The Critic and Her Publics

In this final episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione series for 2025, we’ll confront a subject that the literary world likes to keep subtextual: money. The translators and publishers, who usually meet over contract negotiations, open up their books and compare bottom lines, to see who feels like they’re being short-changed, and why. Is there—or could there be—a pay structure that works for ev...

How do we decide which translations are better than others?  In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions and Adam Levy of Transit Books reveal how they evaluate books for acquisition. And, because so many of the guests on this show have served on prize juries, we compare our experiences making judgments that can seem at once arbitrary and hugely co...

In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, another session of practical translation: the reading and comparing of many renditions of one passage, to see how translators make their choices.  But the text we’ll be examining, 1001 Nights, presents an unusual challenge. Unlike with the Proust that we discussed in the first episode, there is not one fixed source text to work with. There were...

In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, we discuss the problem of English. What happens when you bring a nation’s literature into its colonizer’s language? Is it inevitably a kind of violence? Here, we look to the field of translation studies, which provides some answers—not all of them satisfying.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https...

In this episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, the translators discuss the fraught emotional condition of their work: the sense that not only is their work shameful and grotesque but that they are too, for daring to attempt it.  Translation demands a deep and scholarly knowledge of language, which never feels sufficient. Translators are often faced with a binary of either making themselves i...

In this second episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, we explore beginnings. Anyone who has been around kids knows that a good Lego build starts with a good base. In a translation, this is the first sentence of a text. First sentences are so often the most famous lines.  They are a place for a translator to make their mark. They dictate the voice in which the book unfolds. But has the import...

In the first episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, we start with an exercise in practical translation: a discussion of seven different English interpretations of one, highly complicated sentence from Volume One of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time .  Maureen Freely will speak first, followed by Daisy Rockwell, Virginia Jewiss, Jeremy Tiang, and finally Tiffany Tsao. It sounds like a lo...

Leo Carey is a senior editor at The New Yorker . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Yahdon Israel is a senior editor at Simon Schuster and founder of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature and fashion to make books accessible. He brings an entrepreneurial spirit to these pursuits as the founder of a popular book club , host of a literary podcast, creative writing teacher, event producer, as well as his work in support of several prestigious literary awards....

Ben Calhoun is the executive producer of "The Daily" ( The New York Times ). Previously, he was an editor and producer for This American Life and Serial , and VP of programming at WBEZ in Chicago. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Sasha Weiss is a writer and the deputy culture editor at The New York Times Magazine . Previously she was the literary editor at The New Yorker and an editor at The New York Review of Books . _________________________________ The Critic and Her Publics Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf The Critic and Her P...

Radhika Jones is the fifth editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. She previously held senior editorial roles at The New York Times, Time, and The Paris Review. She also was the managing editor at Grand Street, an editor at Artforum, and the arts editor of The Moscow Times, where she began her career. Jones holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a Ph. D. in English and comparative literature from Columb...

Zakiya Dalila Harris received her MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her debut novel, The Other Black Girl , was an instant New York Times bestseller and is now a critically acclaimed Hulu Original Series. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband. ________________________...

Fergus McIntosh is the head research editor at The New Yorker and runs the magazine's fact-checking department. _________________________________ The Critic and Her Publics Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Cr...

Jackson Howard is an editor and writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn. He’s Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and its imprints MCD and AUWA (headed by Questlove), where he acquires and edits a broad range of fiction and nonfiction. Writers he has published include Judith Butler, Brontez Purnell, Catherine Lacey, Bryan Washington, Laura van den Berg, Sarah Schulman, Jonathan Escoff...

Meghan O'Rourke is a writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller  The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022) ; the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011) ; and the poetry collections Sun In Days (2017) , which was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year; Once (2011) ; and Halflife (2007) , which was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry...

Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of Libertie and We Love You, Charlie Freeman , one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue , Glamour,the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Nat...

Emily Greenhouse is the editor of the New York Review of Books . She is the former managing editor of The New Yorker . For the full episode transcript, visit the NYRB Recorded September 17, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University Edited by Michele Moses Music by Dani Lencioni Art by Leanne Shapton Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf The Critic and Her Publics is a production of the Shapiro Cent...

We've got some exciting news regarding the future of The Critic and Her Publics —and here to bring it to you is the latest episode of Literary Hub's The Lit Hub Podcast . If you don't know The Lit Hub Podcast , it's the in-house show at Lit Hub, hosted by podcasts editor Drew Broussard. This week features Merve Emre talking about what's next for TCAHP as well as Lit Hub's editor-in-chief Jonny Dia...

Christine Smallwood is the author of La Captive (Fireflies Press, 2024) and the novel The Life of the Mind (Hogarth, 2021), which Time magazine named one of the top ten fiction books of the year. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have been published in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She holds a...

Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer, translator, and wannabe backup dancer. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island , is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. It was recently awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant . She writes about Caribbean culture, literary politics, diasporic dramas, and the songs she can’t stop singing to herself. Her essays have been published many places including T...

Maggie Doherty is the author of  The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s  (2020), which won the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her writing has appeared in  The New Yorker , the  New York Review of Books , the  New York Times , and the  Nation , among other publications.  Recorded A...

Doreen St. Félix has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017. Previously, she was a culture writer at MTV News. Her writing has appeared in the Times Magazine , New York , Vogue , The Fader , and Pitchfork. St. Félix was named on the Forbes “30 Under 30” media list in 2016. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and, in 2019, she won in the s...

Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of the essay collection White Negroes and is currently working on a second book, with Amistad Press. She is part of New America’s 2022 class of National Fellows . Recorded March 5, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University Edited by Michele M...

Jo Livingstone is a medieval literature scholar, a critic, and the 2020 National Book Critics Circle recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. After receiving a BA in English literature from the University of Oxford and a PhD in medieval literature from New York University, Livingstone went on to write cultural criticism for The New Republic and currently manages the edi...