Private Life: A New York Review Podcast

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  ”A Little Iliad” by Daniel Mendelsohn 22.07.2026 34мин

  This episode is a reading of Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay,“A Little Iliad,” a review of the film Troy, an adaptation of the Iliad, from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. It is read by the countertenor and opera director Anthony Roth Costanzo. Among many other roles, Costanzohas performed as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and Akhnaten in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, both at the Met Opera, and he won a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2022 for the cast recording of Akhnaten. He is currently the director and president of Opera Philadelphia.  Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. The paperback edition of his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released in April by the University of Chicago Press.   Last week’s episode was an interview with Mendelsohn on Homer’s Odyssey, both the film adaptation and his translation. You can read “A Little Iliad” and other essays by Mendelsohn with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963. 
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  Daniel Mendelsohn on The Odyssey, Film Adaptations, and Translations 15.07.2026 1ч 11мин

  In this episode of Private Life, Daniel Mendelsohn joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his 2025 translation of Homer’s Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film adaptation, premiering this week. They discuss the debate surrounding the film’s casting, the significance of descriptive language in translations, and the enduring place of Greek literature, history, and aesthetics in gay cultural and intellectual life.  Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), and How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays (2008). Mendelsohn is also the author of the essay collections Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (2012) and Ecstasy and Terror (2019), as well as Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (2022), which were all published by New York Review Books. The paperback edition of his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released in April by the University of Chicago Press.   Next week’s episode will be a reading of Mendelsohn’s essay “A Little Iliad,” a review of the film Troy from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. You can read that essay and others by Mendelsohn with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963. 
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  ”The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street” by Geoffrey O’Brien 08.07.2026 26мин

  In this episode of Private Life, the poet and writer Eileen Myles reads Geoffrey O'Brien's essay on Frank O'Hara, ”The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street,” from The New York Review of Books‘ December 2, 1993, issue. It is read by the poet and writer Eileen Myles. Their work includes the semi-autobiographical book Chelsea Girls (1994), the novel Inferno (2008), and the poetry collection I Must Be Living Twice (2015). Frank O’Hara was a writer, art critic, and a leading poet of the New York School who worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He is best known for his poetry collection Lunch Poems (1964) and “Personism: A Manifesto” (1959).  You can read “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street” by Geoffrey O’Brien and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963.  
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  Robert Glück on His Books, Frank O'Hara, and Dreams 01.07.2026 50мин

  In this episode of Private Life, Robert Glück joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about his books, the characters that shaped his stories, and Geoffrey O’Brien’s essay “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street” (published in the Review’s December 2, 1993, issue) on the poet and writer Frank O’Hara. They discuss Glück’s work of postmodern fiction Jack the Modernist (1985), his experimental novel Margery Kempe (1994), and his genre blending book About Ed (2023), all of which were published by New York Review Books.  Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, and editor who cofounded the literary movement New Narrative alongside Bruce Boone in the 1970s. Glück’s books of poetry include La Fontaine (1981) with Bruce Boone, and Reader (1989). His other works include the story collection Denny Smith (2003) and the essay collection Communal Nude (2016). He was the director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, served as codirector of Small Press Traffic, and was an associate editor at Lapis Press. You can find Robert Glück’s books at nyrb.com or at your favorite bookseller. Read Geoffrey O’Brien’s “The Mayakovsky of MacDougal Street” 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. 
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  “Chronicles of Love and Loss“ by Helen Vendler 24.06.2026 51мин

  In this episode of Private Life, Langdon Hammer reads Helen Vendler’s essay, “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” from the May 11, 1995, issue of The New York Review of Books. The essay reviews James Merill’s posthumous collection of poetry, A Scattering of Salts (1995), as well as his poem “The House Fly,” published in the May 13, 1982, issue of the Review. Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art. He has reviewed biography and poetry for the Review and has written about the poet Elizabeth Bishop.  Helen Vendler was an academic and literary critic, known for her contemporary poetry criticism. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Harvard. Vendler was a contributor to the Review for more than forty years.  You can read “Chronicles of Love and Loss” 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.    
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  Eve Babitz's Letters from “Too L.A.” Read By Gina Gershon 17.06.2026 23мин

  This episode of Private Life is a reading from the forthcoming New York Review Books collection of Eve Babitz’s writing, Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were), edited and with an introduction by Lili Anolik. It is read by the actress and singer Gina Gershon. Gershon is best known for starring in the films Showgirls (1995), Bound (1996), Face/Off (1997), and The Insider (1999). Her book AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs was published earlier this year.  Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was a writer and artist from Hollywood, California. She wrote the essay collections Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), both reissued by NYRB Classics, and the novel Sex and Rage (1979). NYRB also published I Used to Be Charming (2019), which brought together decades of her uncollected nonfiction.  This reading accompanies last week's Private Life episode featuring Lili Anolik discussing Eve Babitz’s life and legacy. Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) will be published on June 23, 2026, and will be available at NYRB.com or at a local bookseller.  
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  Matthew Aucoin on Opera, Music Criticism, and Poetry 10.06.2026 1ч 8мин

