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Christmas Writings

A celebration of the best - and funniest - modern writing about Christmas. John Mullan and Jessie Burton join Mariella Frostrup for a look at festive literature.

Christmas, with all its tradition and rituals and emotion, has always provided a rich source of material for writers. In this programme Mariella Frostrup and her guests John Mullan and Jessie Burton explore what it offers twentieth century novelists; from James Joyce and his argumentative Christmas lunch in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man via Patrick Hamilton's bleak 1940's boarding house Christmas Eve in The Slaves of Solitude, to Bridget Jones, in the 1990s, having to return home to her family yet again - still single. And Jonathan Franzen discusses his prize winning book The Corrections which is all about a mother, Enid Lambert, trying to persuade her grown up children to come home for one last Christmas.

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28 minutes

BOOKLIST

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend 
The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas 
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Capital by John Lanchester
Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis
Narnia Chronicles by CS Lewis
Emma  by Jane Austen
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Starter for Ten by David Nichols

Close Reading - Aldous Huxley - Brave New World

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north.  Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory.  Wintriness responded to wintriness.  The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber.  The light was frozen, dead, a ghost.  Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.

‘And this,’ said the Director opening the door, ‘is the Fertilizing Room.’

Credits

Role Contributor
Presenter Mariella Frostrup
Interviewed Guest John Mullan
Interviewed Guest Jessie Burton

Broadcasts

  • Sun 21 Dec 2014 16:00
  • Christmas Day 2014 06:30

This Week's Book List

Read along with us - a list of books discussed in each programme

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Books and Authors Podcast

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