Litopia After Dark

The net’s foremost literary salon: our weekly flagship show

Summer Reads Special

Litopia After Dark is on its annual summer holiday – we’ll be back live on air on Friday 13th August (superstitious? nous?) but until then, please enjoy this special show that Peter, Eve and Dave …

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Don’t Let The Editor Touch My Chode!

It’s our last Litopia After Dark before our summer break – we’ll be back live and kicking on Friday 13th of August, do join us in the chatroom to celebrate – and we’re certainly going …

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Does This Book Make My Butt Look Fat?

“Fiction is dead”, proclaims Lee Siegel in the New York Observer.  Fiction is now a profession – not a vocation – and that simple fact means that fiction is now culturally irrelevant.  In what Siegel …

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I Love You More Than My iPod!

Writers are inherently sensitive people: part of a continuum that at its furthermost extremity finds not just intense creativity but also florid psychosis.  So is writing a disorder, then – a maladaptation to the “real” …

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To E Or Not To E?

How green is your e-book?  How much do you care about the environmental impact of the words you read… or about the sweatshop workers who assembled your shiny new iPad?  Tonight’s special guest is Raz …

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Think Yourself to Death

Is the internet a concrete realization of Jung’s collective unconscious?  Dave Bartram believes it is, and tonight advances the argument that viral advertising on the net is effective precisely because of this deep psychic connection …

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One K Short Of A Dick

Some new faces on tonight’s show – and a surprisingly good turnout in the chatroom (maybe seeking solace from England’s dire performance at the World Cup, taking place at the same time as our broadcast).  …

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Reading, Not Drowning

The nature of reading is changing, and there is much uncertainty about the implications for writers and the publishing industry.  Book sales are in general long-term decline, yet some areas (young adult fiction, for example) …

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The New Age Of Self-Publishing

Publishing is bifurcating.  Until recently, an author only had one option – the traditional and often prolonged publishing route, which involved getting an agent, and then doing a deal with a publisher.  But now, an …

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We Are All Misfits

Here’s a rather striking paradox to kick off your 3-day weekend.  Given how readily people will stigmatize others – even members of their own family – for perceived deviance from a given societal norm, why …

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Dances With Smurfs

The British government has a creative solution to the growing unemployment problem: their  Job Centers are offering unemployed women jobs on X-rated websites.  Female applicants are told they can earn up to £700 ($1000) a …

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I Slipped On A Stream Of Consciousness

Litopia After Dark is officially an election-free zone… not! What – you didn’t think we’d pass up such a golden opportunity to deflate our leaders and betters, did you?  Labour, Conservative or Lib Dem, we’ll …

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Cognitive Theory For Breakfast

Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? And what underlying mental processes are activated when we read?  Professor Lisa Zunshine, Bush-Holbrook professor of English at the University of …

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The Agent Vs. The Amazon Women on the Moon

First came the fireball – searing its way through the Midwestern skies, turning night into day and scaring the bejesus out of the simple-minded but fundamentally good folk of Garrison Keillor country.  Then came the …

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The Hero’s Journey In Wet Socks

In an era when everyone is talking about “the death of the humanities”, cognitive approaches to literature just may be the Next Big Thing that rescues college literature departments from the institutional death of a …

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