Introduction

Selected Essays is a podcast series from The Point magazine. Each episode we'll be talking with writers about an essay that's influenced one of their own. A few months ago, the Rothmear American Institute at the University of Oxford hosted a conversation between Mervé Emre and Toby Haslett but the essayists Elizabeth Hardwick and Susan Sontag. At the beginning of the episode you'll hear them return to their early encounters with both essayists as they discuss why it's difficult to imagine critics like them existing today.