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This week, Eleanor Wachtel speaks with one of the great American literary critics, Harold Bloom, about his love of literature and how it came to be at the centre of his life. His new book, The Western Canon, is an empassioned defence of reading the classics.

From Alexandria and New York, Eleanor speaks with André Aciman. His novel, Harvard Square, is an autobiographical story about an unlikely friendship between two immigrants to America.

"Proust and Memory" - Part I: Eleanor Wachtel talks to Alain De Botton about How Proust Can Change Your Life.; Part II: Eleanor talks to Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter about his book, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past.

To celebrate Writers & Company's 30th anniversary, Eleanor revisits some of the best interviews from season one: Alice Munro, A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, Wole Soyinka and Eduardo Galeano.

Zambian-American writer Namwali Serpell's 2019 novel The Old Drift was hailed by Salman Rushdie as "a dazzling debut." It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Time magazine, The Atlantic and NPR. Her time-bending new work, The Furrows, takes a deep dive into love and loss, memory and mourning.

Semezdin Mehmedinović talks to Eleanor Wachtel about how a near fatal heart attack inspired his newest novel, My Heart: a Novel, and how surviving the Bosnian War inspired his celebrated book, Sarajevo Blues. *Note: The audio for this episode was recorded during the Covid-19 lockdown and contains occasional low-level equipment-related distortion.

This week, from Malaysia and London, Tash Aw. His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory looked back at Malaysia during the Second World War. His new book, Map of the Invisible World, evokes Indonesia on the brink of the "Year of Living Dangerously." Map of the Invisible World is published by McClelland & Stewart.

Eleanor Wachtel speaks with novelist, cultural commentator and historian, Eva Hoffman. The discussion ranges from her memoir of growing up in war-ravaged Poland to her exploration of Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. Eva Hoffman's newest book is called Time. Time is published by Picador.

This month, Writers & Company celebrates its 25th anniversary. From the start, the program set its sights on the world's finest writers, some new, some established. From our first season: Alice Munro, A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Eduardo Galeano.