David Mitchell
Novelist and screenwriterWikipedia
25
MENTIONS
14
EPISODES
14
PODCASTS
Search complete. 25 mentions across 14 episodes found for "David Mitchell".
Sep 14, 2026
AntonHOST
We start off with my favorite releases this year, I think, is Solace House by Will McLean.
AntonHOST
Basically, my elevator pitch for it, if you've read all of David Mitchell, like all of John Crowley, you read Piranesi, and David Mitchell has not written a new book for you in years, and you don't know what else to read.
AntonHOST
You're tired of crying.
AntonHOST
Right.
AntonHOST
This is it.
AntonHOST
This is so good.
AntonHOST
This is David Mitchell-esque, sort of very well done.
AntonHOST
It's a story of some university students who get summer job clearing out a dilapidated Victorian mansion.
Pete MockaitisHOST
And a favorite book?
Martin SeligmanGUEST
My favorite book of the last decade is Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell, and even the movie that was made out of it.
Martin SeligmanGUEST
But the book itself, Cloud Atlas, I strongly recommend.
Pete MockaitisHOST
All right.
Ben Alderson DayGUEST
He was a really famous one for having incredibly vivid characters that he almost had to do an exorcism after a book to actually get rid of them all because they were talking so much.
Ben Alderson DayGUEST
David Mitchell, who wrote Cloud Atlas, he's on record multiple times in interviews talking about these characters having voices for themselves.
Ben Alderson DayGUEST
Hilary Mantel as well.
Ben Alderson DayGUEST
So there's something that happens there which actually tells us something about really the unusual corners of the human mind and the human imagination.
Rebecca KuangGUEST
We take extremely seriously authors who are fantasists.
Rebecca KuangGUEST
Casuo Ishiguro and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, they've won Nobel Prizes, right? David Mitchell, it's one of my favorite authors.
Rebecca KuangGUEST
He's a fantasy and science fiction author, and nobody looks down at him because he's inventing other worlds and working with magic.
Rebecca KuangGUEST
Susanna Clarke is widely beloved.
Adam RutherfordGUEST
And sometimes you get shoved in a taxi back to the train station with some, you know, some random author.
Adam RutherfordGUEST
One time a few years ago, I was in a car with David Mitchell, the author, not the comedian.
Adam RutherfordGUEST
Yeah.
Adam RutherfordGUEST
Who I love.
Ptim CallanHOST
So that's great.
Ptim CallanHOST
The last example I wanna give us today is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
Ptim CallanHOST
And how Cloud Atlas works, this is a fabulous book.
Ptim CallanHOST
How Cloud Atlas works is it starts out and we're reading the journal, of a 19th century doctor.
Ptim CallanHOST
with multiple things inside of other things.
Ptim CallanHOST
And connected to that, they give us opportunities to do fun, interesting things.
Ptim CallanHOST
So in David Mitchell's case, Cloud Atlas, it allows us to cover a huge span of time and jump forward, jump forward, jump forward, and also gives him this great technique of leaving us in suspense over and over and over again and then coming back in giving us a conclusion you know satisfying us satisfying us satisfying us satisfying us so that's a great structure that does a lot of a lot of nice things for him and it also allows him to connect them back so the earlier works are influencing the people in the later works because they're actually reading and consuming these these works that's information that is going into their heads and then it's changing how they behave and then the later person who's looking at that that information is going to their heads and it's changing how they behave so all of this stuff is possible for mitchell because of this nested frame structure that he put together right or if we look at the menelaid barth The, you know, the fun he has by jumping up and down between the little levels of the narrative and having Menelaus quoting himself, quoting himself, quoting himself, quoting himself is really fun and funny.
Ptim CallanHOST
And it also allows him to get very metafictional and to deal with what John Barth is so often dealing with, which is questions of identity and ontology, what is real and what is not.
Robert ThorogoodGUEST
It's an extraordinary work of fiction where...
Robert ThorogoodGUEST
It turns out that there's a group of people, it's quite a David Mitchell idea, not the TV presenter, but the book writer.
Robert ThorogoodGUEST
There's a group of people, a secret society of people, who when they die, go back to the moment of their birth and they relive their life in a constant loop.
Robert ThorogoodGUEST
and they can't get out of it.
John PistelliHOST
It's all one universe, and each individual work is just an excerpt from this massive work, this, uh...
John PistelliHOST
Well, David Mitchell, who does the same thing, called it his uber-novel.
John PistelliHOST
It's all coming from the same uber-novel.
John PistelliHOST
And so really, where The Savage Detectives ends is in this desert with the specter of femicide and with this prophecy of something horrible that's going to happen in the year, I think it said 26-something.
PeterHOST
This is where it gets a little tricky, and this one is actually kind of is tied to Matt, 'cause Matt recommended this author and book to me.
PeterHOST
Um, and the au- the author's David Mitchell.
PeterHOST
I was trying to think of which David Mitchell.
PeterHOST
Um, I almost wanna just do an author, but that's cheating.
Kara InfanteGUEST
[laughs]
8 MINS LATER
Kara InfanteGUEST
[laughs]
PeterHOST
... feel bad for like the original fans who are like, "Hey, I, I don't, you know, don't come and hate on our, our series here." So I, I-
MattHOST
I felt a little like that with David Mitchell when the Cloud Atlas movie came out-
Tom SutcliffeHOST
You-
Mark RavenhillGUEST
But she has a lot of confidence in herself as a songwriter.
Tom SutcliffeHOST
I think you, uh, you have some reason to feel confident that you're gonna hear it.
Tom SutcliffeHOST
I'm not sure I will.
4 more episodes mention David Mitchell.
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