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 the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones and I'm joined today by Richard Seymour to talk about the life and work of the late anthropologist and activist David Graber and the ways that his anthropology and activism intersected.

Richard Seymour's books include Against Austerity, the twittering machine and most recently

disaster nationalism, which was reviewed in the LRB by Daniel Trilling earlier this year.

And Richard's piece in the summer issue of the paper

was a review of a posthumous collection of David Graber's essays,

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World,

edited and introduced by Graber's widow, Nico Dubrovsky.

Hello, Richard, and thank you so much for talking with me today.

Oh, thank you for having me. So this new book you write in your review

attempts to convey the breadth and flavour of Graber's thought by selecting essays,

articles and interviews from across his career and your review is an impressive, very

impressive synoptic account of, as you say, a large body of work,

which will do our best to cover as much as we can in our discussion today.

...