Sylvia Plath

Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. In this episode, Jacke talks to Dr. Zoë McGee about her new book Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines in the Regency Novel, which compares classic novels by Jane Au ...  Show more

"And one man in his time plays many parts," wrote Shakespeare in As You Like It, "[h]is acts being seven ages." We all know the feeling of passing from one phase to the next. But what happens when something dramatic mashes these acts together? In this episode, Jacke talks to New ...  Show more

This is the kind of conversation I dreamed about having when I began this podcast. Emily Wilson joins Close Readings to talk about Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite," a poet and poem at the root of the lyric tradition in European poetry. You'll hear Emily read the poem in the Ancient Gr ...  Show more

An episode I've been waiting for from the beginning: Andrew Epstein joins the podcast to talk about John Ashbery, one of the most important poets of the last hundred years, and his beautiful and haunting poem of mid-career, "Street Musicians."Andrew is Professor of English at Flo ...  Show more

With her new memoir, The Critic's Daughter (Norton), Priscilla Gilman explores her relationship with her father, Theater Critic and Yale Drama professor Richard Gilman (as well as with her mom, literary agent Lynn Nesbit). We get into the perils of literary-kid memoir, the NYC bo ...  Show more

Award-winning poet Emily Berry joins us to consider the work and troubled life of Anne Sexton. We focus on her brilliant second collection All My Pretty Ones (1962). Sexton was a trailblazing American poet of the so-called 'confessional' school of the 1960s, one whose writing con ...  Show more