The Critic and Her Publics is a live interview series that asks the best and most prominent critics working today to perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work, performing their thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgments, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. 

Subscribe to The Critic and Her Publics, available wherever you get your podcasts!

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From the episode:

Merve Emre: A friend of mine described Andrea Long Chu’s approach to criticism as perfecting a rigorous negativity. We all know how deeply fun it can be to hate on something for long and intense periods of time, but as any good analyst or theorist of emotion might point out, there always exists a hard kernel of love in hate. It’s an abiding love for the sheer act of thinking that I always sense in Andrea’s work. She’s this year’s recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the book critic at New York Magazine. Her book Females was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. I’m sure many of you have read her blockbuster reviews of books by Maggie Nelson, Ottessa Moshfegh, and most recently Zadie Smith, as well as her essays on Phantom of the Opera and—my favorite—on the children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit. I’m very happy to have her as our inaugural guest. Welcome, Andrea.

Andrea Long Chu: Thank you for having me.

For a full transcript and details of the piece Andrea responded to, head over to the New York Review of Books [link]

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Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females: an extended annotation of a lost play by Valerie Solanas was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents.

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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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Wesley Morris has served as critic at large at The New York Times since 2015, covering film, politics, and pop culture. He joins this week to discuss this year’s Academy Award nominations.

At the top, we discuss the omission of Greta Gerwig from the Best Director category, former Secretary Clinton on Barbie-gate, the ‘perversely effective’ nature of Killers of the Flower Moon, and the ways in which Bradley Cooper’s Maestro upends the traditional biopic. Wesley then reflects on his early adventures in moviegoing, the indie film boom of the late ‘90s, the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, what the Best Picture nominations of 1988 can tell us about 2023’s slate, and the erosion of the ‘middle’ across film and culture.

In the back-half: Todd Haynes’ beguiling new film May December, Ava DuVernay’s Origin, the Academy’s fraught relationship to diversity, the function of Wesley’s work in 2024, and a reading of his moving, personal review about Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Sam Fragoso: What we’ve lost is the ‘middle’ of movies, the drama or comedy that has no great aspirations. It was not made to win or be nominated for awards. I want to try to unpack how—and why—we’re here. Do you see any parallels between the decline in film criticism with the decline in filmmaking? Did one precipitate the other?

Wesley Morris: Well, that’s a more complicated proposition, because the decline in film criticism is related to the decline of periodicals where film criticism thrived. I think the two things are related but not necessarily causal of each other. I do, however, think that in the last fifteen years, there’s been a sort of downgrading of what a review can do and should do. You know, there’s this tension between coming up with a review—liking something a lot, they love that—or really panning something. When I worked at The Boston Globe, for instance, we gave things stars. If I was like, “Killers of the Flower Moon: two stars” that would have superseded anything I would have necessarily wrote about it. That middle place, the middle of moviemaking is gone, a kind of mixed criticism… people have lost patience for that. That a movie can’t have things that work and don’t work. The disappearance of the middle— there are so many middles that have disappeared. Middle ground, middlebrow, middle class. There’s either, or. There’s very little room for not even debate and disagreement, but just complexity. I find it really interesting that none of the ten nominees on this Best Picture list include May December. Did you see that movie?

SF: I love it.

WM: Yeah, I did not the first time I saw it. Then I went and saw it again, and was like, “What was my problem?” I saw it the next day. That’s a movie that has so much going on. It’s so of a piece with where we are right now. It’s not telling you what it’s doing or how it’s feeling or what it even is. It’s like the weird touchless-ness of Todd Haynes, even though there is so much touching in this movie— the music is touching, the butterfly metaphors are touching you. His fingerprints are all over this thing, but it still feels like the hand guiding it is completely invisible and these characters are just doing whatever it is that they’ve been set on this earth to do. To sit down and talk about this movie and what is happening here… it is really deep and really satisfying to unpack it or argue with people about it. Like, I leave a movie and do not trust my response to it. And in the case of May December, I just went the next day and saw it again. It was like seeing something dead come to life right before your eyes. I found that expansion of my mind exhilarating.

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Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Ilyon Woo about her latest book, Master Slave Husband Wife.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: So, a work like this that you’ve been thinking about for 20 years before you start writing it– and I don’t know how long it took you to actually write it – and now it’s out in the world and outside of you. Is there one thing that you’ll take away from this?

