Episode 7: "Hilary Leichter on the reader’s culpability in Robert Coover’s 'The Babysitter'"

Writer and professor Hilary Leichter joins Naomi for a discussion about books that conjure many different realities; how the reader is made culpable to the events of a text by what they hold and create in their mind, in the gap between what’s stated and what’s implied; how teaching a book you have complex feelings about can enrich the teaching experience; inheriting large libraries; and what happened to that one box of books you shipped that never arrived at its destination? 

Hilary Leichter is the author of the novels Temporary and Terrace Story. She has been a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Prize, and her work in Harper's Magazine won the 2021 National Magazine Award in Fiction. Terrace Story was named a best book of 2023 by Time Magazine, The New Yorker, The LA Times, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. Hilary teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York.

To pre-order Naomis's new title, Marginalia: an autobiography, from Autofocus Books, please click here.

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.