Private Life

Private Life presents a bonus episode from our friends at Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast. Produced by the eponymous art gallery, Dialogues brings together artists, creatives, and intellectuals in conversation about what it means to make things today.   In this episode, host Helen Molesworth is joined by the art historian Lisa Saltzman to discuss Walter Benjamin’s final days. Molesworth and Saltzman discuss philosophy, World War II Europe, and the network of intellectuals who saved Benjamin’s most prized possessions, including Angelus Novelus, the Paul Klee drawing that helped inspired one of his most well-known texts, the Theses on the Philosophy of History.   Saltzman is the inaugural Emily Rauh Pulitzer ’55 Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at Bryn Mawr College. She is currently working on a book, To Make Whole What Has Been Smashed, that explores how one passage from Benjamin’s posthumously published writingscame to transform Klee’s etching of an angel into the “angel of history,” a postwar icon of our seemingly impotent witness to historical catastrophe.  You can find Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.   This Spring, The New York Review of Books announced a new column, “At the Galleries”, featuring sharp, timely reviews of a wide variety of exhibitions, with a particular focus on contemporary art. The column debuted in the magazine’s May 2026 Art Issue.  Read “At the Galleries” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.    

In the October 21, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books, Martin Filler wrote “Ghosts in the House,” about Frank Gehry’s life and work at the turn of the century, including the architect’s own house in Santa Monica, his celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In this episode of Private Life, Filler’s essay is read by Maya Lin. Best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. while she was still an undergraduate student, Lin’s forty-year career has also included the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and the landscape architecture project Wave Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Filler in conversation with host Jarrett Earnest. Read “Ghosts in the House” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

In this episode of Private Life, Martin Filler joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about architecture criticism, Frank Gehry, and the art that makes us weep.  Martin Filler is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books. His first article for the Review, “Tall Stories,” about the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, appeared in our December 5, 1985 issue. In the forty years since, Filler has written about, among many other subjects, Richard Meier’s design for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Michael Arad’s National September 11 Memorial, and the lost beauty and significance of department stores, alongside the opening of the new Printemps New York. Filler also frequently wrote about Frank Gehry—his Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—and eulogized “his boldly original approach…the architectural equivalent of punk rock” when Gehry died this past December. (This episode was recorded prior to Gehry’s death.)Three volumes of Filler’s collected essays, Makers of Modern Architecture, have been published by New York Review Books.  Read the essays discussed in this episode and many others with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website. 

In March 2019 Namwali Serpell wrote for the NYR Online about a choose-your-own-adventure-style episode of the television show Black Mirror, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hannah Arendt, and Violet Allen’s story “The Venus Effect,” among other subjects, in an expansive essay on about narrative empathy. In this episode of Private Life, “The Banality of Empathy” is read by the writer Lovia Gyarkye, whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, and Aperture. Gyarkye is also an editor at Hammer & Hope magazine and was previously a critic for The Hollywood Reporter.  This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring a conversation with Serpell. Read “The Banality of Empathy” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

In this episode of Private Life, the writer and New York Review contributor Namwali Serpell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss her new book, On Morrison, a collection of essays about Toni Morrison and her work. Their conversation covers Morrison’s life as a literary eminence and public intellectual, but the focus is Serpell’s close-readings of her most famous novels—including Jazz (1992), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved(1987), and Tar Baby (1981)—as well as her poetry, criticism, and later books. Earnest also asks Serpell about her essay “The Banality of Empathy,” about the concept of narrative empathy, which was published in the Review’s March 2, 2019, issue.  Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. In addition to On Morrison, she is the author of the novels The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022) and the essay collection Stranger Faces (2020). She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2017, when she wrote “Kenya in Another Tongue,” about a new edition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1980 novel Devil on a Cross. Serpell is also a sometime film critic for the Review, contributing considerations of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, and a bravura essay about Émile Zola and the movie Zola. Her most recent essay, “Toni Plays the Dozens,” adapted from her book, explores humor and the social practice of “signifying” in Song of Solomon.   Read the essays discussed in this episode with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.  

