very end. It was was amazing we can't wait for you to listen to this
1:46.1	but before we get to it octavia do you want to introduce sadie i will and i will also say that i
1:51.3	like missed you up there man that's very nice of you to say but you don't need me oh spread your wings and
1:56.8	fly with sadie fly with zadie i, we should all fly with Zadie.
2:01.7	It was really incredible to speak to her.
2:04.5	She's a profoundly brilliant human being.
2:08.1	And I'm going to tell you all the wonderful things about her right now.
2:11.0	Go on.
2:11.6	She is the author of the novel's White Teeth, the Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swingtime,
2:17.3	as well as a novella, the Embassy of
	...

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