The Guardian Books Podcast

Ice from Adam Gopnik, fire from Bee Wilson and a hymn of praise to the pleasures of handwriting in our Books podcast seasonal special

Rabindranath Tagore returned again and again to the voiceless women of Bengal, as in his short story The Postmaster, says Anita Desai

Jorge Luis Borges's combination of the anecdotal, philosophical and the literary showed Will Self how to achieve the 'truly veridical'. He gets his coordinates from 'On Exactitude in Science'

Nathan Englander finds Jewish history, corruption and man's inhumanity to man and pigeons in Isaac Babel's 'The Story Of My Dovecote'

Zadie Smith launches our winter series of short stories with an almost 'anti-Italian' story from Giuseppe Pontiggia, 'Umberto Buti'

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie admires the 'old-fashioned social realism' of Ama Ata Aidoo's 'No Sweetness Here'

José Saramago tackles the conflict between mind and body in 'The Centaur', says Nadine Gordimer

Despite their restraint, Raymond Carver's 'early-period' stories, such as The Student's Wife, are full to the brim, says Richard Ford

Yiyun Li reads William Trevor's 'Three People', a short story which moved her to write a story in reply, 'Gold Boy, Emerald Girl'

Philip Pullman reads from his new book of Grimm Tales and talks to John Mullan at the Guardian book club

During his week in A Room For London - a model boat on the roof of London's Queen Elizabeth Hall - Syrian poet Adonis talks to Nicholas Wroe about poetry, politics and London's literary greats

Kevin Powers, an American ex-soldier and poet, has won the Guardian first book award with The Yellow Birds. It's a novel about fighting, and surviving, the war in Iraq

Kurt Vonnegut's daughter Nanette rediscovers her father's funny side, and the creator of Bleak Expectations turns the radio hit into a novel

The artists Robert and Aline Crumb talk about Drawn Together, a book of 40 years-worth of strips they've been producing about themselves; plus, this year's Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story winner

Rose Tremain tells how she began writing Restoration to restore the reputation of historical fiction