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12 episodes
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The Critic and Her Publics Merve Emre
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- Arts
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3.8 • 57 Ratings
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The best and most prominent critics working today perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work as they perform how to think about art and culture. From the New York Review of Books and Literary Hub, The Critic and Her Publics is a limited series hosted by Merve Emre.
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf
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Christine Smallwood
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 PhD in English from Columbia University and is a core faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she teaches courses on the nineteenth-century novel and other topics.
Recorded April 16, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf -
Carina del Valle Schorske
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 The Believer, The Cut, The Point, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is now a contributing writer. As a translator, she focuses on Puerto Rican poetry, especially the work of Marigloria Palma. Her own poetry has been featured in a variety of small journals and anthologies, and supported by fellowships from CantoMundo, MacDowell, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Recorded October 17, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf -
Maggie Doherty
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 April 9, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf -
Doreen St. Félix
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 same category.
Recorded March 26, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf -
Lauren Michele Jackson
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 Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf -
Jo Livingstone
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 editorial website The Stopgap with Daniel Lavery. They are currently a visiting professor at Pratt Institute.
Recorded February 20, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University
Edited by Michele Moses
Music by Dani Lencioni
Art by Leanne Shapton
Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf
Customer Reviews
Are the publics really plural ?
Immense respect for this project, but the vibe… ça m’énerve
Please, more of the guests!
I really appreciate the idea of this show and I do enjoy reading Emre’s writing. But she conducts each interview as if she is the teacher and inevitably brings the conversation to be about her or her own teaching /writing. This is fine for an episode but gets repetitive week after week. Please keep the focus on the guests.
such a disappointment
This really is quite poor. I so wanted to like it, be captivated, be enlightened. But the tone is close to unbearable: cloying, self-absorbed, unctuous. And there hasn’t been a single moment that goes anywhere beneath the surface. The questions are beyond bland and anodyne, and the guests respond in kind. Everyone comes off seeming like the most self-absorbed, shallow bores I’d run screaming from at a party. The pity is that I’m sure at least some of the participants are far more interesting than they seem here.