Patricia Lockwood and André Aciman share their sense of the way digital media, and the layers of history press in on our sense of the present moment as they talk about their new books with presenter Laurence Scott.
Patricia Lockwood is a poet and author of the memoir Priestdaddy. Her new novel No One is Talking About This considers the way a world saturated by social media memes, 24/7 news and doom scrolling can become fractured by a health emergency. André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name and editor of the Proust Project – looks at writers including WG Sebald and Constantine Cavafy and the films of Eric Rohmer and what the present tense means to writers who can't grasp the here and now in his new Essay collection Homo Irrealis.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
You can find a playlist of Prose and Poetry on the Free Thinking programme website featuring interviews with authors including Olivia Laing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7mryz Umberto Eco https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qmcqn Rebecca Solnit https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008wc1 Ben Lerner, Derek Owusu and J J Bola https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b0mx Teju Cole https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07yb85h