Who’s afraid of realism?

What’s the difference between realism and the real? James Wood look at novels and short stories from Flaubert and Dostoevsky up to contemporary writers including Amit Chaudhuri and Gwendoline Riley as he examines the uncertain line between artifice and artificiality and the techniques and effects used in fiction to achieve the lifelike. James Wood is a contributor to the London Review of Books, staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. His books include ‘How Fiction Works’, ‘The Fun Stuff’ and ‘The Broken Estate’. Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from the episodes. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Books featured in the series: Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics, trans. Geoffrey Wall) Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Three stories by Anton Chekhov (UK: Bravo Ltd., from Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; USA: same edition, Modern Library) Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Vintage, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Mariner Books Classics) Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Norton) Saul Bellow, Seize The Day (Penguin Modern Classics) Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Vintage) Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Dag Solstad, Shyness & Dignity (Vintage, trans. Sverre Lyngstad) Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag (UK: Faber and Faber, USA: New York Review Books Classics) Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms (UK: Granta Books; USA: New York Review Books Classics)

Episodes

‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark

September 15, 2026 • 21 mins

When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted’. The loss of an arm was hardly wonderful for Mr Lloyd, but for the girls at the centre of the novel it is a rich source of fascination, and Spark’s description exemplifies her use of one of the classic realist tools, free indire...

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‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov

August 31, 2026 • 22 mins

If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of postmodernism. Yet for all its playfulness, the book maintains, in its powers of noticing and subtle emotional intelligence, a strong commitment to the real. To examine the debts to realism in Nabokov’...

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‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow

August 14, 2026 • 15 mins

‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the use of leitmotif all reveal Bellow as a keen student of Flaubert and the 19th-century realists. Yet his novella about a disastrous day in the life of the sloppy, jobless 44-year-old Tommy Wilhelm also b...

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‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Jean Rhys

August 14, 2026 • 19 mins

In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably didn’t know the work of her contemporary Jean Rhys, but if she had read ‘A Voyage in the Dark’ (1934), she might well have marvelled at, and even envied, its radical realism. Rhys’ story of a young woman...

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‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf

May 27, 2026 • 20 mins

In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment’. This was Woolf’s ‘tunnelling process’, a transformative approach that led to the novel's celebrated modernist innovations, with its depi...

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‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy

April 27, 2026 • 22 mins

In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book ‘A Confession’, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and...

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Three stories by Anton Chekhov

March 30, 2026 • 23 mins

‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an actor how he should play the role of Trigorin in The Seagull, Chekhov simply answered: ‘he wears checked trousers’. As James Wood argues, this mastery of the telling detail is central ...

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‘Notes from Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky

March 1, 2026 • 19 mins

Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a 40-year-old’s furious rant against rationalism and moves on to present three humiliating episodes from his earlier life, offers no kind of conclusion. Instead, it is the unbearable moments of psycholog...

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‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert (part two)

February 1, 2026 • 9 mins

‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s tragic story, it serves as a condemnation not just of Charles’s emptiness but the whole provincial world Flaubert has been describing. In the second part of his analysis of &ls...

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‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert (part one)

January 4, 2026 • 20 mins

Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was anxious about the ambition of Flaubert’s ‘realism’ to cut to the bone of its characters and society at large. Karl Marx, on the other hand, praised realist writers who ‘issued to the world more political and social...

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Introducing ‘Who’s afraid of realism?’

December 31, 2025 • 2 mins

What’s the difference between realism and the real? James Wood looks at novels and short stories from Flaubert and Dostoevsky up to contemporary writers including Amit Chaudhuri and Gwendoline Riley as he examines the uncertain line between artifice and artificiality and the techniques and effects used in fiction to achieve the lifelike. James Wood is a contributor to the London Review of Books, staff writer at The New Yorke...

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Who’s afraid of realism?

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov

‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow

‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Jean Rhys

‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf

‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy

Three stories by Anton Chekhov

‘Notes from Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky

‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert (part two)

‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert (part one)

Introducing ‘Who’s afraid of realism?’

Popular Podcasts

‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark

‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov