Close Reading and Literary Interpretation

Christine Smallwood is the author of La Captive (Fireflies Press, 2024) and the novel The Life of the Mind (Hogarth, 2021), which Time magazine named one of the top ten fiction books of the year. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have been published in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a core faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she teaches courses on the nineteenth-century novel and other topics.

Recorded April 16, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf