John and Elizabeth look back at Recall This Book’s terrific 2019 conversation with Zadie Smith , so you may want to listen to that again before proceeding Elizabeth and John try their best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, authenticity and human sacredness; the “golden ticket” dirty secret behind our hypocritical academic meritocracy; surveillance capitalism as the “biggest capital grab of human experience in history;” and her genealogy of the novel. If we had to sum the day up with a few adjectives: funny, provocative, resplendent, chill, generous, cantankerous.
Discussed in this episode:

Tony Judt, Postwar


Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy


Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test


Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge


Doris Lessing The Fifth Child


Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means


Stephen McCauley (with JP on RTB) Barbara Pym and the Comic Novel


Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (and others…)

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland


J. P. Toussaint, The Bathroom


Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, “Moments of Being”


Philip Roth, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost


Listen to the episode here:
You can read the transcript here:
RTB 15x Ferry and Plotz on ZS
Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies