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.

Thank you. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm joined by Joanna Biggs to talk about the novelist Marguerite Yorzinau.

Joanna Biggs, a former editor at the LRB, is now deputy editor of the Yale Review, and her most recent book is A Life of One's Own's Own, Nine Women Writers Begin Again.

Her piece in the latest LRB is a review of two books, a blue tale and other stories by

Marguerite Yorsossinard, translated by Alberto

Mangel, and Zéinand, which is Yorsenar's correspondence from 1968 to 1970. But the piece is also

a consideration of Memoirs of Hadrian, Yorsenar's 1951 novel, which is, as Joe says, her finest book,

and often considered the best French

novel of the 20th century. And it takes the form of a letter from the dying Roman Emperor

Hadrian to his adoptive grandson and eventual successor, Marcus Orrides. Hello, Joe, and thank you

so much for joining me today. Oh, pleasure. Thank you for having me. So I suppose my two large

questions would be why is memoirs of Hadrian such a great book and how did yours sonar come to

write it? But to get there, we could begin maybe with a more straightforward question, which is

when and where and also with what name was your son are born?

...