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Today we continue talking about Walter Benjamin. 

Thank you so much for listening! Could never do this without your help. 

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Novelist Heidi Julavits and scholar Leah Price join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels help us make sense of catastrophe.

When Ling Ma's Severance was published in 2018, the idea of an airborne global plague seemed theoretical. In hindsight, it appears eerily prescient. How do novels like Severance guide us to understand our place in historical time—to process events like pandemics alongside the mundanity of everyday working life?

You can find complete show notes here and purchase books from our independent-bookshop partner, Harvard Book Store, here.

Novelist Garth Greenwell and scholar Daniel Wright join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels expand our understanding of sex and intimacy in the digital age.

In our image-saturated culture, it can be easy to fixate on a surface while overlooking the consciousness—the thinking, feeling subject—under the (pixelated) skin. How can novels, like Barbara Browning’s The Gift, remind us that bodies are, well, embodied?

You can find complete show notes here and purchase books from our independent-bookshop partner, Harvard Book Store, here.

Maggie O’Farrell has written eight novels, a memoir and a children’s book. In 2020 her novel Hamnet won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was also named Waterstones Book of the Year.

Maggie was born in Northern Ireland. Her parents moved around during her childhood, and she grew up in Wales and Scotland. As a young girl, she was very ill and almost died from encephalitis. She says her lifelong love of reading comes from her long stay in hospital followed by an extended convalescence, when she missed a year of school. Her illness also left her with a stammer, which she believes has profoundly affected her relationship with language.

She studied English at Cambridge University, and then looked for work as a journalist, writing poetry in her spare time. When she chanced upon a discarded computer, she decided to write a novel. She attended a creative writing course, where her tutors encouraged her to get her first manuscript published.

She lives in Scotland with her husband, the writer William Sutcliffe, and their three children.

DISC ONE: Elephant Gun by Beirut

BOOK CHOICE: Selected Stories by Alice Munro

Presenter: Lauren Laverne

Today we begin discussing the work of Walter Benjamin. 

Thank you so much for listening! Could never do this without your help. 

Website: https://www.philosophizethis.org/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/philosophizethis 

Social:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philosophizethispodcast

X: https://twitter.com/iamstephenwest

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philosophizethisshow

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Novelist Elif Batuman and scholar Merve Emre join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels help us develop an awareness of capitalism, power, and the world we live in. In making pain beautiful, do novels depoliticize us? Or can a novel like Sakaya Murata's Convenience Store Woman help us figure out what freedom looks like? 

You can find complete show notes here and purchase books from our independent-bookshop partner, Harvard Book Store, here.

Novelist Teju Cole and scholar Tara Menon join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels inspire readers to wrestle with difficult ideas. From Shelley's Frankenstein to Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, how have novels helped us think more ethically about the world we inhabit?

You can find complete show notes here and purchase books from our independent-bookshop partner, Harvard Book Store, here.

Jhumpa Lahiri reads her story from the February 15 & 22, 2021, issue of the magazine. Lahiri is the author of two novels and two short-story collections. Her first book, “Interpreter of Maladies,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and she was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal in 2014. Her new novel, “Whereabouts,” from which this story is adapted, was published in Italian in  2018 and will come out in Lahiri’s translation in April.