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.

You're listening to On Politics on the LRB podcast. I'm Adam Schatz, your host. I'm here for James Butler. The subject of

this week's episode is the recent wave of anti-government protests in Iran, an uprising that has been

met with levels of state violence not seen since the late 1980s when the Islamic Republic executed

thousands of leftists and other dissidents.

My guests are Amir Amadi Ariane, a novelist, essayist, and contributor to the LRB, who teaches at the

State University of New York in Binghamton, and Shora Makuremi, a writer, filmmaker, and

anthropologist at the National Center for Research in Paris.

I'd like to start by asking both of you a question about the protests themselves.

How do you explain their outbreak?

It seems to have been initially sparked by discontent over inflation, electricity shortages and so on. But the protests very quickly

acquired a growing political dimension. So I just want to get first a sense of your take on

how this explosion occurred. Shora, do you want to start?

Yes, sure. Actually, the protests started in the bazaar in Tehran. It started with the protest of

...