Private Life

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.

In the third episode of Private Life, Joyce Carol Oates joins Jarrett Earnest for an expansive conversation on everything from Joan Didion to serial killers. They discuss “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” Didion’s essay from the Review’s March 7, 1991, issue about the Central Park Five, the rush to judgment in a sensational murder case, media mythmaking, and sentimentalized narratives about crime. The conversation also touches on the state of long-form criticism, true crime’s grip on pop culture, and the elusive art of the novella, and Oates reflects on her writing (including three essays about murderers that she wrote for the Review: “‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness,’” “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey,” and “Death in the Air”) and the improbability of her life. 
Joyce Carol Oates’s many novels, essays, short stories, poems, and works of criticism have addressed subjects ranging from boxing to Marilyn Monroe, often exploring the dark underbelly of American life. She is a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Rutgers–New Brunswick and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, among many other publications. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1992, when she wrote “The Cruelest Sport,”  about boxing, Muhammad Ali, and masculinity. Her most recent novel, Fox, about a predatory English teacher at a New Jersey boarding school, came out last year. 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.
Read the essays discussed in this episode:
New York: Sentimental Journeys
I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness
The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey
Death in the Air
The Cruelest Sport

In the May 4, 1972, issue of The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about the lives and work of the Brontë sisters on the occasion of Winifred Gérin’s then-new biography of Emily (preceded by Gérin’s biographies of Anne, Branwell, and Charlotte, and followed in 1973 by her group biography The Brontës). In this episode of Private Life, Hardwick’s essay is read by Kathleen Chalfant, an actress who has appeared in television, in film, and in stage productions on and off Broadway. She is currently performing in New York in the Playwrights Horizons production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs, and she recently starred in Sarah Friedland’s film Familiar Touch (2024).

This reading serves as an accompaniment to the Private Life episode featuring Darryl Pinckney discussing his close friendship with Hardwick. You can also read “Working Girls: The Brontës” 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 the first episode of our podcast Private Life, Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick. Pinckney discusses her inimitable voice on the page, her love of literature’s most “terrific losers,” and the people in her inner circle, including the Review’s editor Barbara Epstein, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag, who came to shape Hardwick’s life and art. Pinckney reflects on the painful process of writing memoirs and his education in early 1970s New York City.
Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels as well as the memoir Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (2022). He met Hardwick while a student in her creative writing seminar at Columbia University, then worked as an assistant at The New York Review of Books before contributing his first article, in 1977, “The Black Upper Class,” a review of Stephen Birmingham’s Certain People: America’s Black Elite. For the Review, as well as Harper’s, Granta, and The New Yorker, he has written extensively about American literature, black American culture, YouTube, James Baldwin, Obama’s presidency, and Elizabeth Hardwick. His essays about Hardwick include “Master Class,” about his experience as her student, and “On Elizabeth Hardwick,” an expansive consideration of her style. Darryl Pinckney selected the work included in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010) and The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (2017), for which he wrote the introduction.
Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was a writer and Review contributor who wrote some of the most influential criticism of the twentieth century. In 1963 she cofounded The New York Review of Books alongside the editors Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, as well as Hardwick’s then husband, the poet Robert Lowell. Essays by Hardwick discussed in this episode include “On Sylvia Plath”(published in the August 12, 1971, issue), and “Working Girls: The Brontës” (May 4, 1972). Her collected criticism, published in, among many other magazines, The New York Review, The New Yorker, and Harper’s, has been collected by the NYRB Classics in several volumes, and she also wrote three novels, including Sleepless Nights(1979), a genre-defying book that blends fiction and memoir (reissued by NYRB in 2001), as well as a clutch of short stories, collected in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010).
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—provides access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

On Sylvia Plath by Elizabeth Hardwick
Melville In Love by Elizabeth Hardwick
Working Girls: The Brontës by Elizabeth Hardwick
Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf by Elizabeth Hardwick
Bartleby and Manhattan by Elizabeth Hardwick

We are thrilled to present Private Life, a new podcast from The New York Review that delves into that creative, exhilarating moment where ideas first appeared on the page. Hosted by Jarrett Earnest, one of the most exciting art critics working today, each episode features an intimate, in-depth conversation with a distinguished writer about their lives, their work, their influences, and the ideas that shape our culture.