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
And this physical thing, along with the whitened honey color of his hair, will be repeated in the book.
So, free and direct style, detail, leitmotif, cinematic moves.
That's our realist toolkit, revived postmodernism by a great writer in the 1950s.
And...
as we did with Flaubert, because this is a really, really exquisite stylist for me.
He's a really great 20th century stylist or post-war 20th century stylist.
We have to slow down and just enjoy, you know, what I call this sort of all-purpose, four seasons prose, as it were.
It's a prose that can do everything at once.
There are almost no weaknesses in Bellows' style.
Hello, and welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close readings podcast from the London Review of Books.
I'm James Wood, and I'm delighted today to be joined by Miranda Seymour, a biographer of Jean Rees, who is the novelist in question.
Miranda, hello.
It's lovely to have you here.
So today we're discussing a novel that was published in 1934 by Jean Rees called Voyage in the Dark.
It's the penultimate novel of an extraordinary series of four books that she started writing, started publishing in 1928 and that went through the late 20s and the 1930s about her experiences more or less in London and Australia.
There are various ways of approaching this extraordinary novel, but one of the ways I want to – well, two ways I want to set this up that I hope may be of interest to our listeners and that has some connection with –
how we've been discussing fiction over the last few months.
And that would be something like realism as content, right?
The amount of extraordinary new material that the dangerous realist novel goes prospecting for and discovers for the reader.
and then realism as style or realism as form, because I suppose those are the two things I've been thinking of.
Showing 441–460 of 815 · page 23 of 41
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