Little Atoms

Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley talk to Neil about their new book Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sam Byers is the author of Idiopathy (2013) and Perfidious Albion (2018). He talks to Neil about ideas of freedom, wellness and degradation in his new novel Come Join Our Disease . NB: For some reason Neil's end sounds like he was recorded at the bottom of a well, but Sam sounds fine and that's the main thing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melanie Challenger talks to Neil about her new book How To Be Animal , which combines popular science, history and moral philosophy in a wide-ranging and radical new take on the human story and what it means for us today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jess Walter talks to Neil about his new novel The Cold Millions, which features union organising, riots and the suppression of protest. Set in Spokane in 1909, but seemingly ripped out of today's headlines. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Courttia Newland is the author of  The Scholar ,  Snakeskin  and  The Gospel According to Cane . He co-edited  The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain , and his short stories have featured in various anthologies. He talks to Neil about working with Steve McQueen on Little Axe, and about taking 20 years to write his multiverse spanning, world decolonising nove...

The Author of Homegoing Yaa Gyasi talks to Neil about the American opioid epidemic, finding meaning through both faith and science, and growing up in Alabama in her latest novel Transcendent Kingdom , which is long-listed for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction. Featuring an appearance by Yaa's dog. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Kat Arney talks about how cancer breaks the rules, via naked mole rats, nazi scientists and chimney sweep's scrotums in her new book Rebel Cell. See her website for more details:  https://www.rebelcellbook.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the week of St Patrick's Day Neil talks to the current Laureate for Irish Fiction Sebastian Barry on the paperback release of his latest novel A Thousand Moons . Sebastian talks about finding his family through fiction, and how an Arshile Gorky painting, a pet dog, the writings of Peter Matthiessen and watching RuPaul's Drag Race all influenced Days Without End and A Thousand Moons . Hosted on...

Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer from Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned both his B.F.A. in creative writing and M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College. His work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Essence  and  The Paris Review . He is the creator of the social justice social media community, Son of Baldwin. He talks to Neil about his debut novel  The Prophets. Hosted on Acas...

Rebecca Watson talks to Neil about her debut novel little scratch , which was published recently to critical acclaim. She is one of The Observer’s 10 best debut novelists of 2021. Watson writes for publications including the TLS, Granta and the Guardian, and is part-time Assistant Arts Editor at the Financial Times. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. Hosted on Aca...

Francis Spufford returns to Little Atoms to talk to Neil about his new novel Light Perpetual. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and a professor of physics and planetary science at MIT. She talks about her new memoir The Smallest Lights in the Universe, about juggling being a MacArthur award winning astrophysicist with being a widowed single-mother, and brings Neil up to speed with the latest news in the hunt for exo-planets. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Max Porter is the author of  Lanny , longlisted for the Booker Prize, and  Grief Is the Thing with Feathers , winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the  Guardian  First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. He is the recipient of the  Sunday Times /Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award. He talks to Neil about painting with words...

Torrey Peters lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She is the author of two novellas,  Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones  and  The Masker. She talks to Neil about ideas of motherhood, ethical surgery, the politically fraught concept of detransitioning and what trans women and divorced cis women have i...

Cal Flyn, author of the memoir Thicker Than Water , talks about her latest book Islands of Abandonment: Life In The Post-Human Landscape . She talks to Neil about her travels to post-industrial wastelands, nuclear exclusion zones and sites of natural disasters to see how nature can reclaim even the most polluted landscapes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité is one of Sweden’s most well-known hip-hop artists. Born in Lund to American parents—an African American dad and a white mom—he has released eight solo albums and numerous singles, the majority of which have reached gold or platinum status. He talks to Neil about his new memoir A Drop of Midnight , in which he talks about growing up conflicted in Sweden, and his travels to...

Andrew Harding is the BBC's Africa correspondent. He talks to Neil about his new book These Are Not Gentle People, about a crime that shook South Africa and split a community apart. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stuart Turton's debut novel,  The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle , won the Costa First Novel Award and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Novel, and was shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards and the British Book Awards Debut of the Year. A  Sunday Times bestseller for three weeks, it has been translated into over thirty languages and has also been a bestseller i...

Ivy Pochoda is the author of  The Art of Disappearing ,  Visitation Street  - a  Guardian  and Amazon best book of 2013 - and  Wonder Valley , a  Los Angeles Times  Book Prize finalist and a winner of the Strand Critics Circle Award. For many years she was a world-ranked squash player. She teaches creative writing at the Lamp Arts Studio in Skid Row. Ivy gre...

On this week's show, George Saunders, author of the Booker Prize winning novel Lincoln In The Bardo , talks to Neil about the genius of the Russian short story in his latest book A Swim In A Pond In The Rain . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just in time for Christmas! John Lanchester joins Neil for some spooky stories in his first short story collection, Reality and Other Stories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Ross graduated from Harvard in 1990. He wrote for the  New York Times  from 1992 until 1996 when he became staff writer at the  New Yorker . His first book,  The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century , won the Guardian First Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of the essay collection&nbs...

Noreena Hertz is a renowned thought leader, academic, and broadcaster who was named by The Observer “one of the world’s leading thinkers” and by Vogue “one of the world’s most inspiring women.” Her previous bestsellers—The Silent Takeover, I.O.U. and Eyes Wide Open—have been published in more than twenty countries, and her opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Th...

Gavin Francis is an award-winning writer and GP. He is the author of four books of non-fiction, including  Adventures in Human Being , which was a  Sunday Times  bestseller and won the Saltire Scottish Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and  Empire Antarctica , which won Scottish Book of the Year in the SMIT Awards and was shortlisted for both the Ondaatje and Costa Prize...

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of fifteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. His latest novel is Tri o. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.