Ilyon Woo: A takeaway? That’s a really good question. You know, the one thing I keep thinking about is just in terms of the creative process – have you seen Sesame Street where there’s a character named Don Music?  He plays these songs on the piano and Kermit the Frog introduces him and he says, you know, here we are in the studio of Don Music and he’s in the process of writing this incredible song, it is going to be hit.  And Don Music is starting to write a song, which is obviously Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, but he gets stuck, because he can’t rhyme something or it loses a word, and he’s like, I’ll never get it. I’ll never get it. And he bangs his whole head and his hands and his face on the piano. For me being a pianist’s daughter, this seemed like the ultimate, you know, I mean, you just don’t bang a piano, right? So, there was that. But there was also that frustration that I could empathize with when you’re trying to do something, and it just doesn’t work. You just want to throw everything down. Maybe my takeaway as an artist is how even if you keep banging your head on the piano that eventually, I can find my way writing my way out of this. And usually, I found that when I got to that wanting to bang my head on the piano phase, it was because I didn’t know enough. It was because I was trying to force something when I wasn’t ready to get there. And if I could pull back for a moment and do a little more research around it, then something would pop open. And luckily, I have my own real life Kermit, my writing partner, Rachel Kousser, who would, you know, pat me on the back and also say, Isn’t it time to like peel your face and fingers on that keyboard?

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Ilyon Woo is the is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023. Woo is also the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times.  Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times.  She has a PhD in English from Columbia University.

Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is currently in its fourth year. We are a weekly podcast for writers craving a unique blend of inspiration and real talk about the ups and downs of the writing life. Hosted by Brooke Warner of She Writes and Grant Faulkner of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), each theme-focused episode of Write-minded features an interview with a writer, author, or publishing industry professional.

In this gorgeous, sensualistic, tactile, provocative episode of Write-minded, we explore the senses with Janet Fitch of White Oleander fame. In this interview, Janet takes us on a tour through the senses, making the point that our language is impoverished and we can—and must—do more to become more sophisticated observers on the page. This is an episode you’ll carry with you into your next writing or reading session, keeping an eye out (and tastebuds at the ready and an ear attuned and the nose trained) for the next sensual experience or opportunity. Revel in the possibilities and ideas Janet offers to employ the superpowers each of our senses hold.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Janet Fitch is the bestselling author of White Oleander, an Oprah book club pick, Paint it Black, and the historical novels The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, set during the Russian Revolution. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Noir, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing widely online and in person.

Novelist Ed Park joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the role of alternate histories and counternarratives in popular culture, public record, and the general consciousness, via his new novel, Same Bed Different Dreams. Park talks about depicting and reimagining well known events and eras, including the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910-1945; Korean resistance to that occupation in the form of the Korean Provisional Government; the post-World War II division of Korea into North and South, which became sovereign nations in 1948; and the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to until 1953. He reflects on writing about more recent history, as well as his hometown of Buffalo, New York. The conversation suggests that positive alternate timelines, like the one Park creates, invite readers to learn more about actual events, whereas a more pernicious spin on the past may edit for the benefit of a particular group. Park reads from the novel.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Same Bed Different Dreams begins in a speculative future in which a writer ends up reading a manuscript by another, who is an older man known as Echo. That manuscript is an alternative history of Korea, that is kind of an interesting echo, and that manuscript itself appears within your book. And that manuscript is called Same Bed Different Dreams: Being a True Account of the Korean Provisional Government. Since today we’re talking about alternative histories, we’re going to focus first on this part of your book. So of course, that true account is true and also not, and as one of your characters notes, Americans know almost nothing about Korea, despite U.S. involvement with important parts of Korean history. 

I thought that for the benefit of our listeners, we would just start with some basic events. So you write about and reference the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945; Korean resistance to that occupation in the form of the Korean Provisional Government; the post-WWII division of Korea into the north, administered by the Soviet Union, and the South, administered by the U.S.; the North and South becoming sovereign nations in 1948; and the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953. And going past that there are other incidents as well. Why did you decide to start with a period right before the occupation and the rest of the colonial era?

