Los Angeles, 1981. A group of beautiful, rich, high school students are playing adult in their absentee parents' empty mansions, fueled by lust and prescription drugs, and filled with fear and disaffection. This is the world of The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis’ first novel in 13 years, part auto-fiction, part horror. The provocative and polarising author joins ... Show More
Nov 24
Does modern medicine need to drop the distinction between mental and physical health? With Professor Edward Bullmore
For centuries, mental and physical health have been divided - disorders of the mind and body have been treated as if they were poles apart. This deep-rooted division has shaped medicine, psychiatry, and society. But what if this mind/body split is not only outdated - but dangerou ... Show More
47m 33s
Apr 2020
#254 Holly Bourne on Writing Teen & Adult Novels
My guest today is the brilliant author Holly Bourne who started her writing career as a news journalist, where she was nominated for Best Print Journalist of the Year. She then spent six years working as an editor, a relationship advisor, and general 'agony aunt' for a youth char ... Show More
37m 19s
Jul 2021
A Heartbreaking Novel About Mothers, Daughters and Secrets
<p>The latest pick for Group Text, our monthly column for readers and book clubs, is Esther Freud's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/books/i-couldnt-love-you-more-esther-freud-group-text.html" target="_blank">“I Couldn’t Love You More,”</a> a novel about three generati ... Show More
56m 44s
Sep 2021
Welcome to "Once Upon A Time... at Bennington College"
It’s the groves of academe: Bennington College, the wildest and wickedest school in America. In the last great decade: the 1980s. Bennington class of ’86, class of Bret Easton Ellis, future writer of American Psycho and co-leader of the literary Brat Pack; Jonathan Lethem, future ... Show More
3m 31s
Mar 2023
Juliana Lamy, "You Were Watching from the Sand" (Red Hen Press, 2023)
Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023) is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In "belly," a youn ... Show More
34m 41s
Sep 2023
Alexander Stille, "The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune" (FSG, 2023)
In the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, wanted to start a revo ... Show More
44m 53s
Mar 2022
Author Tessa Hadley writes a juicy tale of the bourgeois in 'Free Love'
Author Tess Hadley's new novel opens with an affair, but that's not really what the book is about. Free Love is set in the 1960s just outside of London and it starts with a wealthy woman in her 40s, Phyllis, sharing a secret kiss with a much younger man who is not her husband (ga ... Show More
9m 8s