Father Son Romance: Merve Emre on Erich Segal's Love Story
04/24/24 • 55 min
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Previous Episode
Do It With Your Teeth: Daniel M. Lavery on The Prisoner of Zenda
This week Jo greets the universal subject in Rebecca Renner's Gator Country and Charlotte attacks and is attacked by Jane Eyre. (15:00) Then they're joined by matchless prose stylist and beloved genius Daniel M. Lavery (33:55) to discuss Anthony Hope's 1894 swashbuckler, The Prisoner of Zenda.
Daniel Lavery is the author of Something That May Shock and Discredit You and The Chatner newsletter. His forthcoming debut novel Women's Hotel is available to preorder!
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Next Episode
Up Ladder Lane: Anna Fitzpatrick on David Grann's The Wager
Season 2 comes out of the gate hot, with Charlotte learning about the Magna Carta through Sharon Kay Penman’s Here Be Dragons, and Jo (18:50) enraptured by the visions of Nat Turner, Black Prophet, by Anthony E. Kaye and Gregory P. Downs. Then the special and wonderful Anna Fitzpatrick joins (29:00) to discuss boats, scurvy, informal autism diagnoses, radicalizing dads through reading recommendations, and David Grann’s The Wager.
Also discussed: Anna’s Good Girl, Dava Sobel’s Longitude, and Sarah Helm’s Ravensbrück.
Anna Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Good Girl, a comedy about an aspiring slut with a panic disorder published by Flying Books. She is also the author of the children's book Margot and the Moon Landing.
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.
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