This episode is a reading of Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay,“A Little Iliad,” a review of the film Troy, an adaptation of the Iliad, from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. It is read by the countertenor and opera director Anthony Roth Costanzo. Among many other roles, Costanzohas performed as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and Akhnaten in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, both at the Met Opera, and he won a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2022 for the cast recording of Akhnaten. He is currently the director and president of Opera Philadelphia.  

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. The paperback edition of his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released in April by the University of Chicago Press.   

Last week’s episode was an interview with Mendelsohn on Homer’s Odyssey, both the film adaptation and his translation. You can read “A Little Iliad” and other essays by Mendelsohn with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963. 

In this episode of Private Life, Daniel Mendelsohn joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his 2025 translation of Homer’s Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film adaptation, premiering this week. They discuss the debate surrounding the film’s casting, the significance of descriptive language in translations, and the enduring place of Greek literature, history, and aesthetics in gay cultural and intellectual life.  

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), and How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays (2008). Mendelsohn is also the author of the essay collections Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (2012) and Ecstasy and Terror (2019), as well as Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (2022), which were all published by New York Review Books. The paperback edition of his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released in April by the University of Chicago Press.   

Next week’s episode will be a reading of Mendelsohn’s essay “A Little Iliad,” a review of the film Troy from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. You can read that essay and others by Mendelsohn with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963. 

In this episode of Private Life, the poet and writer Eileen Myles reads Geoffrey O'Brien's essay on Frank O'Hara, ”The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street,” from The New York Review of Books‘ December 2, 1993, issue. It is read by the poet and writer Eileen Myles. Their work includes the semi-autobiographical book Chelsea Girls (1994), the novel Inferno (2008), and the poetry collection I Must Be Living Twice (2015). 

Frank O’Hara was a writer, art critic, and a leading poet of the New York School who worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He is best known for his poetry collection Lunch Poems (1964) and “Personism: A Manifesto” (1959).  

You can read “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street” by Geoffrey O’Brien and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963.  

In this episode of Private Life, Robert Glück joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about his books, the characters that shaped his stories, and Geoffrey O’Brien’s essay “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street” (published in the Review’s December 2, 1993, issue) on the poet and writer Frank O’Hara. They discuss Glück’s work of postmodern fiction Jack the Modernist (1985), his experimental novel Margery Kempe (1994), and his genre blending book About Ed (2023), all of which were published by New York Review Books.  

Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, and editor who cofounded the literary movement New Narrative alongside Bruce Boone in the 1970s. Glück’s books of poetry include La Fontaine (1981) with Bruce Boone, and Reader (1989). His other works include the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the essay collection Communal Nude (2016). He was the director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, served as codirector of Small Press Traffic, and was an associate editor at Lapis Press. 

You can find Robert Glück’s books at nyrb.com or at your favorite bookseller. Read Geoffrey O’Brien’s “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website. 

In this episode of Private Life, Langdon Hammer reads Helen Vendler’s essay, “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” from the May 11, 1995, issue of The New York Review of Books. The essay reviews James Merill’s posthumous collection of poetry, A Scattering of Salts (1995), as well as his poem “The House Fly,” published in the May 13, 1982, issue of the Review. 

Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art. He has reviewed biography and poetry for the Review and has written about the poet Elizabeth Bishop.  

Helen Vendler was an academic and literary critic, known for her contemporary poetry criticism. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Harvard. Vendler was a contributor to the Review for more than forty years.  

You can read “Chronicles of Love and Loss” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.   

This episode of Private Life is a reading from the forthcoming New York Review Books collection of Eve Babitz’s writing, Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were), edited and with an introduction by Lili Anolik. It is read by the actress and singer Gina Gershon. Gershon is best known for starring in the films Showgirls (1995), Bound (1996), Face/Off (1997), and The Insider (1999). Her book AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs was published earlier this year.  

Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was a writer and artist from Hollywood, California. She wrote the essay collections Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), both reissued by NYRB Classics, and the novel Sex and Rage (1979). NYRB also published I Used to Be Charming (2019), which brought together decades of her uncollected nonfiction. 

This reading accompanies last week's Private Life episode featuring Lili Anolik discussing Eve Babitz’s life and legacy. Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) will be published on June 23, 2026, and will be available at NYRB.com or at a local bookseller.  

In this episode of Private Life, Matthew Aucoin joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss the state of music criticism, the work of music composition, and the life and writing of Aucoin’s former professor and mentor, the poetry critic Helen Vendler. The two also talk about “Inside the Music,” Aucoin’s essay from the Review’s November 6, 2025, issue about the decline of music reviews in mainstream media, as well as “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” Vendler’s review, from our May 11, 1995, issue, of o James Merill’s final book of poetry, A Scattering of Salts.(1995).

Aucoin is a composer, conductor, and writer. His operatic song cycle Music for New Bodies, inspired by the poetry of Jorie Graham, premiered in 2024 and was staged at the Lincoln Center in the summer of 2025. He is the author of the book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera (2021), and he has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2018. Also in 2018 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Vendler was an academic and literary critic, known most for writing about contemporary poetry. Over a six-decade career she taught English and poetics at Cornell, Boston University, and Harvard, where she retired as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita in the Department of English. Vendler was also a longtime contributor to the Review, beginning in 1975 with an essay on William Carlos Willaims. 

Read the essays discussed in this episode with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

In this episode of Private Life, Lili Anolik joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about the life and legacy of Eve Babitz, in honor of the publication of New York Review Books’s Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) (2026), a collection of Babitz’s correspondence. Earnest and Anolik discuss Babitz’s captivating persona and the strange course of her life, from New York to Los Angeles and from riotous success to anonymity. Anolik, who has spent over a decade researching and writing about Babitz, talks about the notorious photo of a nude Babitz, age twenty-one, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp; her relationship with Joan Didion, and her artistic legacy captured through letter writing.  

Anolik is a writer and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She is the author of both Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. (2019) and the dual biography Didion & Babitz (2024). She is a writer at large for Air Mail, and her work has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, and Esquire, among other publications. 

Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was a writer and artist from Hollywood, California. She is best known for the essay collections Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), both reissued by NYRB Classics, and the novel Sex and Rage (1979). NYRB alsopublished I Used to Be Charming (2019), which brought together decades of her uncollected nonfiction. In addition to her writing, Babitz was a visual artist and created collages for a number of album covers, including LPs by Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt.  

Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) will be published on June 23, 2026, and will be available at NYRB.com or at a local bookseller. 

In the May 27, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Ingrid D. Rowland wrote “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio,” a look at the tempestuous life and brilliant art of the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. For this episode of Private Life, Rowland’s essay is read by the artist Lisa Yuskavage. Yuskavage has shown her paintings in solo exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. Through June 26, her show “Lisa Yuskavage” will be on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York.
This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Rowland in conversation with host Jarrett Earnest. Read “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

In this episode of Private Life, the art historian Ingrid D. Rowland joins Jarrett Earnest for an in-depth discussion about art history and disegno, an Italian word for “design” that was also a Renaissance-era concept describing some artists’ ability simultaneously to draw and to conceive of a grander scheme in their work. Rowland also talks about the lives and work of some of the Italian Renaissance’s most significant figures: Raphael; Caravaggio; Giorgi Vasari, a sixteenth-century artist and writer from Florence; and Agostini Chigi, a banker and art patron.  

Rowland is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450–1750 (2024). In 2017, she cowrote the biography The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1994, writing extensively on art, art history, architecture, and theater. Her debut in our pages was “Character Witnesses,” an essay about Renaissance portrait medals. Other articles have included “Caravaggio Lost and Found,” about two rediscovered Caravaggio paintings, “Roman Rivalries,” about Michelangelo and Sebastiano, and “The Virtuoso,” a rapturous review of a 2020 Raphael exhibition in Rome.  

Read the essays discussed in this episode and many others with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.