Fiction and the Fantastic
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Ranking history
About the show
Latest episodes
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J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter
October 19, 2025 · 14 minJ.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of manners and empire that…
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‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington
September 21, 2025 · 16 minLeonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, her writing has helped cement her cult status, not least The Hearing Trumpet (1974)…
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Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
August 24, 2025 · 13 minJorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by…
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‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
July 27, 2025 · 32 minBorn from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction, horror and trauma narrative, and…
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Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg
June 29, 2025 · 14 minJames Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an…
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Gothic Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen
June 1, 2025 · 15 min‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.’ The gothic is a central seam of the…
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Stories by Franz Kafka
May 4, 2025 · 16 minIn the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the 20th century as it…
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‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll
April 6, 2025 · 16 minAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of…