Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Orhan Pamuk. (28 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Orhan Pamuk in his six Norton Lectures at Harvard this fall filled the air with ideas about fiction. “The novel is not about the characters but about their world,” for...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Keith Waldrop. (23 minutes, 11 meg mp3) Keith Waldrop, who just won the National Book Award in poetry for his Transcendental Studies, is a quilter in phrases. He eschews any intention or meaning that you...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Suketu Mehta. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Suketu Mehta, the master storyteller of modern Bombay, learned by listening — to the runaway poet from Bihar, for example, who wanted him to write a book titled “Untold...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rana Dasgupta. (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Rana Dasgupta’s India is a land of grueling poverty still, in a culture transfixed by glittering wealth. The dominant mood is “frenzied accumulation” in a society...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Henri Cole. (42 minutes, 19 mb mp3) The poet Henri Cole got his French first name from his Armenian mother. From his father, a military man, he got his Southern speech and, in what sounds like sadness and...