Podcast

As the speed of AI development grows ever faster, serious questions regarding bias, transparency and misinformation linger. On his second visit to the TANK office, senior scientist at DeepMind Ali Eslami answers our queries on the social and environmental consequences of AI. 

Caroline Issa reads from the editor's letter from TANK's autumn issue, a treatise on our politically murky age of grey.

Best-known for their ground-breaking audio and video walks and multi-media sound installations, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller created one of their most memorable works, The Missing Voice (Case Study B), for Artangel in 1999. Part detective story, part psycho-geographical expedition, the soundtrack was experienced through headphones whilst walking the streets of Whitechapel in East London. They talk with James Lingwood and Michael Morris about making The Missing Voice and explore installations inspired the music of Thomas Tallis and Leonard Cohen, and the pleasures and challenges of living and making their art together.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Artist and composer Heiner Goebbels describes his mechanised installation ‘Stifter’s Dinge’, made in collaboration with Artangel in 2008, as “a composition for five pianos without pianists, a play with no actors, a performance without performers”. Adalbert Stifter was a 19th-century Austrian landscape writer known for his obsessive descriptions of the natural world, ‘Stifter’s Dinge’ was an invitation for audiences to experience many different landscapes and weather systems intercut with fragments of recorded text from Malcolm X, William S. Burroughs and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Heiner Goebbels joins Michael Morris and James Lingwood to discuss ‘Stifter’s Dinge’, and his later Artangel collaboration ‘Everything that happened and would happen’ which commemorated 100 years since the end of the First World War in 2018 with performances in Manchester, New York and St Petersburg.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture House was a quiet memorial in Bow, East London and a lighting conductor for impassioned debate in the local community and the national media. Commissioned by Artangel, House led to Whiteread becoming the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993. Whiteread sat down with James Lingwood and Michael Morris on the 30th anniversary of the demolition of House to recall how the work came into the world and reflect on what it felt like to be in the eye of a media storm. They also talk about other public sculptures of hers including Holocaust Memorial in Vienna and Cabin on Governor’s Island in New York City, as well as a surprising shift in her work that came about during the pandemic.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

“In the great prison where I was then incarcerated, I was merely the figure and the letter of a little cell in a long gallery. One of a thousand lifeless numbers, as of a thousand lifeless lives,” wrote Oscar Wilde in De Profundis, a long letter addressed to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas whilst enduring his brutal confinement in Reading Gaol in 1897. Over a century later, Reading Prison was opened to the public for the first time for Inside, an exhibition orchestrated by James Lingwood and Michael Morris with 30 international artists, performers and writers in 2016. Writer, director and performer Neil Bartlett, and writer and theatre-maker Gillian Slovo recall their experiences of the prison, the exhibition and their own contributions; Bartlett’s reading of Wilde’s De Profundis in the prison chapel, and Slovo’s letter to her mother Ruth First, who had been locked up in solitary confinement by the apartheid regime in South Africa.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

A titanic figure in performance, Pina Bausch’s blend of elaborate staging and innovative choreography remains unparalleled even 15 years after her death. Former co-director of Artangel Michael Morris and Artistic Director and Co-Chief Executive of Sadler’s Wells Alistair Spalding reminisce about their late friend.

Over the past two decades Yto Barrada has made a vital contribution to cultural life in the city of Tangier in Moroco, across north Africa and the Middle East. She talks with James Lingwood and Michael Morris about the vision for her most recent project The Mothership, an ‘eco-campus’ in Tangier developed with Artangel over recent years; a place for growing and making where artists and artisans, botanists and ecologists, amateurs and experts explore the rich and varied world of natural dyes. They discuss her work as an archivist and activist, and the reasons behind her decision to withdraw her work from the Barbican Centre’s recent exhibition Unravel - The Art and Politics of Textiles.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

