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 I'm Malin Hay.

By the time she was 12, Judy Garland was being billed as the

little girl with the leather lungs, someone whose powerful voice seemed at odds with her childlike,

even frail physique and persona. More than 50 years after her death, it's hard to think of

another star of Hollywood's golden era, with whom fans feel such a strong

sense of identification and protectiveness. After being brought up in a family of travelling performers,

Garland signed a contract at MGM Studios at age 13, and she stayed there for the next 15 years,

starring in films such as Easter Parade, Meet Me in St. Louis, and of course, the Wizard of

Oz. MGM was the place where Garland grew from a studio player into a star, but it was also the

site of formative and traumatic experiences, including the start of the drug addiction that played

her for the rest of her life. Joining me today to discuss Garland's life and work is the writer

B Wilson, who has written astutely for the LRB about the way that Hollywood can shape and sometimes

to form the lives of its stars. She's written about Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Hedy Lamar

and Nicole Kidman, and many of those pieces were included in an book, Complicated Women, that came out in

...