OurShelves with special guest Sigrid Nunez

How do you overcome criticism?

In this episode of OurShelves Lucy Scholes interviews Sigrid Nunez, author of eight novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, The Friend and, most recently, What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.

Lucy and Sigrid discuss the music of Odetta, the comfort of creatures, and her friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick.

Click here to listen.

On the nightstand

Vespa Flights by Helen McDonald

Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

X+Y by Eugenia Cheng

The High House by Jessie Greengrass

On your mind

Katherine Rundell’s Consider the… series for the London Review of Books

On repeat

The music of Odetta.

‘Her musicality is stunning and she was a hero to the folk music movement. She was born in 1930 in Birmingham, Alabama and sang at the same march Martin Luther King Jnr. made his I Have a Dream Speech.’

Pass it on

Middlemarch by George Eliot

On the pedestal

Jane Goodall

On the wall

A photograph of novelist and friend Elizabeth Hardwick, shot by Marion Ettinger.

On the shelf

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

Tune in next time for more conversation about books, feminism and culture.