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.

Thank you. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to Robert Choffey, who teaches at Bard College in New York State.

His book, Egypt, Ethiopia and the Greek novel was published last year,

and he appeared on this podcast a few months ago to talk about the discovery of a papyrus

that contained some previously unknown writing by Euripides.

And he has a piece in the latest issue of the LRB on another recent, remarkable, well, not quite so recent about 10 years ago, but still recent in the long scheme of things, remarkable paparological find in Egypt, a first-hand account, as he puts it, of the men who built the great pyramid of Giza.

It's a review of the Red Sea Scrolls, how ancient papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Pierre Talley and Mark Lena. So, hello, Robert, and thank you for joining me again. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here. I feel like I'm becoming the paparological expert. You are. You are very much our Gose Man for papari. So the so-called Red Sea Scrolls, obviously, sort of a pun, as it were, on Dead Sea Scrolls.

So when and where, where they discovered and who by?

So they were discovered in 2013 on this kind of amazing site along the Red Sea coast.

It's called Wadi Al-Jarv, but I suspect that none of our listeners will have ever been there. It's called Wadi Al Jarref, but I suspect that none of our

listeners will have ever been there. It's quite desolate. There's like a monastery nearby, but that's

really all. And they were discovered because Talley and his team were really interested in these

ports that they call intermittent ports, where people could bring boats, they could sail during

the sailing season, and then when they were done, they could sail during the sailing season,

...