Reading Writers

Reading Writers' first season draws to a close. To celebrate, Charlotte and Jo speak with the wise, bold, and original Merve Emre, who brings news of a secret Plautian aspect to Erich Segal's 1970 novel Love Story—the big book so bad it wrecked its author's career. Or was it?

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She writes semi-regularly in newsletter form, with additional work linked on charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com

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Jo recommends Augusto Higa Oshiro’s restrained The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, while Charlotte’s encounter with the first Twilight book (13:00) leads ineluctably to the Black Eyed Peas. Decorated journalist Connie Wang (26:30) joins to share the delights of Sanmao, the prolific Chinese memoirist who puts Joan Didion to shame.

Connie Wang is a journalist and writer based in Los Angeles. She was born in Jinan, China and raised in Minnesota. She’s the recipient of several Front Page Awards for her fashion reporting at Refinery29, and an Online Journalism Award for a multimedia essay with the NYT about a generation of Asian American women named after Connie Chung. My book, Oh My Mother! A MEMOIR IN NINE ADVENTURES is with Viking Books, and you can buy it now (please buy it now).

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She has a newsletter called Meant For You, with additional writing at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo’s spent the weekend on two books that have their seal of approval—The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright and The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War by Chad L. Williams—while Charlotte (12:35) has been getting Edna O’Brien-pilled. The inimitable Iva Dixit (25:00) stops by to share the remarkable story of her spite-buy of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, a much-loved novel that has “rewired her brain.”

Read Iva’s work on Sean Paul, Oppenheimer, and Retin-A.

Read the Andrea Dworkin essay mentioned in this episode here.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She has a newsletter called Meant For You, with additional writing at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo finds surprising depth to Susan Casey’s The Devil’s Teeth and Charlotte (8:35) fantasizes that her nonexistent celebrity romance novel is better than Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You, with a brief bonus discussion of Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry. The great mind and Mobility author Lydia Kiesling (25:40) then joins to reflect on Lucky Jim and the ways our parents’ book collections shape us as readers.

Read Jo's review of Asymmetry from 2018 here.

Lydia Kiesling is a novelist and culture writer. Her first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree and a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her second novel, Mobility, a national bestseller, was named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, Time, and NPR, among others. It is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her essays and nonfiction have been published in outlets including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, and The Cut.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.

Charlotte is on Instagram and Twitter as @Charoshane. Her memoir, An Honest Woman (August 13, 2024) can be pre-ordered now. She has a newsletter called Meant For You, with additional writing at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Learn more about our producer Alex at https://www.alexsugiura.com/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jo opens their mind to further basketball books after reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year, while Charlotte (11:30) revisits a YA novel from her youth, Bette Green’s Summer of My German Soldier. Glamorous Marlowe Granados then joins (24:30) to expound on great novels of mid-century women, namely Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone.

Other books discussed in this episode: Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything

Marlowe Granados is the author of Happy Hour, a novel the New Yorker called an "effervescent debut." In 2021, it was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel award and received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Review. It is considered a RAVE on Literary Hub’s BookMarks, a website that aggregates reviews from major publications. She writes a substack called "From the Desk of Marlowe Granados" and is currently at work on her second novel. After spending time in New York and London, she now lives in Toronto.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com.

Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com

Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.