Who owns Sherlock Holmes? Patricia Cornwell wins bigtime! Conrad Black stalks Random House… and our favorite plagiarist, Jonah Lehrer! Presented by leading lawyer Donna Ballman with literary agent Peter Cox. Don’t forget – you can post topics for Donna to discuss in the Comments section, below. Be a wonderful human ...read more →
Author Archive
Litvinenko: Murder Most Foul
At the age of 43, a few weeks after he secured British citizenship, former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered: the world’s first victim of polonium 210 poisoning. The Litvinenko killing revealed that London has quietly become not only the single greatest centre of Russian capital outside Moscow, ...read more →
UKIP’s Nigel Farage, Kingmaker in Waiting
He’s Britain’s most controversial politician, and he tells it like it is. David Cameron? On Botox! The BBC’s chairman Chris Patten? An old toad who should be abolished! And please don’t get him started on immigration. Wait a minute – this is The Garry Bushell Show! The place where political ...read more →
Death To All Hobbits!
Multi-award-winning author Mal Peet joins us for this special show: Mal’s off to New Zealand to teach a three-month creative writing workshop at the University of Wellington: before he visits the Land Of The Long White Cloud, he’s here to share his thoughts about this week’s topics… and also about hobbits ...read more →
Fighting For Libraries
This week, bestselling children’s writer Terry Deary – author of the mega-million-selling Horrible Histories series – condemned libraries to the scrapheap of, er, history. Libraries “have been around too long”, he believes, and are “no longer relevant”. Deary is the seventh most-borrowed children’s writer in UK libraries – so presumably ...read more →
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Me & You & Mary Sue
Do you know what a “Mary Sue” character is? In today’s Eve’s Salmagundi Club, we’re investigating this strange phenomenon that owes its origin to fan fiction, but has now gone thoroughly mainstream with the Twilight sagas. And here’s your Mary Sue Generator, and the world’s longest test for Mary Sue ...read more →
Fetishizing Agents
From Monday to Thursday this week we’re having an orgy of Eve’s Salmagundi Clubs… that’s right, one every day! Why? Well, the truth is that Litopia Daily is changing… in a good way. Our plans are not yet quite ready to be made public, but rest assured that Eve will ...read more →
The Devil’s Bargain
Before we continue with today’s exploration into writing and writers – guided by the terrifying genius that was William S. Burroughs – we should tell you that tomorrow’s show will be a relay of tonight’s big event – the Golden Twits Award, in which Litopia has been shortlisted in three ...read more →
Bad By Nature
It’s our second day of hearing directly from some of the most successful and acclaimed writers of the 20th century: did you guess who today’s subject is? Here’s another clue: In 1939, he deliberately severed the last joint of his left little finger, right at the knuckle, to impress a ...read more →
Straight To The Top
This week, we’re doing something rather different on Litopia Daily… Peter will be examining some of the most successful authors of the past century, and asking – what can we learn from their successes? Today, it’s two top British women authors – one is the best-selling writer of all time, ...read more →
Are Writers Flaky?
One of the reasons that writers are, as a whole, having a hard time at the moment is that they’re flaky – they make bad economic decisions because they get bored quickly; they trust people they shouldn’t; and they go with their guts rather than with their brains. True? Or ...read more →
The Velvet Rope
Valerie Plame Wilson – a former CIA agent whose unmasking led to the conviction of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aide has lost an appeal to declassify parts of her memoir. The only winner in this case appears to be her publisher, Simon & Schuster – who will publish ...read more →
Someone’s Impersonating Me!
A really good question for Peter today about authors’ names – what happens if you discover that there’s another author out there with exactly the same name? And… Peter wants to ask you a question about book clubs… did you ever belong to one? And whatever happened to them? The ...read more →
Question Time
It’s an impressively long Question Time for Peter today – nearly half an hour of accumulated questions from authors covering a wide variety of topics. Are two books better than one when it comes to writing a proposal? What’s an agent thinking when they request the full manuscript? Should you ...read more →
