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NEXT STORY

My teenage fantasy

RELATED STORIES

The Futurist and Other Stories
Carl Djerassi Scientist
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You can see what I’m doing. I am so much more interested in how I use literature to talk about myself that the way to do is to demonstrate and not just talk about it. Now, this was the very first fiction book that I wrote and it has again an artistic cover that I picked because it’s one of the famous Italian futurist paintings by Balla. And I also had this wonderful blurb... 'Brilliant elegant stories sparkling with wit and wordplay, exploring human nature, the nature of literature, and the nature of thought. Cleverness at its humane best', Iris Murdoch. So that was a good... I’ve never been able to improve on that, except one by... once by Cynthia Ozick of my autobiography, and these are two women that influenced me very much in my writing. I mean writers that I admired very much and liked very much. Yeah. And you see very soon what their relationship to this... to what I’ve just been talking about in the short stories.  And this short story... actually, not only did it eventually appear in the short story collection, but also with my first commercially published one in Cosmopolitan... here in Cosmopolitan in the UK.

Austrian-American Carl Djerassi (1923-2015) was best known for his work on the synthesis of the steroid cortisone and then of a progesterone derivative that was the basis of the first contraceptive pill. He wrote a number of books, plays and poems, in the process inventing a new genre, 'science-in-fiction', illustrated by the novel 'Cantor's Dilemma' which explores ethics in science.

Listeners: Tamara Tracz

Tamara Tracz is a writer and filmmaker based in London.

Tags: The Futurist and Other Stories, Jean Iris Murdoch, Giacomo Balla, Cynthia Shoshana Ozick

Duration: 1 minute, 34 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2005

Date story went live: 24 January 2008