32 min listen
Benjamin Labatut, "When We Cease to Understand the World" (NYRB, 2021)
Benjamin Labatut, "When We Cease to Understand the World" (NYRB, 2021)
ratings:
Length:
74 minutes
Released:
Dec 7, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
An interview with Benjamín Labatut, author of When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. Benjamin and I cover an enormous amount of ground in our wide-ranging interview: we touch on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal as a way of his writing; the failure of our societies to make room for overlapping, sometimes contradictory histories; his distaste for genre categories; the inevitable loss involved in translation; Chile’s frightening presidential election; and much much more. I know that you will be as enthralled and challenged and delighted by Benjamín’s capacious mind.
Benjamín Recommends:
Juan Forn, Los Viernes
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Pascal Quignard, The Last Kingdom
Elliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing
J.A. Baker, The Peregrine
Georg Buchner, Lenz
Frantisek Vlacil, Marketa Lazarova (film)
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Benjamín Recommends:
Juan Forn, Los Viernes
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Pascal Quignard, The Last Kingdom
Elliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing
J.A. Baker, The Peregrine
Georg Buchner, Lenz
Frantisek Vlacil, Marketa Lazarova (film)
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Released:
Dec 7, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Alex Vilenkin, “Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes” (Hill and Wang, 2006): [This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] Want to know how the world is going to end? Just ask Russian cosmologist Alex Vilenkin. If it’s our own universe you’re talking about, well, it’s called the big crunch, by New Books in Science