Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.

And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.

You can find a link in the description, or search close readings, wherever you get your podcasts.

Music You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and this week I'm joined by Chal Ravens, head of audio at Navarra Media,

and one of the hosts of No Tags, a podcast to newsletter chronicling underground music culture.

We spoke on this podcast a few months ago on the Acid House Revolution.

She has a piece in the latest issue of the LRB on ABBA, which you might think is about as

overground as music

gets, though Chal does identify some countercultural currents, which we'll maybe get to later

in the episode. Her piece is a review of two books, The Book of Abba, Melancholy Undercover by

Jan Gradval, translated by Sarah Klein Sundberg and Bright Lights Dark Shadows,

The Definitive Biography of Abba by Carl Magnus Palm, now on its third edition.

Hello, Charon, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Hello, thank you for having me back.

So, as you say in your piece, the moment in 1974 when Abba burst,

or at least stepped out onto the Eurovision stage in

...