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.

Emily Bronte died on the 19th of December, 1848.

As Patricia Lockwood said on an LRB podcast earlier this year,

there is evidence that Bronte was writing a second novel to follow Wuthering Heights,

but if she was, it has been lost, and it has been suggested, though never proved,

that her sister Charlotte might have destroyed it. But what could possibly be in that lost novel? Lockwood wondered,

that was worse, more unacceptable than what we find in Wuthering Heights. David Trotter,

on the same podcast episode, described Emily Bronte's only published and only surviving novel

as completely a moral.

They were speaking on an episode of Novel Approaches, one of the LRB's Close Readings podcast series. If you already subscribe to Close Readings, you may well have heard

it already, but if you don't, now's your chance. And I'll let you know at the end of the

episode how to go about subscribing to close readings or

giving it as a gift to someone for Christmas.

Hello and welcome to episode three of novel approaches, a close readings podcast series from

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