In this episode of Private Life, the writer, translator, and editor Gini Alhadeff reads excerpts from Mark Polizzotti’s recent translation, for NYRB Classics, of André Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel, Nadja. Blending autobiography and fiction, this abidingly strange book recounts, analyzes, and remembers Breton’s brief love affair with the eponymous young woman in 1920s Paris.  Alhadeff is the author of a memoir, The Sun at Midday (1997), and a novel, Diary of a Dijinn (2003), and the translator of a number of Italian novels, including I Am the Brother of XX, by Fleur Jaeggy, and The Road to the City, by Natalia Ginzburg. To find Mark Polizzotti’s translation of Nadja by André Breton and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

In this episode of Private Life, Jarrett Earnest is joined by Mark Polizzotti to discuss André Breton’s surrealist novel, Nadja, originally published in 1928 and translated into English by Polizzotti for NYRB Classics in 2025. Polizzotti gives insight into the process of translation, the facts of the real Nadja’s life, and the quotations and photography that Breton employed to evoke the woman behind the “ethereal phantom.” André Breton was a French poet, writer, and theorist, best known as a pioneering Surrealist and Dadaist. He published Claire de Terre, a collection of poems, in 1923 and the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme)in 1924. Breton also cofounded the literary magazine Littérature in 1919.  Mark Polizzotti is a writer based in New York. He has translated over seventy books from the French, including Command Performance (NYRB Classics, 2025) by Jean Echenoz and The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings (NYRB Poets, 2022) by Arthur Rimbaud. Polizzotti is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995), Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (2018), and Why Surrealism Matters (2024). He is currently the publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  To find Nadja and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.  

In this episode of Private Life, Richard Hell reads from his novel Godlike (2005), which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Faye. Godlike tells the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back, closely mirroring the doomed romance between the nineteenth-century French poètes maudits Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Some of his books include The Voidoid (1996), Artifact (1990), Hot and Cold (2001), Go Now (1996), I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013), and What Just Happened (2023). This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Hell discussing his novels, poetry, and creative process. To find Richard Hell’s Godlike and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books; in addition to twenty print issues a year, a subscription provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

In this episode of Private Life, Richard Hell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his novel Godlike (newly reissued by NYRB Classics), his creative process, the love of poetry, and the stories behind his work.  Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Originally from Kentucky, he moved to New York at the age of seventeen and began publishing his poetry. In his early twenties, along with his friend Tom Verlaine, he started the Neon Boys, which later became the influential punk rock band Television. He went on to form the bands the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. In addition to Godlike, Hell has written several novels, poetry collections, and essay collections, as well as a memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013). His most recent book of poetry, What Just Happened, was published in 2023. Godlike, which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Foye, was originally published in 2005. Crossing Hell’s experiences in the demimonde of 1970s New York City with the doomed romance of the nineteenth-century poètes maudits of France, it traverses the profane and the profound in the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back.   To find Richard Hell’s Godlike and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

In the June 24, 1999, issue of The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates wrote about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey and dissected America’s fascination with “the category of nonfiction known as ‘true crime.’” In this episode of Private Life, “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey" is read by writer Alissa Bennett, whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, Vogue, The New York Times, and Artforum. From 2016 to 2019 she also wrote the zine Dead Is Better, about celebrity deaths, and from 2019 to 2022 she cohosted the podcast The C-Word with Lena Dunham.  This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Oates discussing her novels, essays, and the improbability of her life. You can read “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