What are the boundaries of mutual understanding and empathy? Marcus Coates’ powerful and poignant Artangel work The Directors offers a profound exploration into this question. In five films, Coates reenacted the experiences of five individuals in recovery from psychosis, each directing him from behind the camera. The work was an attempt to create a reciprocal dialogue between Coates and the directors in order to recognise the other’s shared humanity and help reduce the stigma of psychosis. In conversation with Michael Morris and James Lingwood, Marcus Coates is joined by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who has his own history with Artangel in the exhibition The Concise Dictionary of Dress made in collaboration with fashion curator Judith Clark in 2010.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Part theatrical event, part archeological dig, ‘The Vertical Line’ was an Artangel production by the director and actor Simon McBurney and the writer and art historian John Berger. Performed in “the darkness of rock” 30 metres beneath central London, audiences were magically transported 30,000 years back in time from the platforms of the disused Strand station below Aldwych to the Chauvet Caves, site of some of the world’s most ancient forms of human expression. Simon McBurney joins Michael Morris and James Lingwood to discuss the project and his creative partnership with John Berger.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

The performance artist, filmmaker, musician, and composer Laurie Anderson has long been one of the most compelling multi-media chroniclers of our time. At heart a storyteller and alchemist, she makes poetry out of technology, using imagery and language in all its forms to reveal something universal out of personal experience. Laurie Anderson has collaborated on several occasions with Artangel and she is joined by Michael Morris and James Lingwood to reflect and to discuss her current hopes, fears and preoccupations.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

In 2001, Jeremy Deller restaged the Battle of Orgreave, one of the most notorious conflicts of the 1984 UK miners’ strike. Deller’s first decision was to involve former miners who had experienced the original battle, performing alongside historical reenactors. This was a forensic attempt, in Deller’s words, to “revisit a crime scene, dig up a corpse and give it a proper post-mortem”. His subsequent work ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, featuring actors dressed as World War One soldiers silently deployed across the UK to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, similarly reflected Deller’s call to “re-live” painful moments in British history. Jeremy Deller joins James Lingwood and Michael Morris to discuss the production of ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ and how the artist has repeatedly explored the intersections of memory, public inquiry and masculinity.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Since the 1970s, Roni Horn has been intimately involved with the distinctive geography, geology, culture and climate of Iceland. She talks with James Lingwood and Michael Morris about her longstanding relationship with the island and how her project with Artangel, the installation ‘Vatnasafn/Library of Water’, was realised in a former library building in the coastal town of Stykkishólmur. Housing a collection of glacial water collected across Iceland and weather reports from people in the local community, the Library of Water is emblematic of Horn’s ongoing exploration, in her writing, drawings and sculpture, of weather, water and the shifting nature of identity.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

In 1518, an unusual plague engulfed the city of Strasbourg. Scores of people were “infected”, compelled to dance for weeks on end, beyond exhaustion and sometimes to their deaths. 502 years later, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the globe, in rapid response filmmaker Jonathan Glazer made 'Strasbourg 1518' with Artangel. A vision of confinement, liberation and constraint, featuring some of the world’s leading dancers, moving to a new score by Mica Levi and shot entirely on iPhone. The film’s technical daring marked a continuation of Glazer’s radical experiments in film form, which he discusses here with Michael Morris and James Lingwood.

HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.

The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

“Oftentimes a memory knows that the body cannot handle it, so it protects you and breaks itself into these fragments, and redistributes itself...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans discusses her recent collaboration with Miu Miu for their FW24 show, a film exploring the ramifications of a digital storage crisis. Starring Guslagie Malanda, the film continues Evans' inquiry into how emotion interrelates with ideological and societal structures. She discusses memory, nonbinary identity and the practicalities of creating for a fashion show. 

“What we see at DeSmog is people using a playbook, and that's the same as the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry before them...”

Hazel Healy, environmental journalist and UK editor of DeSmog, a platform investigating climate change misinformation, speaks to TANK on the spin tactics used by the agricultural industry. Speaking at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, Healy dishes the dirt on how major agricultural corporations obscure the environmental impact of their practices. 