Ed Park: I started writing the novel, and one of the narrators was Korean American and had some of my biographical background. And, I’m essentially a comic novelist—or at least I think of myself as one—but as I wrote, I realized I was getting into something that’s both very important to me, and something that didn’t appear at all in Personal Days. Personal Days was kind of a dark office comedy. There’s a very small reference to ethnicity at, like, two points in the book. Part of that was because I had a very clear idea what that book was going to be, and it was going to be about the office. 

I almost streamlined it to focus on the comic aspects. And with Same Bed, which took about nine years to write, just the fact that this was kind of an Ed Park-like narrator, that should have made it easy for me in some ways, but then I realized people don’t really know about the history of modern Korea. People will have heard of the Korean War, but I bet you most Americans don’t know when that was – it’s called “The Forgotten War,” it’s commonly labeled that here – and why should they? I feel like even I, somebody who, you know, my parents came in the late 60s, I was born in Buffalo. It’s hard to get that information. You can say the education system should be better or whatever, but it’s a very complicated history. 

I’m interested in lots of periods of Korean history, but I didn’t want to do like a Charlie Kaufman adaptation and start at the beginning of all Korean history, but I thought giving a clear sense of Korea before it became a colony, and leading up to the Korean War, and then of course, it extends beyond by a couple of decades. This is mainly because I realized that it would place the narrator and some of the other characters more firmly in the reader’s mind in a historical sense. What are they? How is it that there are Korean people in America? What’s he doing in Buffalo? 

This is something, as a kid, sometimes I would think like, what am I doing? Why am I here? I mean, I love Buffalo in many ways, but especially in the 70s and 80s, you kind of stand out.  Every other generation in my family was in Korea, speaking Korean, and here I am speaking English. And I understand some Korean but it’s fading. 

I’ll say one more thing, which is that a lot of what I know about Korea isn’t through books or through pop culture, it comes from my parents. My dad would tell me about his early life. He’s old enough that when he first went to school he had to learn Japanese. The school was conducted in Japanese. He’s old enough that he knew the chaos post WWII leading up to the Korean War. And he’s old enough to have been in these very harrowing moments during the Korean War. In a way, it’s helped me understand the characters better and the situation, and also, my parents and myself, I suppose.

Whitney Terrell: So the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) began by resisting Japanese occupation, and a version of it plays a significant role in your book. Can you just talk to us about the actual KPG? 

EP: For various reasons, Japan wants Korea, and they annex it in 1905, and it becomes a full-fledged colony in 1910. 1919 is when the last real king of Korea dies, and there’s going to be a mass display of mourning. But what happens instead is the Koreans organize all across the peninsula—remember, it’s not North and South yet, it’s all one country—and they form a peaceful protest, and there’s a declaration of independence. That’s in March of 1919. Just a little bit after that, the Korean Provisional Government forms, and the headquarters is in Shanghai, China. So a lot of these members are in exile. They choose as their president a man named Sigmund Rhee, who is already in the U.S. at this point. He’s mostly living in Hawaii, but he’s kind of been all over. He’s one of the major historical figures in the book. He’s elected in exile, and they don’t really have any power. 

It’s a figurehead government, and they just want to publicize what’s happening, and that Korea is its own nation, its own people. I believe I first read about them in this modern Korean history class that I took in grad school. This is like in the early to mid-90s. I got a lot out of that class. But somehow that idea fascinated me, and the word “provisional” fascinated me—that adjective is so full of possibility. As a fiction writer, I just thought it would be fun to play with, and it took me 30 years to follow up. 

But my KPG is based in that original reality. What I do in the book is imagine it lasting beyond 1948, and also rounding up people who were not at all part of the KPG. Sigmund Rhee was definitely part of it and some of the other figures, but a lot of them, even the Korean ones, I just shoehorn them in. When I realized the KPG was going to be in this book, it gave me a tremendous amount of freedom and inspiration to talk about these different people who have fascinated me for a while.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo. Photograph of Ed Park by Sylvia Plachy.

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Ed Park

Same Bed Different Dreams • Personal Days • Weird Menace

Others:

Charlie Kaufman • Philip Roth • Richard E. Kim • Jack London on Korea • Thomas Pynchon • BTS

For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today?

Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.

In 1817 and 1818, the discovery of two sets of Czech manuscripts helped fuel the Czech National Revival, as promoters of Czech nationalism trumpeted these centuries-old works as foundational texts of a national mythology. There was only one problem: they were completely forged. In this episode, Jacke talks to David Cooper about his new book, The Czech Manuscripts: Forgery, Translation, and National Myth, which looks at why people were so eager to fall for this hoax – and what happened when the truth was learned. PLUS Jesse Kavadlo, President of the Don DeLillo Society and editor of Don DeLillo in Context, discusses his choice for the last book he will ever read.