In the third episode of Private Life, Joyce Carol Oates joins Jarrett Earnest for an expansive conversation on everything from Joan Didion to serial killers. They discuss “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” Didion’s essay from the Review’s March 7, 1991, issue about the Central Park Five, the rush to judgment in a sensational murder case, media mythmaking, and sentimentalized narratives about crime. The conversation also touches on the state of long-form criticism, true crime’s grip on pop culture, and the elusive art of the novella, and Oates reflects on her writing (including three essays about murderers that she wrote for the Review: “‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness,’” “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey,” and “Death in the Air”) and the improbability of her life. Joyce Carol Oates’s many novels, essays, short stories, poems, and works of criticism have addressed subjects ranging from boxing to Marilyn Monroe, often exploring the dark underbelly of American life. She is a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Rutgers–New Brunswick and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, among many other publications. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1992, when she wrote “The Cruelest Sport,”  about boxing, Muhammad Ali, and masculinity. Her most recent novel, Fox, about a predatory English teacher at a New Jersey boarding school, came out last year. Read the essays discussed in this episode with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.Read the essays discussed in this episode:New York: Sentimental JourneysI Had No Other Thrill or HappinessThe Mystery of JonBenét RamseyDeath in the AirThe Cruelest Sport

In the May 4, 1972, issue of The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about the lives and work of the Brontë sisters on the occasion of Winifred Gérin’s then-new biography of Emily (preceded by Gérin’s biographies of Anne, Branwell, and Charlotte, and followed in 1973 by her group biography The Brontës). In this episode of Private Life, Hardwick’s essay is read by Kathleen Chalfant, an actress who has appeared in television, in film, and in stage productions on and off Broadway. She is currently performing in New York in the Playwrights Horizons production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs, and she recently starred in Sarah Friedland’s film Familiar Touch (2024).This reading serves as an accompaniment to the Private Life episode featuring Darryl Pinckney discussing his close friendship with Hardwick. You can also read “Working Girls: The Brontës” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

In the first episode of our podcast Private Life, Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick. Pinckney discusses her inimitable voice on the page, her love of literature’s most “terrific losers,” and the people in her inner circle, including the Review’s editor Barbara Epstein, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag, who came to shape Hardwick’s life and art. Pinckney reflects on the painful process of writing memoirs and his education in early 1970s New York City.Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels as well as the memoir Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (2022). He met Hardwick while a student in her creative writing seminar at Columbia University, then worked as an assistant at The New York Review of Books before contributing his first article, in 1977, “The Black Upper Class,” a review of Stephen Birmingham’s Certain People: America’s Black Elite. For the Review, as well as Harper’s, Granta, and The New Yorker, he has written extensively about American literature, black American culture, YouTube, James Baldwin, Obama’s presidency, and Elizabeth Hardwick. His essays about Hardwick include “Master Class,” about his experience as her student, and “On Elizabeth Hardwick,” an expansive consideration of her style. Darryl Pinckney selected the work included in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010) and The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (2017), for which he wrote the introduction.Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was a writer and Review contributor who wrote some of the most influential criticism of the twentieth century. In 1963 she cofounded The New York Review of Books alongside the editors Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, as well as Hardwick’s then husband, the poet Robert Lowell. Essays by Hardwick discussed in this episode include “On Sylvia Plath”(published in the August 12, 1971, issue), and “Working Girls: The Brontës” (May 4, 1972). Her collected criticism, published in, among many other magazines, The New York Review, The New Yorker, and Harper’s, has been collected by the NYRB Classics in several volumes, and she also wrote three novels, including Sleepless Nights(1979), a genre-defying book that blends fiction and memoir (reissued by NYRB in 2001), as well as a clutch of short stories, collected in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010).Read the essays discussed in this episode and many others with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which—in addition to twenty issues a year—provides access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.On Sylvia Plath by Elizabeth HardwickMelville In Love by Elizabeth HardwickWorking Girls: The Brontës by Elizabeth HardwickBloomsbury and Virginia Woolf by Elizabeth HardwickBartleby and Manhattan by Elizabeth Hardwick 

We are thrilled to present Private Life, a new podcast from The New York Review that delves into that creative, exhilarating moment where ideas first appeared on the page. Hosted by Jarrett Earnest, one of the most exciting art critics working today, each episode features an intimate, in-depth conversation with a distinguished writer about their lives, their work, their influences, and the ideas that shape our culture.