The podcast’s topics, too, reflect the hosts’ wide-ranging tastes. While they do spar over the relative merits of English department favorites like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, they also discuss the work of the romance novelist Jackie Collins (a favorite of James’s) and “Nothing Lasts Forever,” the 1979 novel by Roderick Thorp on which the film “Die Hard” is based.
James, a professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., won the Booker Prize in 2015 for “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” and was a National Book Awards finalist last year for his fantasy novel “Black Leopard, Red Wolf.” That he would gravitate toward podcasting is no surprise to those familiar with his books. In “Black Leopard,” he worked hard to retain the oral and aural dimensions of the western and central African epic traditions that inspired the project. “I write to be read aloud,” he said.
On top of encouraging readers to expand their literary horizons, James has found there are other benefits to talking about authors from the past. “I’m not denying there is some fun in talking trash about dead people,” he said. “They can’t attack me on Twitter.”
After the first two episodes of “Marlon and Jake Read Dead People” drop, the subsequent six installments will be released each Monday on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/books/marlon-james-podcast-dead-people.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
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