Angelo Fick asks Darryl Pinckney about his book Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan.

Darryl remembers his friendship with critic and author Elizabeth Hardwick, who taught him that writing is a matter of reading. He reflects on his diaries, avant-garde New York in the 1970s, Robert Lowell,  feminism and Black politics, The New York Review of Books and aging.

Angelo Fick is the Director of Research at ASRI. For two decades he taught across a variety of disciplines in the Humanities and Applied Sciences in universities in South Africa and Europe. He has written widely on post-apartheid South Africa’s political economy.

Darryl Pinckney is a long-time contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is the author of two novels, several works of nonfiction and has contributed to numerous other publications. His theatrical collaborations with director Robert Wilson have appeared internationally and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His most recent book is Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).

In this episode we are in solidarity with Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi. In November 2022, they were both unjustly sentenced to a second decade in prison in Iran. You can read more about their case here: https://www.pen-international.org/news/mahvash-sabet-sentenced-to-ten-years-in-prison

As tributes to them, Darryl reads “Hello Again” and “Lights Out” from Sabet’s Prison Poems as well as “Jerusalem” by James Fenton. Angelo reads Sabet’s poem “To Fariba Kamalabadi”.

This podcast series is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to promote open conversation and highlight shared histories.