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

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

from Flobert'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.

Welcome to Fiction and the Fantastic, a close reading series from the London Review of Books.

I'm Marina Warner and I'm talking with Adam Thurwell, and we're both writers of fiction

and cultural criticism and long-time contributors to the LRB.

In this, the last of our conversations together were exploring a work with which we could have started,

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,

first published in 1818. It's a foundational work of the fantastic, as gothic, as sci-fi,

as trauma narrative. And it's also the progenitor of many other works in a variety of media.

It's by far the most popular and well-known and most famous of the works we have read together

so far.

Adam, I found it very difficult to look at Frankenstein with an open mind, as it were,

because my mind was so full of images from the way it's been interpreted.

Can you tell us what kind of book it is?

Absolutely, yeah, it's true, because it's become such a famous name

...