Read By: David Mitchell
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David Mitchell on his selection:
I hope you\\u2019re well, whoever you are, wherever you are. If my readings were songs on a playlist, I\\u2019d call it "A Winter, Some Ghosts and The Summer." I hope you enjoy it, and I hope to revisit New York soon.
1) John Connolly is a contemporary Irish crime writer and fantasist. This is my favourite very short ghost story. Thanks to John for letting me read it here.
2) Wis\\u0142awa Szymborska was a Polish poet, translator and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. This cool shot of vodka of a poem is translated here by Joanna Trzeciak.
3) Henry Cecil was a lawyer and writer from the mid-20th century, mostly forgotten now. This story came from a spooky anthology I owned as a kid, called The House of Nightmare. It has a killer ending...
4) Edward Thomas died in the trenches in 1917. The poem evokes a \\u2018before the war\\u2019 moment, when a golden peace was on borrowed time. The train platform in the poem strikes me as a liminal space between life and death.
5) The Country Child is another book from my childhood about a childhood. I love the animism of the trees in this passage. Alison Uttley also wrote A Traveller in Time. She had a historian\\u2019s eye and a poet\\u2019s ear.
6) \\u201cA Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.\\u201d William Wordsworth at his shortest. Having to learn \\u2018the one about the daffodils\\u2019 at school bleached Wordsworth for my generation. Discovering this poem, a few years later, put the colour back in.
7) I found James Wright\\u2019s collection The Branch Will Not Break in Auckland, NZ on my first visit to the country as a published author. I loved it then and I love it now. On the face of it, the final line from \\u201cLying in a Hammock\\u2026\\u201d is a downer: why do I find it so uplifting?
8) Ursula K. Le Guin woke up my hunger to write narrative, and to (try to) make other people feel what this novel made me feel. Most hungers consume, but the writing-hunger sustains. I didn\\u2019t know Ursula well, but we emailed occasionally. She was sharp, funny and gracious, and the world is a little less magical now she\\u2019s no longer in it. Luckily, we still have her writing to make the world more magical than it otherwise would be. This exquisite passage from A Wizard of Earthsea, written (so she told me) on her kitchen table at night after she had put her kids to bed, doubles as a metaphor for the whole, glorious, transformative Wow of Art.
Nocturnes at Bookshop.org
\\u201cA Word on Statistics\\u201d at Poetry Foundation
\\u201cAdlestrop\\u201d at Poetry Foundation
The Country Child at Penguin UK
\\u201cA Slumber did my Spirit Seal\\u201d at Poetry Foundation
The Branch Will Not Break at Bookshop.org
A Wizard of Earthsea at Bookshop.org
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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