#149: Merve Emre, author, academic and literary critic

Rachel and Simon speak to author, academic and literary critic Merve Emre. After a stint as a management consultant, she completed a PhD and taught English literature at McGill University in Canada, before taking up a role as an associate professor at Oxford. (This year she is a distinguished writer-in-residence at Wesleyan in the US.) Alongside her academic work, Merve has written books including "Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America", "The Ferrante Letters" and "The Personality Brokers" (published in Britain as "What's Your Type?"), about the Myers-Briggs personality test. She is also a contributing writer at the New Yorker and her essays have been published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic and the London Review of Books. We spoke to Merve about the differences between academia in America and Britain, her books and her criticism.