“Love is impossible as long as it is attached to physical, emotional and economic safety...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Caroline Issa decodes Simone de Beauvoir's classic of feminist philosophy, The Second Sex. Assessing anthropology, history and biology, de Beauvoir illustrates the mechanisms of female oppression over two millennia. 

“What Not to Wear presented the bleak truth of fashion as something eternally wedged as somewhere between self-hate and self-worship...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Dal Chodha reads from 'You gotta keep your head straight about clothes', a consideration of 'Cheap Chic', one of the first consumer guides to thrift shopping. Written in the 1970s, the acerbic advice given in the guide sees contemporary manifestations in the camp absurdity of 'What Not to Wear'.

“It's possible to be a feminist and a Freudian...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Holly Stevenson and Rosie Gibbens discuss Hans Richter's seminal surrealist masterpiece Dreams that Money Can Buy, a dreamy and deeply strange dadaist romp directed by some of the luminaries of the 1940s avant garde.

“The East, in need of 'civilising', became a fertile ground for colonial ventures...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Caroline Issa assesses Edward Said's enduring 1978 book Orientalism, a treatise into the imperialist attitudes underpinning Western conceptions of the East.

“I lost my virginity to Hastings beach...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, director Andrew Kotting and flaneur John Rogers discuss Kotting's foundational film 'Gallivant', a psychogeographic romp across this strange island we call home. Made on a shoestring budget, 'Gallivant' follows Kotting, his grandmother Gladys and his disabled daughter Eden on a unique road trip across the coasts of Britain, meeting farmers, fishermen and folklore along the way.

“International law has become the exception rather than the rule in defining the actions of states today...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Faisal Devji discusses the new geopolitical paradigm emerging in the wake of the Gaza conflict. This podcast was recorded in November 2023.

“Critical art is not the adversary of art financialisation; it is its essential alibi. The more radical the art, the better the alibi. Win-win.”

In this week's TANK podcast, Benjamin Bratton reads from his article “Not Right Now”, a critique on the art-making paradigm of subjectivity-as-format and the bloated art speak he christens “International Art English”.

“I am filled with a deep sense of well-being as I watch a hillside stone tumble down the slope and think of the other people or small animals who have watched the same stones over incalculable seasons.”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Jan-Peter Westad reads “Above the Clouds of Endagin”, taken from the Winter 2023 issue of TANK. In the piece, Westad pays a visit to the Kulm hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, high in the Alps and where Friedrich Nietzsche arrived at his theory of eternal recurrence.

“These are the ways I like mustard: scraped onto bread to save a boring sandwich; slapped onto salt beef; a scoop on the side of my plate, to be swiped at with a sausage; as the basis for a hearty, wine-filled sauce.”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Hester van Hensbergen reads from her piece “Spice up your life”, a paean to the joys of mustard and its storied history in the city of Dijon.

“Oh well, he thinks, at least I drank and laughed. Oh well, he thinks, at least I did a little bit of fucking, and it was good.”

In this week's TANK podcast, A.K. Blakemore reads from “The Glutton”, her vivid, disquieting depiction of Tarrare, a French peasant famed for his insatiable hunger.

“People should not be deterred or afraid, because their rights are heavily protected by legislation...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Giovanni Fassina, executive director of the European Legal Support Centre, discusses how to ensure your rights are being protected while protesting.

“As far as wealth is inextricable with social organisation, it will infuse the individual on the very essential level on his sense of self...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Caroline Issa reads and decodes Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, a treatise on consumerism and the emergent concept of conspicuous consumption.

“I'm interested in a form of something almost like exhaustion...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Stephanie Sy-Quia speaks to poet Bhanu Kapil on the siren call of the archive and the rituals that inform writing.

“It's about talent, first and foremost...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Arnaud Carrez, Senior Vice President of Cartier discusses the jewellery maison's proud heritage and recent artistic collaborations.

“You have a sense of vibration when you use cardboard...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, artist Eva Jospin discusses her collaboration with the champagne house Ruinart as part of their Carte Blanche program, a series of artworks and immersive environments made entirely out of cardboard.

