John and Elizabeth look back at Recall This Book’s 2019 conversation with Zadie Smith, so you may want to listen to that again before proceeding. Elizabeth and John try their best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, authenticity and human sacredness; the “golden ticket” dirty secret behind our hypocritical academic meritocracy; surveillance capitalism as the “biggest capital grab of human experience in history;” and her genealogy of the novel. If we had to sum the day up with a few adjectives: funny, provocative, resplendent, chill, generous, cantankerous.
Discussed in this episode:
Tony Judt, Postwar
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Doris Lessing The Fifth Child
Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means
Stephen McCauley (with JP on RTB) Barbara Pym and the Comic Novel
Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (and others…)
Joseph O’Neill, Netherland
J. P. Toussaint, The Bathroom
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, “Moments of Being”
Philip Roth, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost
You can read the transcript here:
RTB 15x Ferry and Plotz on ZS
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