James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But somehow he did it.
But somehow he did it.
Hello, and welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close readings podcast from the London Review of Books.
I'm James Wood, and today we're discussing a wonderful brief novel by the American writer Saul Bellow.
It's called Seize the Day, and it was published in 1956.
In some ways, the novel has a canonical status in Bellow's work for those who know that work.
When he won the Nobel Prize in 1976, for instance, this novel was cited as a prime reason for that prize.
But perhaps in the popular sense of Bellow, if there is one left anymore, it's been supplanted by the big antique comic novels that we think of as typically Bellowvian.
I'm thinking of The Adventures of Augie March from 1953, his novel Herzog from 1964, which amazingly enough was a bestseller in the United States.
in the days when literary novels, very briefly, a brief window when literary novels still could be bestsellers, and his wonderful novel about his old friend Delmore Schwartz, the poet, called Humboldt's Gift from 1975.
Those are the books, I guess, along with a later book called The Dean's December that perhaps people would put on a shelf and say, you know, that's Bellow.
Whereas this small 100-page book that the English writer V.S.
Pritchett once called a small gray masterpiece sits slightly to one side of those big pioneering books.
But it's a wonderful novel.
I'm very fond of it.
And something I'll get to in a second.
It also works very nicely for our series about realism.
It's like Mrs. Dalloway.
It's set on a single day.
And the plot, such as there is, can be easily summarized.
Showing 321–340 of 815 · page 17 of 41
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