In this episode of Private Life, the writer and New York Review contributor Namwali Serpell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss her new book, On Morrison, a collection of essays about Toni Morrison and her work.  Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. Their conversation covers Morrison’s life as a literary eminence and public intellectual, but the focus is Serpell’s close-readings of her most famous novels—including Jazz (1992), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved(1987), and Tar Baby (1981)—as well as her poetry, criticism, and later books. Earnest also asks Serpell about her essay “The Banality of Empathy,” about the concept of narrative empathy, which was published in the Review’s March 2, 2019, issue.   Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. In addition to On Morrison, she is the author of the novels The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022) and the essay collection Stranger Faces (2020). She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2017, when she wrote “Kenya in Another Tongue,” about a new edition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1980 novel Devil on a Cross. Serpell is also a …