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.

Veröffentlicht am 3.0.2026