Pod45 is the discursive cultural criticism podcast from Post45: Contemporaries.

This episode is the first of two discussions responding to our recent Ali Smith Now cluster, which takes the publication of Smith's latest novel Companion Piece as an opportunity to reflect on her unique oeuvre. Contemporaries editorial team members Gloria Fisk and Francisco Robles sit down for a conversation with cluster editors Debra Rae Cohen and Cara L. Lewis, alongside Deidre Lynch and Amy Elkins, who collaborated on a piece for the cluster.

The novel form, technologies of reading, connection and disconnection, collaboration and collegiality, aesthetics and politics, nature and art(ifice), irony and enchantment, joy and love and rapture: our panel bagatelle it as they see it on all these subjects and more.

Part two of Ali Smith Now will follow next week. You can read the Ali Smith Now cluster at Post45: Contemporaries now: https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/ali-smith-now/