“Before her husband died and her house burned down, Bicycle Jenny worked at Crocker's, the slaughtering plant...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, Kathryn Scanlan reads from her haunting and vivid novel Kick the Latch, based on a series of interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer from Iowa.

“I wanted my melancholy atypical, non-conformist, kinky...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Anaheed Nersessian reads from her book Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, both an exhaustive work of literary criticism and a love letter to the Romantic Poet.

“I couldn't believe she'd been that ill-tempered, so steadfast in her refusal to please people. Maybe I loved her after all...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Nicole Flattery reads from Nothing Special, her coming-of-age novel set in 1960s New York.

“The country is becoming a site of extremes...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Mohsen Mostafavi discusses his new book Sharing Tokyo, an erudite collection of essays on Tokyo as a shared architectural space.

“I found myself humming an Olivia Rodrigo song...”

Oscar-winning composer Justin Hurwitz discusses his nearly two-decade career composing alongside director Damien Chazelle. This interview was hosted at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, in collaboration with Cartier.

“People were admitted to asylums for politics, novel reading, hatred of spouse...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Micha Frazer-Carroll discusses her new book Mad World, published by Pluto Press. Mad World investigates the ways in which mental health goes beyond the personal, connected – sometimes obliquely – to systems of medicine, culture and capitalism. This talk was taken from a talk hosted by Pluto at the TANK Reading Rooms.

“The alignment of political actors has changed to a degree that it is now no longer possible to continue the liberal mode of Palestinian politics...”

In this week's TANK Podcast, recorded the day after Hamas launched their attack on Israel, Faisal Devji discusses the Palestine question in conjunction with wider geopolitical transformations.

“I wanted the title to make people feel something, and I wanted it to feel bad...”

Bratty, bright and magisterial, the new album by L'Rain (real name: Taja Cheek) I Killed Your Dog is a bold next step for the New York-based artist. With a faintly diabolical undertone that is perfectly attuned to our insurgent apocalypse, L'Rain continues to refine her artful blend of ambient, R&B and psychedelia, whilst introducing new shades of crunchy rock and wistful folk music. In this week's TANK Podcast, Matteo Pini spoke to L'Rain about early synthesisers, running out of time and the canicide of the album's title.

"Intelligences tend to have very narrow applications."

In this week's TANK podcast, AI researcher Ali Eslami speaks to Caroline Issa on the potentials and pitfalls of AI and the brave new world it will usher in.

“I wish to give freely or to sell...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Sophia Giovannitti reads from her book Working Girl, a frank account of her own experiences with sex work and the art marketplace. In the passage, she uses Marina Abramović's work as a jumping-off point for a wider consideration of bodily autonomy in the gig economy era.

“How are we to understand the similarity of aspiration which characterises both the refugees and the billionaires who were on the submersible?”

Welcome to the TANK podcast. In this week's episode, Oxford professor Faisal Devji reflects on the media reaction to two recent maritime accidents, and it tells us about Western perspectives on class, ethnicity and aspiration.

“The Chinese don't really need or want incursion on Indian territory...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Oxford professor Faisal Devji discusses Indian-American relations in the wake of Modi and Biden's recent meeting, and the impact it will have on Chinese diplomacy.

“Aestheticisation is a bid for the virtual to feel actual...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Matteo Pini reads an excerpt from his piece on BookTok, featured in the Summer Reader. The trend towards decorating books is nothing new, but on BookTok, readers take aestheticisation to a curious new level. 

In this week's TANK podcast, Gboyega Odubanjo reads three poems from his forthcoming poetry collection Adam, which considers civic identity, gentrification and diasporic masculinities.

“The only way discontinuity happens is through the birth of an ego.”

In this week's TANK podcast, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Sougwen Chung and Asad Raza discuss the legacy of Gaia theory, synthetic intelligence and how technology inevitably decentres the human. This conversation was held at the As Above, So Below event hosted by Ignota Books at the Science Gallery, of which TANK was an official media partner. 

