For the first episode of Season 2, Naomi is joined by writer and art critic Emily LaBarge. We revisit marginalia from her copies of Amy Hempel's The Dog of the Marriage, Joan Didion's The White Album, Sylvia Plath's The Unabridged Journals, and Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? exploring a lineage of library-keeping; book titles lost in translation across continents; forms of intertextual desire; marginalia as a record of life outside the book; the complexity of memory; and the internal rhythms of our prose style, as they develop consciously and unconsciously through our practice of reading and thinking.
Reading List
Selection of related essays by Emily LaBarge
Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer living in London. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Artforum, mousse, Bookforum, Frieze, The Observer, and The Paris Review, among others. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns. She is the author of Dog Days (Peninsula Press, 2025; Transit and Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2026).
What is Reading Around the Margins?
In each episode of Reading Around the Margins, Naomi Washer talks with writers, readers, translators, publishers, and booksellers about how they interact with their books as objects; how their own marginalia consciously or unconsciously informs the books they come to write; and how the experience of reading brings a book into existence.