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.

On the 3rd of January, as many of us were still blarily greeting the new year, a series of

shocking headlines rolled across our screens.

In a perhaps unprecedented exercise of power, the US military captured and abducted the president

of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Celia Flores.

In one sense, this was the culmination of a long antipathy to Venezuela from the Trump administration.

It was unresolved business from its first term, when it backed an attempted coup centered around

Juan Guaido and the more recent military buildup and maritime slaughters at the end of last year.

Critical response was immediate over the total junking of international law, the nakedly imperial

disposition of the White House and its total contempt for congressional authorization.

And yet global political response has been cautious and muted.

European leaders, fearful perhaps that Trump will pull

support for Ukraine, if strongly criticized, have mostly accepted the facts on the ground.

The Democrats in the United States have been, well, the Democrats.

...