Miriam Stoney on The Freedom to be Disliked

Audio 37

Recorded live in front of an audience, the writer, translator, and artist Miriam Stoney reads from her new essay and talks with Berlin Review editor Hana Szabo about characters: in fiction, in film, and in the self.

They get into how a literary character is built backwards while a self is built forwards; the difference between being disliked and being hated; and who is granted the nuance to be unlikable without collapsing into a stereotype. Along the way: Marguerite Duras, Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights and its whitewashing of Heathcliff, Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection, and the critic Andrea Long Chu on criticism and cruelty.

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