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 Erin Maglaki, who teaches history at Sheffield.

She's the author of Venice's Intimate Empire, which was published in 2018, and she's currently working on a history of the female body. She was also one of the earliest guests on this podcast

back in March 2020 when we talked during the first COVID lockdown about a lockdown imposed

by the city of Florence in 1631 during an

outbreak of plague. We also spoke at the end of last year about Aldous Manus, the early modern

Venetian publisher, and we're returning to Venice today, as Erin's most recent piece for the

LRP is a review of Shylock's Venice, the remarkable history of Venice's Jews and the Ghetto by

Harry Friedman. Hello, Aaron,

and thank you for joining me again. Hi, Tom. Thank you so much for having me back. So near the

beginning of your piece, you mention Rilke's story, a scene from the Venetian ghetto and observed that

the narrator is hazy on chronology, when was the ghetto, though in a more literal-minded way, there is a precise date for when it was created.

Yes, it was founded in 1516 by Senate decree.

I was interested in kind of the haziness in Wilka's story

...