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 I'm joined today by J. Robert Lennon to talk about the great American crime writer,

or do I mean simply the great writer, Elmore Leonard, and how his novels escape or work

against or work productively with the constraints of genre.

Jay Robert Lennon is the author of 11 novels, most recently Buzzkill, and four story collections.

He teaches creative writing at Cornell University in upstate New York, and he's been reviewing

for the LRB since 2006.

His piece in the current issue is a close look at three of Elmore Leonard's novels, which

were first published in the 1970s and 80s, but have been reissued this year by

Penguin Modern Classics, their swag, the switch, and rum punch. Hello, John, and thank

you so much for talking with me today. Hi, thanks for having me on. Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans

in 2025, grew up mostly in Detroit, where his father worked for General Motors. He served in the Navy

during the Second World War. He went to the University of Detroit on the GI Bill, graduating in

1950 with a degree in English and philosophy. And he immediately got a job. In fact, even before

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