“The whole of the living world is embedded in fluid networks of some kind of communication...”

In this week's TANK podcast, Gaia Vince, Edna Bonhomme, Daisy Hildyard and Merlin Sheldrake discuss the ways in which Gaia theory has influenced their respective practices. This conversation was held at the As Above, So Below event hosted by Ignota Books at the Science Gallery.

“The logic of the top-down bureaucratic structure that characterizes nation states is breaking down...”

In this week's TANK podcast, in the wake of the Wagner Group rebellion, Faisal Devji considers the increasing use of contractors and mercenaries within global conflict.

“If you're not having a nervous breakdown on this planet at the moment, you're mad...”

In this episode of the TANK podcast, Mark Rylance discussed his transatlantic upbringing, Jeremy Corbyn and his new role in Inland, a micro-budget debut feature directed by Fridtjof Ryder, who was only 20 at the time of production.

“The solution to our predicaments isn't finally finding the one perfect and truthful news source but realising that such a source is inside us all."

In this week's TANK podcast, Caroline Issa reads from the editor's letter of the 2023 Summer Reader, on the Iranian revolution, AI and why the centre is no longer holding.

“... the forest becomes an entity and an organism that is partly the mother, partly something else ...”

Fridtjof Ryder is the director of Inland, which recently saw a nationwide release. A bewitching fairy tale set in Ryder's homeland of Gloucester, the film was shot when the director was only 20. TANK assistant editor Nell Whittaker recently sat down with Ryder to discuss changeling myths and the limitations of English folklore.

"They don't like it that you, not just as a Black person, but a Black person with a certain kind of politics, occupies a certain kind of space. And the moment you get the adjective wrong then they're on you."

In this episode of the TANK podcast, Masoud Golsorkhi talks to Gary Younge about his new book Dispatches from the Diaspora, a collection of essays from Younge's 30-year career as a journalist and broadcaster.

"In the context of diminishing spaces for criticism, the soaring price of paper, and an incipient AI revolution, we have sought to understand the art and business of books."

For the first time since 2015, TANK has revamped the Summer Reader. In this week's podcast, our resident voiceover artist Tina explains why, and what to expect from the issue, available now in all good newsagents.

"Sanctions...refuse to distinguish between war and peace."

In this week's episode, we spoke again to Faisal Devji, a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, on why neutrality as a mode of international relations is making a most welcomed return. 

"What happens in civil wars is they are never resolved..."

In this episode of the TANK podcast, we spoke again to Faisal Devji, a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, on why civil war has become the predominant form of conflict marring geopolitics today.

"Is it not ridiculous that where you went to school has an impact on people 20, 30 years down the line?"

As the gap in funding between state and private school pupils grows wider, the entrenchment of the private school system within British culture becomes ever incompatible with democracy. In this episode of the TANK podcast, editorial assistant Matteo Pini talks with Paul Turner of Integrate Private Schools, previously known as Abolish Eton. The pair discuss the movement's complicated relationship with the Labour Party and how private schools represent a continuation of the British colonial project.

"If craft is not literal reproduction, can it also change the nature of social reproduction? It's a big ask to expect a kitting needle to puncture a government..."

In this week's TANK podcast, Joanna Walsh reads from her piece "Craft in the digital age", which considers the myriad interweavings between craft, capitalism and modern technology.

"I may be able to trick some people into thinking I'm human..."

In this week's TANK podcast, Tina reads from our interview with our favourite robot overlord ChatGPT, discussing autonomy, how machine learning works and the murky future of AI.

"Science fiction fantasy allows for the kind of storytelling that can elaborate on and extrapolate from the increasingly bizarre reality we hold in common."

In this week's TANK podcast, Olivia Erlanger reads her piece 'The fantastic real', an account of how science fiction fantasy has influenced her artistic practice.

"Drunk client was getting slightly drunker than usual at one of our lunches when he decided that we had to go to one of the city's ritziest strip clubs..."

In this week's TANK podcast, Charlotte Shane reads from her memoir Prostitute Laundry, a thoughtful account of the pleasures and pains of sex work.

"Never before has what is most intimately one’s own been so readily available as the object of others’ knowledge."

Paul Franz reads from his piece "Yesterday this day's madness did prepare", which investigates the representation of time, memory and research in Terry Gilliam's 1995 sci-fi noir.

“It wasn’t all perfect in the 1960s, but there was a genuine debate about ideas”

Jeremy Corbyn on school, his vision for a National Education Service and the learning opportunities within industrial action.

"It is unadmitted grappling with the history of Empire that is informing the discourse and the narrative of the European Right, and not the story of fascism..."

Faisal Devji, a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, on the European Right, its relationship to colonialism and race, and its future on the political stage.

“In novels, very often we hear about an evening or an afternoon that changes the character’s life forever... actually, some of the big changes in life happen not suddenly, but very gradually.”

Geoff Dyer reads from The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (Canongate, 2022), his paen to conclusions, endings and exits by way of Bob Dylan, Jean Rhys, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.M.W. Turner and the Disintegration Tapes.

“The demotion of movies comes at a time when the world, in reality, is cracking clean open and we are fast losing the shared traditions that included a common artistic language and art forms with a life-breath in them that came down through the generations.”

Justin E.H. Smith reads from his piece “We Don't Need Another Hero” from TANK’s entertainment issue. Read here.

We invited acclaimed literary translators Anton Hur and Bryan Karetnyk to discuss the art of translation: the unstable element of deception, the difference between working with living and long-gone writers, and what it feels like to live half-inside a language. This is part two of the conversation, so if you haven’t listened already, start with last week’s podcast.

We invited acclaimed literary translators Anton Hur and Bryan Karetnyk to discuss the art of translation: the unstable element of deception, the difference between working with living and long-gone writers, and what it feels like to live half-inside a language.

This is part one of Anton and Bryan's conversation – part two will be released next week.

Watch Bryan and Anton in conversation on TANKtv, and read more about Cursed Bunny and Deceit in our Summer Reader.

Thuận and Trà My Hickin read from Thuận's novel Chinatown, in a translation by Nguyễn An Lý. Thuận reads in Vietnamese and Trà My in English, providing a rare opportunity to hear the novel in two of Thuận's languages. 

See last week's podcast, or this video on TANKtv, for a mediative interview with Thuận in which she discusses language, translation, and what you can say in French but not in Vietnamese.

Tice Cin interviews writer Thuận, alongside translator Trà My Hickin, about her new novel Chinatown. Thuận’s twelfth novel and the first to be translated into English, Chinatown takes place over the couple of hours that a mother and her son wait in a stopped Metro carriage. As she waits, she is assailed by recollections of her son’s father and their shared adolescence in Hanoi, her university years in Leningrad, and her life now in Paris and its suburbs. Tice and Thuận spoke about dreaming, walking, time and how the act of translating between Vietnamese, French and English affords new linguistic opportunity.

Pankaj Mishra reads from his exacting novel Run and Hide, a prescient and unflinching examination of globalisation at the level of the individual and the local. Enrolling in the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology will change Arun's life and send him wheeling from Delhi to New York to Tuscany, but how long can he and his friends live out this strange and extravagant lifestyle?

Read our interview with Pankaj here.

Fernanda Melchor reads from her ferocious novel Paradais, "a labyrinthine monologue on the banal violence of a modern-day teenager" (Virginie Despentes). Then, translator Sophie Hughes reads from her translation of Fernanda's previous novel Hurricane Season – for which she "deserves a medal", according to the New Statesman, her translation "expertly capturing the novel’s lugubrious comedy and propulsive, high-octane scatology".

Read an extract of Paradais in the Summer Reader. Both books are published by Fitzcarraldo.

We invited publishing superstar Barbara Epler of New Directions to make a selection of books for our Summer Reader. She tells Tina about how she built her list and why every writer on it is a genius. 

Read extracts from Barbara’s selections in the latest issue of the magazine.