If you enjoy listening to the LRB podcast, then you'll probably enjoy reading the LRB.

You can subscribe to the LRB from just one pound per issue.

To find out more, go to LRB.m.me forward slash listen.

That's LRB.m.m.

Forward slash listen.

Or click on the link in the description below this episode.

Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Joanne O'Leary, one of the editors at the paper, and I'm speaking today with Patricia Lockwood, a contributing editor at the

LRB, who has a piece in the latest issue on Vladimir Nabokov.

It's a review of Think, Speak Right, a book of his uncollected essays, reviews,

interviews and letters to the editor, published in the UK by Penguin.

And the piece touches on everything from the complete biography of Nabokov that lurks behind

the pages of this book, to his monomaniacal

control over the interview process, to what it's like to read Alita as a teenage girl and feel

photographically seen. Joshah, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I thought we

could begin by discussing how this piece came into being. So you were in the middle of

writing this essay about Nabokov when you realised that you'd contracted COVID. And there's a footnote

in the piece where you describe spending a week trying to read Ben Sinister, that horribly

dystopian novel, realising you had virus, and then devoting the next three weeks

to working on what you call a delirious bingo card,

which tries to gather together all of Nabokov's themes in one place.

This is reproduced on page 16 of the latest issue of the paper,

and no verbal description can do it justice.

...