Mike chats with Olivia Laing, winner of a 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, about the strange and confounding (and wonderful) pleasures of Charlotte Brontë's Villette. READING LIST: Villette by Charlotte Brontë • Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy • The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Olivia Laing is the author of several books of nonfiction and fiction including The Garden Against Time and the forthcoming The Silver Book. The Lonely City (2016) was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and has been translated into 14 languages. The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) was a finalist for both the Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burn PrizeLaing lives in Cambridge, England, and writes on art and culture for many publications, including The Guardian, The New Statesman, and The New York Times. Her debut novel Crudo was published by Picador and W. W. Norton & Company in June 2018. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a co-production between The Windham-Campbell Prizes and Literary Hub. Music by Dani Lencioni, production by Drew Broussard, hosted by Michael Kelleher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices