Welcome to Season Four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview . This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they're looking for, what makes a good question, how do you listen for what's unsaid, and how hard do you have to push someone before they say something new? Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by Leanne Shapton This season of The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the New York Review of Books and Lit Hub.
"Couples therapy. The words alone are enough to send many people running for the hills, but Orna Guralnik—star of Showtime's documentary series Couples Therapy —has people running to her office. Orna, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, has become a household name: she's a watchful guide for couples as they navigate intimate and sometimes agonizing discussions, and for viewers, as they watch these couples bare their souls or refuse to do so. With her beloved dog Nico on her lap, Orna explained to me how she practices listening for the unconscious, the limits and possibilities of televised therapy, and whether the psychoanalytic interview can teach even the most adversarial pairs (like warring nations) how to make peace." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Sarah Stillman
45 min
"Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the most decorated investigative reporters of her generation. She's won several National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur 'Genius' Grant. Her articles draw attention to the men and women forced to do the bidding of the American security state; the third-country nationals tricked into working on military bases in Iraq; the addicts coerced into serving as informants; the victims of civil asset forfeiture. Our conversation touched on every stage of Sarah's career, from her days as a student journalist to her current directorship of Yale's investigative reporting lab. As a teacher, she helps students cultivate the relentlessness and the compassion that makes her a uniquely effective reporter." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Sheila Heti
37 min
"In the fall of 2022, I saw the novelist Shelia Heti give a presentation on her conversations with early AI chatbots. Their names were Eliza, Alice, and George, and they had wild, undisciplined opinions about art, selfhood, and God. Talking to them seemed to come naturally to Sheila: for several years, she had been the interviews editors at The Believer and her novels Motherhood and Pure Colour featured narrators who ask difficult questions of non-human entities like the I Ching or a leaf on a tree. A few months after OpenAI released ChatGPT-5, Sheila and I spoke about the role of the interview at a time when human thought and feeling are impinged by artificial intelligence and whether machines can help us to unlock the mysteries of consciousness." — Merve Emre See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Chana Joffe-Walt
39 min
The new season of The Critic and Her Publics—The Art of the Interview— begins! "Chana Joffe-Walt is a Peabody Award-winning journalist and a producer at This American Life . Her series on school segregation, Nice White Parents , examined how progressive Brooklyn families undermined racial integration. She regularly takes over from Ira Glass to host special episodes on race, labor, and education. But it was her series of conversations with men, women, and children in Gaza that made me want to begin the season with her, to explore how the interview can preserve the dignity and complexity of ordinary people in a time of genocide." — Merve Emre See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Money
46 min
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 everyone? And how should the translator be compensated, when their role is still so unresolved? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Judgement
56 min
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 consequential. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Practical Translation: 1,001 Nights
39 min
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 many retellings of Scheherazade’s tales over the centuries, which were then written down as many different manuscripts. What, then, does it mean for a translator to “take liberties,” or to be “faithful to the text”? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
English
39 min
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://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Shame
48 min
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 invisible or asserting their styles. Many of them are caught between identities. You’ll hear Maureen Freely, an American who grew up in Istanbul, talk about her vexed relationship with Orhan Pamuk and Tiffany Tsao, American-born, but of Indonesian heritage, confess the shame she felt when translating Budi Darma. All of the translators in this group, for reasons of temperament and structure, seem to have a masochistic relationship to their work. But as in all cases of masochism, the pain is a kind of pleasure, too. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
First Sentences
33 min
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 importance of the first sentence been overly inflated? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Practical Translation: Proust
36 min
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 lot to keep track of, but in the course of these conversations, you will get to know all of their voices very well. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Leo Carey: "What's Not There"
42 min
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: "Faustian Bargains"
42 min
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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Ben Calhoun: "Close Listening"
37 min
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: "Mischief in the Pages"
39 min
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 Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Radhika Jones: "Past the Illusion"
42 min
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 Columbia, where she has also taught courses in writing and literature. Born in New York City, she grew up in Cincinnati and Ridgefield, Connecticut. _________________________________ 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 Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Zakiya Dalilah Harris: "Satire and Sensitivity"
40 min
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. _________________________________ 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 Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Fergus McIntosh: "One Wonders"
37 min
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 Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Jackson Howard: "Risk It All"
35 min
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 Escoffery, Fernando A. Flores, Susan Straight, Imogen Binnie, Shon Faye, Henry Hoke, Thomas Grattan, Venita Blackburn, Missouri Williams, and many others. Books he has edited have won or been nominated for the Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Open Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. A longtime Pitchfork contributor, his reviews, profiles, and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine , The Cut , Rolling Stone , The Ringer , W., i-D , office , Document , and elsewhere. In 2023, he was featured in New York magazine’s Power Issue and was named one of Harper’s BAZAAR ’s 36 Voices of Now and part of Town & Country ’s Creative Aristocracy . In 2022, he was named a Star Watch Honoree by Publishers Weekly . _________________________________ 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 Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books , and Lit Hub. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Meghan O'Rourke: "The Glitzy Bits"
41 min
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 Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. O’Rourke is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. Currently the editor of The Yale Review, she began her career as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker . Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review . Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, The Kenyon Review , and Best American Poetry , among others. She is a graduate of Yale University, where she also teaches. 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 Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books , and Lit Hub. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
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