Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

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.