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Daisy Hildyard reads her story “Revision,” from the December 23, 2024, issue of the magazine. Hildyard, a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and of one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” awards, is the author of the novels “Emergency” and “Hunters in the Snow,” and of a nonfiction book, “The Second Body.”

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Frank spends a day in Belfast, wallowing in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. The poem referenced are ‘Personal Helicon’ from ‘Death of a Naturalist’ and ‘Limbo’ by Seamus Heaney.

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Join your hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver for a bonus episode discussing the lasting influence of Proust on today’s literary culture. We discuss memoirs, translations, and the transformative power of Proust, particularly two books that profoundly influenced our reading: Laure Murat’s Proust, roman familial (forthcoming in English as Proust, A Family Romance) and Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory. Plus, we reveal what we appreciate in friends in our final round of the Proust Questionnaire.

Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver join the narrator for one last search for lost time, rejoicing with him as he finds it by stumbling on a paving stone in the courtyard of the Princesse de Guermantes’s house, and dreams about the book he finally knows he can write – if he can only live long enough. The shadow of mortality is cast not only by the Great War, which ends some time before this ‘regaining’ of lost time, but in the iconic ‘bal des têtes’ scene in which the narrator suddenly notices that he and everyone else he knows has gotten older as time has passed. We giddily discuss Proust’s vision of art and his theory of time, and how he brings his ‘unfinished’ novel to a virtuosic conclusion. Plus, we answer the question, “who is your favorite heroine?”. Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.

Presenter James Crawford takes a deep dive into the latest work by critically-acclaimed writer Tessa Hadley and learns more about her creative process by exploring its connections to three other literary works. Tessa's new novella The Party started out life as a short story for the New Yorker magazine but was later expanded. Her three influential choices are: Alice Munro's short story collection Open Secrets; Elizabeth Bowen's The Death Of The Heart and Colm Toibin's Brooklyn.

David Szalay reads “Plaster,” from the December 9, 2024, issue of the magazine. Szalay is the author of six books of fiction, including “All That Man Is,” which won the Plimpton Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016, “Turbulence,” and “Flesh,” which will be published in April of 2025.

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Divination, by Stephen O'Reilly, read by Andrew Bennett

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Frank is more than slightly besotted with ‘Lunch Poems’ by Frank O'Hara. The poems referenced are ‘Personal Poem’ and ‘The Day Lady Died’ by Frank O’Hara.

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The panel discusses the biographical details of David Jones, and his participation in the Great War, before reading parts 5–7 of In Parenthesis, with attention to the role of mechanisation and the inversion of traditional forms of warfare and defence.

This is the volume of Albertine’s disappearance, first from the narrator’s home, then from life, and finally from the narrator’s memory. Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver contemplate Proust’s extended meditation on oblivion, love, jealousy, grief, and death. We discuss the careful rhythm of the volume, the transitory nature of the self, and the proliferation of doubles and specters. We travel to Venice, which for once disappoints us more than it does the narrator. Plus, we answer the question, “What is your favorite occupation?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.