"On Morrison": a conversation with Namwali Serpell
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we're all listening to this podcast because, well, we love classic books. It's hugely exciting to be giving a big plug to our podcasting friends, the team from Book Riot, who are making the Fantastic Books podcast zero to well-read. I listen to it all the time and I learn from it constantly. The team is Jeff O'Neill and Rebecca Shinsky from Book Riot, and they've been talking about books on the internet together for almost 15 years. They've heard from a lot of people who feel like they missed the window to read the so-called important books. So they created Zero to Well Read. It's a podcast that tells you everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. From classics to contemporary hits and social media sensations, you hear from Jeff and Rebecca why they're so great, what you should know about them, what makes them weird and fun and strange and why they matter.
These guys are willing to go in and get their hands dirty talking about all sorts of books from the... unquestionable classics to what we might call emerging classics or contemporary classics. Have a listen. Can't recommend them highly enough. Hi, everyone. As we come to the end of our series on Toni Morrison's novels, it's a huge pleasure to be welcoming to the show Namwali Serpell, who's recently published the acclaimed collection of essays on Morrison's which is inspired both by the class that she's taught over several years as an English professor at Harvard and by her many years of critical thinking and creative writing about Toni Morrison's work. Namwali is a little bit of an intimidating legend.
She's written multiple books of fiction, all of which have won and been nominated for incredibly prestigious prizes. She's written Acclaimed Literary Criticism, which looks at the relationship between literature's capacity to unsettle and bewilder us as being part of what literature's ethical value is. It's such an interesting set of questions to be thinking through at a time when we're trying to bring people back into relationship with books. And this is also a part of what Namwali is writing about in her amazing essay collection on Toni Morrison. So we're feeling pretty lucky. getting both Autumn Womack and Namwali Serpell on the podcast. Jonti and I have been loving our conversations about Toni Morrison.
We've also, of course, been finding them extremely challenging and inviting us to rethink a lot of our assumptions that we have as readers of classic texts. Welcome to The Secret Life of Books, Namwali Serpell. It's so good to have you with us.
Thank you so much, Sophie. It's wonderful to be here with you.
Congratulations on On Morrison. It's an absolute tour de force. I was blown away reading it by the depth of your reflections on the novels as a fellow academic, by the intelligibility and accessibility of what you were saying, though I don't think you compromised the complexity of your arguments.
Thank you so much. That's the highest compliment I could receive. And it's precisely the goal of the book, which, of course, I derived from Morrison herself, who said that she wanted to be as sophisticated as she wanted to be and also as pleasurable. The highest aspiration for her, of course, was jazz, jazz music being incredibly complex, but also really fun to listen to. I think you got there.
We always ask our guests the same starter question because this is a classic books podcast. And the question is, what for you is a classic? And sometimes I ask it as what's a literary classic, but I actually just want to leave it as what's a classic, partly because jazz is hovering in the background.
A classic musical form, and of course the classics in jazz are called the standards. Something that I really like about this version of the question is that it uses a word that, these are the words that we use now, but classic holds in it, in its origin, right, the notion of classes, right? This isn't just about social class. It's also about classes in a hierarchy, artistic excellence or accomplishment.
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