The Point Podcast

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Jennifer Wilson abouther New York Times Book Review essay, “The Love Letters That Spoke of Everything but Love,” and Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device,” first published in 1917.Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50at checkout for 50% off.

On this bonus episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to Point editors, Jon Baskin and Rachel Wiseman about two of their favorite essays—Charles Comey's “Against Honeymoons,” and Moeko Fujii’s “Let Them Misunderstand”—and what makes them quintessential Point pieces.

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Apoorva Tadepalli about Maeve Brennan’s “Lost Overtures” and her Electric Lit essay “It’s Okay to Talk to Me When I’m Trying to Read.”

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Sumana Roy about Joseph Brodsky’s “Less Than One” and her Caravan essay “We Are All Mamata Now.” Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50 at checkout for 50% off.

On the new episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach speak with Clare Bucknell about Charles Lamb’s “The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers”—surprisingly the first essay a guest has chosen that was written before 1900. In histories of the essay form, from Montaigne forward, you’ll often see Lamb’s name appear as one of the great “familiar” essayists, but he’s read relatively little today. Listen to hear Clare’s  reading of Lamb’s essay and how it shaped her thoughts on the ever-controversial Giacomo Casanova, the focus of her piece in Harper’s, “The Thoughtful Prick.” Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50 at checkout for 50% off.

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Suzy Hansen about her essay, “A Cold War Mind: American and the World,” a chapter from Suzy's book Notes on a Foreign Country, and Octavio Paz’s “The Pachucho and Other Extremes,”  the first part of his 1950 book The Labyrinth of Solitude. Craving more essays? Subscribe to The Point here and use the coupon code 7POD50 at checkout for 50% off.

Jess and Zach go over their favorite moments from the first season of “Selected Essays”—listen in for the highlights and then catch up in time for Season 2.

Garth Greenwell and Martha Nussbaum discuss their essays on moral philosophy in literature. They explore the complexities of relationships, dramatic plot twists, alternative views in moral philosophy, and Nussbaum's collaborative approach to being wronged. They also delve into uncertainty and the writer's relationship with their work.

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Jess and Zach talk with Lauren Oyler about her essay “Desperately Seeking Sebald,” which was published in Harper’s in 2021 and Elif Batuman’s “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy,” which was also published in Harper's in 2009 and then later collected in her book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them as “Who Killed Tolstoy?”

On this episode of “Selected Essays,” Ryan Ruby joins us to discuss Susan Sontag’s “Approaching Artaud” and his own essay “Dig It Up Again,” which was written for the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and published last year by Poetry magazine.