Penelope Fitzgerald

But, you know, you need something to refresh your brain.

Penelope Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, those are people that I would use to retune my mind to great writing.

And therefore I would dip into them when I was in trouble.

Elizabeth Bowen would be another one that I would read.

Yes.

As long as we're staying in the British theme, the book is called The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald.

And it was made into a movie a couple of years ago.

It's a s- it's a...

Well, I'm more fascinated with Penelope Fitzgerald.

She is considered one of the best writers, like one of the top 50 British writers.

But she didn't publish her first novel until she was 58.

Okay.

This is his first novel, which is shocking to me because he- it's so good, and frankly, I'm always inspired by people who write their first novels in their 70s.

This is like Penelope Fitzgerald, like, just an absolute genius and didn't start writing fiction until she was, like, 65 and then wrote, like, 10 books and was, like, an incredible phenom.

Very inventive, actually, and very, like, formally inventive in some of the ways that Jed Perl is being here.

But Jed Perl is, uh, first and foremost an art critic, and, uh, we're gonna take a look at some of the work that he's done, a very, very brief bio of what he is all about.

Of course, she's written major biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton.

Penelope Fitzgerald, and as a critic too, she's often written about women authors who are difficult to disentangle from their public image.

So this is a very, very, I think, significant book on Bruckner, and it's definitely the biography that she deserves.

Before we let you go, speaking of women authors, you've let slip, Elizabeth, just before we started recording, that you have just finished work on your own book.