Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

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 Liv...

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...

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. Pr...

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 Alp...

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...

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 an...

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, i...

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 Renaiss...

Private Life presents a bonus episode from our friends at Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast . Produced by the eponymous art gallery, Dialogues brings together artists, creatives, and intellectuals in conversation about what it means to make things today.     In this episode, host Helen Molesworth is joined by the art historian Lisa Saltzman to discuss Walter Benjamin’s final days. Molesworth an...

In the October 21, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books , Martin Filler wrote “Ghosts in the House,” about Frank Gehry’s life and work at the turn of the century, including the architect’s own house in Santa Monica, his celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In this episode of Private Life , Filler’s essay is read by Maya Lin. Best known for designing the Vie...

In this episode of Private Life, Martin Filler joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about architecture criticism, Frank Gehry, and the art that makes us weep.  Martin Filler is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books . His first article for the Review , “ Tall Stories ,” about the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, appeared in our December 5, 1985 is...

In March 2019 Namwali Serpell wrote for the  NYR Online about a choose-your-own-adventure-style episode of the television show Black Mirror , Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hannah Arendt, and Violet Allen’s story “The Venus Effect,” among other subjects, in an expansive essay on about narrative empathy . In this episode of Private Life , “The Banality of Empathy” is read by the writer Lovia Gyarkye, whose w...

In this episode of Private Life , the writer and New York Review contributor Namwali Serpell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss her new book, On Morrison , a collection of essays about Toni Morrison and her work. Their conversation covers Morrison’s life as a literary eminence and public intellectual, but the focus is Serpell’s close-readings of her most famous novels—including Jazz (1992), Sula (19...

In this episode of Private Life , the writer, translator, and editor Gini Alhadeff reads excerpts from Mark Polizzotti’s recent translation, for NYRB Classics, of André Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel, Nadja . Blending autobiography and fiction, this abidingly strange book recounts, analyzes, and remembers Breton’s brief love affair with the eponymous young woman in 1920s Paris.   Alhadeff is the a...

In this episode of Private Life , Jarrett Earnest is joined by Mark Polizzotti to discuss André Breton’s surrealist novel, Nadja , originally published in 1928 and translated into English by Polizzotti for NYRB Classics in 2025. Polizzotti gives insight into the process of translation, the facts of the real Nadja’s life, and the quotations and photography that Breton employed to evoke the woman be...

In this episode of Private Life , Richard Hell reads from his novel Godlike (2005), which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Faye. Godlike tells the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back, closely mirroring the doomed romance between the nineteenth-century French poètes maudits...

In this episode of Private Life , Richard Hell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his novel Godlike (newly reissued by NYRB Classics), his creative process, the love of poetry, and the stories behind his work.   Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Originally from Kentucky, he moved to New York at the age of seventeen and bega...

In the June 24, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates wrote about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey and dissected America’s fascination with “the category of nonfiction known as ‘true crime.’” In this episode of Private Life , “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey" is read by writer Alissa Bennett, whose work has appeared in The Paris Review , Vogue , The New York Times , and Artfor...

In the third episode of Private Life , Joyce Carol Oates joins Jarrett Earnest for an expansive conversation on everything from Joan Didion to serial killers. They discuss “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” Didion’s essay from the Review ’s March 7, 1991, issue about the Central Park Five, the rush to judgment in a sensational murder case, media mythmaking, and sentimentalized narratives about crim...

In the May 4, 1972, issue of The New York Review of Books , Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about the lives and work of the Brontë sisters on the occasion of Winifred Gérin’s then-new biography of Emily (preceded by Gérin’s biographies of Anne, Branwell, and Charlotte, and followed in 1973 by her group biography The Brontës ). In this episode of Private Life , Hardwick’s essay is read by Kathleen Chalfan...

In the first episode of our podcast Private Life , Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick. Pinckney discusses her inimitable voice on the page, her love of literature’s most “terrific losers,” and the people in her inner circle, including the Review ’s editor Barbara Epstein, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag, who came to shape Ha...

We are thrilled to present Private Life , a new podcast from The New York Review that delves into that creative, exhilarating moment where ideas first appeared on the page. Hosted by Jarrett Earnest, one of the most exciting art critics working today, each episode features an intimate, in-depth conversation with a distinguished writer about their lives, their work, their influences, and the ideas...