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.

Hello, you're listening to On Politics on the LRB podcast. I am James Butler, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.

At the end of the 20th century and across the first decade of the 21st, a swathe of countries

across Latin America elected left-wing governments in what became known internationally as

the pink tide. Often a cause of hope for left-wingers far beyond the global south.

These governments avowed their connections to movements of the poor,

spoke against neoliberalism and in the name of the people,

and their prominent leaders had often been involved in struggle

and frequently armed struggle against dictatorial regimes.

Many of these governments sought to harness the commodity boom of the period for their own ends

towards a developmentalist and redistributive politics.

At the peak of the tide, three-fifths of the region's population lived under-elected left-wing

governments.

Since then, the story has become somewhat darker, with faltering collapse or coup of progressive governments across the region.

...