Cynthia Ozick on the Link Between Beauty and Purity
Editor’s Note: Read Cynthia Ozick’s new short story “Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All.”
“Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All” is a new story by Cynthia Ozick. To mark the story’s publication, Ozick and Oliver Munday, the associate creative director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Oliver Munday: Your story, “Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All,” is about an aging radio host named Nicky. It’s a beguiling and profound character study. What drew you to after-hours radio as a fictional setting?
Chronic insomnia, to begin with, which turned, for a time, into a nocturnal addiction. So much of night radio is repetitious detritus: weather, traffic, headlines, sports, nostrums for
