In this week's podcast we discuss the controversy over Philip Roth's Man Booker International win.
We also mark the launch of a new publisher dedicated to the essay. Lucasta Miller, of Notting Hill Editions joins us in the studio to explain why, far from a schoolroom slog, the essay is the most flexible and joyful of forms with a history that ranges from Montaigne and Locke to Roland Barthes and Virginia Woolf. The biographer Iain Finlayson takes issue with one of our Twitter followers as to whether Boswell was actually a better essayist than Johnson.
Finally, we head off for another recent controversy, to hear from the poet Alice Oswald whether it's true that the great Bengali master Rabindranath Tagore is untranslatable.
Reading list
American Pastoral, by Philip Roth, Vintage
I Married a Communist, by Philip Roth, Vintage
The Human Stain, by Philip Roth, Vintage
Notting Hill Editions Gift Box 1
The Essential Tagore, Harvard University Press