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Subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

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Over the past decade, writer and actor Dan Levy rose to prominence for his work on Schitt’s Creek. After co-creating the series with his father, Eugene Levy, he turned to a more personal project.

Said project is his heartfelt directorial debut, a film entitled Good Grief. At the top of our conversation, Dan shares the origin of this story  and we discuss the importance of friendship, his experience working as a director, and a pivotal, full-circle moment from his time in London. Then, we discuss how he charted his course as a co-host on MTV Canada, the red carpet experience that clarified his path forward, and his ultimate arrival at making Schitt’s Creek.

On the back-half, we unpack the pure, timeless nature of the hit series, Dan’s journey to making Good Grief after the show’s momentous conclusion, a powerful scene from the film, the universality of loss, and the responses that encourage him to continue creating.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode: 

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.    

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Today, Kate Brody discusses her literary crime debut, Rabbit Hole, inhabiting and subverting the crime genre, writing sex scenes, writing men, the narrative use of a gun in the novel, what drives us to consume true crime, and more!

From the episode:

Kate Brody: I feel like the book does well with the lit fic people who are closet crime people. […] Story is just so much of who we are as human beings. I was a big crime reader as a kid; I still love a really well-written crime novel. I love the Tana French books, and the writing is beautiful. Any kind of genre fiction [in MFA programs] is the ugly stepchild, but you see books that are doing it really well, and you think, okay, there’s no reason why the quality of the writing can’t be where I want it to be, and also work in this space. I was never going to write a straight down the middle crime novel.

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Kate Brody lives in Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Lit Hub, CrimeReads, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, and The Literary Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from NYU. Rabbit Hole is her debut.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Jill McCorkle about her new story collection, Old Crimes.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I saw a lot of nostalgia in your stories, not necessarily in the stories but the impact on the reader.  Most of your characters seem to be wistful or have important memories of times before cell phones and of Esso gas stations and you brought up Charlotte’s Web a few times and those first indelible memories that help shape us.  

Jill McCorkle: I think there is this longing for the purity of those early beliefs and hopes and dreams. Obviously, there are a lot of schoolteachers and librarians along the way. And you know, I do go back again and again to some of the earliest memories in life. I often tell my students that when you’re trying to evoke a certain emotion on the page or to give feeling to a character, I think one of the best things we can do as writers is to reach back into our own memories and maybe not the most recent experience of an emotion but to go all the way back to when it is so pure and so clear and not cluttered with all we know.  As a kid you really know joy and you know, sadness.  I always use the analogy of like the Crayola box of crayons, you know, those primary colors, there’s no denying what the color is or what you’re feeling in those early, early memories. So, I find myself looking back to childhood, a lot and what was learned in fairy tales and those scary, scary stories that serve a very good purpose.

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Jill McCorkle is the author of four short story collections and seven novels including the New York Times bestseller Life After Life.  Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books and her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories.  She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is currently a faculty member at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and is affiliated with the MFA program at North Carolina State University.  Her new short story collection is called Old Crimes.

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

We have forgotten the covenant of primordial love and reciprocal care with the Earth that existed from the beginning in favor of a story that casts humans as the center of the cosmos. As the fallout of this narrative culminates in the unprecedented transformation of our outer landscapes, our inner landscapes are also shifting in ways that demand our attention.

Given at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London in November 2023, this talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee speaks to the possibility of profound inner transformation amid the great changes engulfing the Earth. Exploring the need to step away from a humancentric paradigm and towards a remembrance of the Earth as a divine being, Emmanuel asks: As so much falls away, what can we offer to the Earth? How can we place Earth back at the center of the story? What opens when love once again becomes present between us?

Read the transcript.

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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is an Emmy- and Peabody Award–nominated filmmaker and a Sufi teacher. His films include: Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, The Atomic Tree, Counter Mapping, Marie’s Dictionary, and Elemental. His films have been screened at New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and Hot Docs, exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum, and featured on PBS POV, National Geographic, and New York Times Op-Docs. He is the founder and executive editor of Emergence Magazine.