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'Leary, another editor at the paper. And for this, You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

I'm Joanne O'Leary, another editor at the paper.

And for this third episode in the LRB podcast's Summer of Sport Triple Bill,

following golfers David Trotter and tennis with Edmund Gordon,

we're going to be talking about motor racing.

The cars, but more than the cars, the people

who drive them, the people who make them, who live for them, and in some cases have died

for them and in them. I wrote a piece recently about the life and times of Enzo Ferrari, one of the

towering figures, of course, of motor racing and sports car manufacturing,

whose life spanned most of the 20th century. But Joanne is the LRB's resident petrol head,

if it's okay to call you that?

Relatively within the parameters of the LRB, I can occupy that role.

Yes. If it's okay to use LRB, I can occupy that role. Yes.

If it's okay to use the word again.

...