Hello, I'm Jens Wolfakis. I'm at Novara Media and I have a message for you, the best way of

underpinning any kind of potential resistance to a very toxic establishment without being populist

anti-establishment and by supporting good, irrational, humanist causes is to support left-wing media

like Novara Media. Novara Media and all such media need your support because they certainly

do not have the support of the establishment. Kapadeem.

What is the point of reading fiction? Can it tell us anything about the world we live in?

I'm John Merrick and on this episode of Novara FM I'm joined by the

writer and novelist Pancage Misra. I first encountered Misra's work in the early 2010s,

following his powerful take down of Nile Ferguson in the LRB, an essay that was so devastating in

its analysis of Ferguson's denials of empire and its crimes, the threatened to sue for libel.

Misra is one of our great critics, both the delusions of liberalism and of the contemporary novel.

He's the author of many books, including An End to Suffering, The Budder in the World,

Age of Anger, History of the Present and Blanth fanatics, a brilliant collection of essays on

liberals, race and empire. In this episode, we discuss Misra's latest novel, Run and Hide,

the power of fiction to illuminate the world, what a Marxist fiction might look like,

and why those of us who care deeply about social change need to take fiction seriously.

Pancage Misra, thank you for joining us on Novara FM.

Thank you for having me.

So your most recent book, Run and Hide, was published last year. It's a return to fiction for you,

so over 20 years after you published your last novel, which was The Romantics, and the new one

follows a group of friends from modest backgrounds, who meet at prestigious Indian University,

two of whom become hedge fund billionaires in the US before getting embroiled in a Wall Street

...