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.

... You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and I'm joined this week by Erin Maglaki to talk about Caravaggio, his paintings, his models, their dress and undress.

Erin Maglaki teaches history at Durham. Her next book, Presence, A Hidden History of the Female Body, will be published in June.

Her piece in the latest issue of the LRB is a review of street style, art and dress in the time of Caravaggio by Elizabeth

Curry. Hello, Aaron, and thank you for talking with me again. Hi, it's so nice to be back.

So I was in the National Gallery in London not long ago and a woman had stopped to look at Caravaggio's

separate Emmaus. And the painting with Jesus in the middle, he's just revealed his identity to his disciples.

The surprised disciples, one of them has his arms flung out perpendicular to the picture plane,

this amazing bit of foreshortening of the hands.

One of them has his jacket elbow torn.

They actually look like fishermen in a way that disciples often didn't in paintings.

It's an arresting painting and this woman had stopped to look at it.

And then this man who I presume was her husband, and he'd been marching on ahead and he came

back to get her and saying, come on, we're getting distracted, which is such as if, you know,

...