Hazlitt - "We Should Probably Listen Harder": An Interview with Ruth Ozeki

“When I think about things left behind, and I think about memory and legacy, of course the first thing that pops to mind is the book. That’s what books are, they’re containers for memory. They’re containers for the stories of the past. It’s an artifact that allows you to communicate with the past. It allows you to communicate with the minds of the dead, if you’re reading dead authors. There’s that lovely idea that if you read the poems of the dead poet out loud, it’s actually the poet who’s borrowing your tongue. It’s the dead poet borrowing the tongues of the living in order to speak again.”
— Ruth Ozeki

December 8, 2021
Hazlitt | Interview with Haley Cullingham

Literary Friction - Books about Books with Ruth Ozeki

Regular listeners will know that we love to get a little meta here on LF, and this month author Ruth Ozeki gave us the perfect excuse to indulge ourselves as we slide into the holiday season. Ruth's latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, is about a boy named Benny who loses his father and shortly thereafter begins to hear the voices of inanimate objects, including the voice of the novel itself. In honour of Ruth, and Benny, this show is all about books about books. We'll dig into the ways that literature can be about itself, from books set in libraries to stories about writers to metafictional texts about their own means of creation, and ask what the joys and the pitfalls of this kind of self-referentiality can be - plus all the usual recommendations.