  In this episode of Private Life, Matthew Aucoin joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss the state of music criticism, the work of music composition, and the life and writing of Aucoin’s former professor and mentor, the poetry critic Helen Vendler. The two also talk about “Inside the Music,” Aucoin’s essay from the Review’s November 6, 2025, issue about the decline of music reviews in mainstream media, as well as “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” Vendler’s review, from our May 11, 1995, issue, of o James Merill’s final book of poetry, A Scattering of Salts.(1995).Aucoin is a composer, conductor, and writer. His operatic song cycle Music for New Bodies, inspired by the poetry of Jorie Graham, premiered in 2024 and was staged at the Lincoln Center in the summer of 2025. He is the author of the book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera (2021), and he has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2018. Also in 2018 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.Vendler was an academic and literary critic, known most for writing about contemporary poetry. Over a six-decade career she taught English and poetics at Cornell, Boston University, and Harvard, where she retired as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita in the Department of English. Vendler was also a longtime contributor to the Review, beginning in 1975 with an essay on William Carlos Willaims. 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.
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  Lili Anolik on Eve Babitz, Her Legacy, and Unsent Letters 27.05.2026 57мин

  In this episode of Private Life, Lili Anolik joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about the life and legacy of Eve Babitz, in honor of the publication of New York Review Books’s Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) (2026), a collection of Babitz’s correspondence. Earnest and Anolik discuss Babitz’s captivating persona and the strange course of her life, from New York to Los Angeles and from riotous success to anonymity. Anolik, who has spent over a decade researching and writing about Babitz, talks about the notorious photo of a nude Babitz, age twenty-one, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp; her relationship with Joan Didion, and her artistic legacy captured through letter writing.   Anolik is a writer and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She is the author of both Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. (2019) and the dual biography Didion & Babitz (2024). She is a writer at large for Air Mail, and her work has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, and Esquire, among other publications.  Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was a writer and artist from Hollywood, California. She is best known for the essay collections Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), both reissued by NYRB Classics, and the novel Sex and Rage (1979). NYRB alsopublished I Used to Be Charming (2019), which brought together decades of her uncollected nonfiction. In addition to her writing, Babitz was a visual artist and created collages for a number of album covers, including LPs by Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt.   Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) will be published on June 23, 2026, and will be available at NYRB.com or at a local bookseller. 
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  “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio“ by Ingrid D. Rowland 20.05.2026 34мин

  In the May 27, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Ingrid D. Rowland wrote “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio,” a look at the tempestuous life and brilliant art of the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. For this episode of Private Life, Rowland’s essay is read by the artist Lisa Yuskavage. Yuskavage has shown her paintings in solo exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. Through June 26, her show “Lisa Yuskavage” will be on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Rowland in conversation with host Jarrett Earnest. Read “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio” 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.  
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  Ingrid D. Rowland on Art History, Raphael, and Disegno 13.05.2026 54мин

  In this episode of Private Life, the art historian Ingrid D. Rowland joins Jarrett Earnest for an in-depth discussion about art history and disegno, an Italian word for “design” that was also a Renaissance-era concept describing some artists’ ability simultaneously to draw and to conceive of a grander scheme in their work. Rowland also talks about the lives and work of some of the Italian Renaissance’s most significant figures: Raphael; Caravaggio; Giorgi Vasari, a sixteenth-century artist and writer from Florence; and Agostini Chigi, a banker and art patron.   Rowland is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450–1750 (2024). In 2017, she cowrote the biography The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1994, writing extensively on art, art history, architecture, and theater. Her debut in our pages was “Character Witnesses,” an essay about Renaissance portrait medals. Other articles have included “Caravaggio Lost and Found,” about two rediscovered Caravaggio paintings, “Roman Rivalries,” about Michelangelo and Sebastiano, and “The Virtuoso,” a rapturous review of a 2020 Raphael exhibition in Rome.  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. 
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  Private Life x Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast 06.05.2026 36мин

  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.    
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  “Ghosts in the House” by Martin Filler 29.04.2026 41мин

  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. 
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  Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture 22.04.2026 1ч 10мин

  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. 
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  “The Banality of Empathy“ by Namwali Serpell 15.04.2026 28мин

  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. 
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  Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison, Criticism, and Narrative Empathy 08.04.2026 1ч 15мин

  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.  
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  Gini Alhadeff Reads from André Breton's ’Nadja’ 01.04.2026 51мин

  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. 
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  Mark Polizzotti on André Breton, Translation, and Surrealism 25.03.2026 1ч 15мин

  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.  
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  Richard Hell Reads From ‘Godlike‘ 18.03.2026 38мин

  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. 
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  Richard Hell on ’Godlike’ and Poetry as a Way of Life 11.03.2026 58мин

  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. 
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  “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey” by Joyce Carol Oates 04.03.2026 47мин

  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.