If you dive into the depths of Ivoox and other platforms you will find many literature podcasts. Many refer to news, some are simple book recommendations and then there is “Great unfortunates”, light years away. Author of “Agnes” e “Unhappy”, both under the Blackie Books label, the journalist and writer Javier Peña takes us into the universes of some of the greatest writers in history based on a specific work, the most famous, the one for which they became famous. eternity. Now, what he tells us in his podcasts are the unfortunate lives of all of them – hence the title –, lives that, as he often points out in the program, seem like plots from the most unimaginable novels.
The second season has just started with David Foster Wallace, but some of its great unfortunates have been from Roberto Bolaño to Virginia Woolf, from Sylvia Plath to Juan Rulfo, from Georges Perec to Harper Lee, from Kurt Vonnegut to Patricia Highsmith, among others. Peña is responsible for highlighting the connections between the real lives of the authors and what they wrote in their works, as well as their contradictions. He puts them under the spotlight to discover that unhappiness has marked the lives of a good part – the majority? – of those who signed some of the great gems of universal literature. A must-listen podcast for any serious book lover.