Ed Yongs new book, An Immense World, urges readers to break outside their sensory bubble to consider the unique ways that dogs, dolphins, mice and other animals experience their surroundings. Ive often said that my beat is everything that is or was once alive, which covers billions of species, across basically the entirety of the planets history, Yong says on this weeks podcast. One thing I like about this particular topic the sensory worlds of other animals is that it, itself, though a singular...
Jun 25, 2022•46 min•Ep 404•Transcript available on Metacast Elisabeth Egan, an editor at the Book Review, curates our Group Text column a monthly choice of a book that she feels is particularly well suited to book clubs and their discussions. On this weeks podcast, she talks about her latest pick: Jackie & Me, by Louis Bayard, which imagines the friendship between Jacqueline Bouvier and Lem Billings, a close friend of the Kennedys. This is rooted in reality, Egan says, but Bayard runs with it and imagines conversations between Lem and Jackie, and just sh...
Jun 17, 2022•48 min•Ep 403•Transcript available on Metacast Few fictional characters in recent decades have been as intensely discussed as Tracy Flick. The ambitious teenage protagonist of Tom Perrottas novel Election (1998) and the ensuing film adaptation, starring Reese Witherspoon, has been reconsidered in recent years as misunderstood and unfairly maligned. On this weeks podcast, Perrotta talks about Tracys return in his new novel, Tracy Flick Cant Win. I think most people, when they think about Tracy Flick I say this in all sad modesty theyre thinki...
Jun 10, 2022•52 min•Ep 402•Transcript available on Metacast Karen Jenningss novel An Island, which was on the longlist for the Booker Prize in 2021, is set on a fictional unnamed island off the coast of Africa, where a man named Samuel has worked as a lighthouse keeper for more than 20 years. When a refugee washes up on shore one day, barely alive, Samuel navigates life around this stranger and flashes back to his own past, including his role in a political uprising and years that he spent in prison. On this weeks podcast, Jennings says that the books so...
Jun 03, 2022•53 min•Ep 401•Transcript available on Metacast With current-day labor movements at Amazon, Starbucks and other big employers in the news, Nell McShane Wulfhart is on the podcast this week to discuss her new book about a vivid moment in labor history, The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet. That revolution was launched in the face of working conditions that included contracts with onerous demands about every corner of a womans life. The age restrictions and the marriage restrictions and the pr...
May 27, 2022•52 min•Ep 400•Transcript available on Metacast Brian Morton, an accomplished novelist, has turned to nonfiction for the first time in his new book, Tasha: A Sons Memoir. On this weeks podcast, he discusses his mothers life, the difficulties in taking care of her toward the end of her life and what led him to write a memoir. I started writing a few pages about her, and I relished the freedom to write directly, to write without having to invent any characters, Morton says. I love to write about fictional characters, thats my favorite part of w...
May 20, 2022•36 min•Ep 399•Transcript available on Metacast The filmmaker, artist, author and general cultural icon John Waters visits the podcast this week to talk about his first novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance. The book features three generations of women in the Sprinkle family, and their very complicated (and antagonistic) relationships with one another. The first of them we meet is Marsha, an unrepentant thief and overall misanthrope; but Waters says he still wants us to root for her. Shes so crazy and so terrible that you cant believe it at fi...
May 13, 2022•33 min•Ep 398•Transcript available on Metacast Hernan Diazs second novel, Trust, is four books in one. Our reviewer, Michael Gorra, calls it intricate, cunning and consistently surprising. It starts with a novel inside the novel, about a man named Benjamin Rask, who builds and maintains a fortune in New York City as the 19th century gives way to the 20th. Diaz describes writing the uniquely structured book on this weeks podcast, and the ideas at its core. Although wealth and money are so essential in the American narrative about itself as a ...
May 07, 2022•49 min•Ep 397•Transcript available on Metacast Jennifer Egans new novel, The Candy House, is a follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad. A few characters appear in both books, but the novels are also united by Egans structural approach an inventive one that, in Goon Squad, included a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation, and in The Candy House, a chapter written as a long series of terse directives to a spy. On this weeks podcast, Egan talks about the new book, and about why she enjoys experimenting with fo...
Apr 29, 2022•41 min•Ep 396•Transcript available on Metacast The cartoonist Liana Fincks new book, Let There Be Light, recasts the story of Genesis with a female God who is a neurotic artist. At the very beginning of this book, shes existing in a void and she just decides to make something, Finck says. And its all fun and games until she starts to feel some self-doubt and realizes that she hasnt done well enough. Shes really kind of a self-portrait of me at that point. Shes well-intentioned, shes happy and shes very hard on herself. Jonathan Van Ness of Q...
Apr 23, 2022•38 min•Ep 395•Transcript available on Metacast Elizabeth Alexanders new book, The Trayvon Generation, grew out of a widely discussed essay of the same name that she wrote for The New Yorker in 2020. The book explores themes of race, class and justice and their intersections with art. On this weeks podcast, Alexander discusses the effects of video technology on our exposure to and understanding of violence and vulnerability, and contrasts the way her generation was brought up with the lives of younger people today. If you think about some of ...
Apr 15, 2022•47 min•Ep 394•Transcript available on Metacast While a steady stream of disturbing news continues to come from Ukraine, new works of fiction highlight the ways in which lives there have been transformed by conflict. On this weeks podcast, the critic Jennifer Wilson talks about two books, including the story collection Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky. Belorusets has been compared to Gogol in these stories, Wilson says. Theres a certain kind of supernatural quality to them. I think anyone looking to these...
Apr 08, 2022•49 min•Ep 393•Transcript available on Metacast Thomas Fishers new book, The Emergency, details his life as an emergency physician at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where hes worked for 20 years. It provides an up-close look at a hospital during the pandemic, and also zooms out to address the systemic issues that afflict American health care. This book was conceptualized prior to Covid, Fisher says on this weeks podcast. But Covid laid bare so much of what I intended to discuss from the beginning. So in some ways it was weirdly for...
Apr 02, 2022•51 min•Ep 392•Transcript available on Metacast Fintan OToole was born in Dublin in 1958, the same year that T.K. Whitaker, a member of the Irish government, published an influential report suggesting that Ireland open its doors economically and culturally to the rest of the world. OTooles new book, We Dont Know Ourselves, weaves memoir with history to tell the story of modern Ireland. Theres a lot of dark stuff in the book, he says, theres a lot of violence and repression and hypocrisy and abuse. But theres also the story of a people coming ...
Mar 25, 2022•52 min•Ep 391•Transcript available on Metacast In A Molecule Away From Madness, the neurologist Sara Manning Peskinwrites about the errant molecular activity that underlies many serious mental afflictions. Peskins book, reminiscent of the work of Oliver Sacks, conveys its scientific information through narrative. I wanted to capture how this actually unfolds in real time, she says on this weeks podcast. For a lot of us, we go to doctors and you get a diagnosis and its as if that diagnosis has always existed. But in fact, the diagnosis was in...
Mar 18, 2022•59 min•Ep 390•Transcript available on Metacast Scholars have long believed that the first Americans arrived via land bridge some 13,000 years ago, when retreating glaciers created an inland corridor from Siberia. Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas, tells a different story in Origin. According to Raff, the path to the Americas was coastal rather than inland, and what weve thought of as a bridge was a homeland inhabited for millenniums. Raff talks about the book on this weeks podcast. In recent years, the ...
Mar 11, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep 389•Transcript available on Metacast In 2017, Frank Bruni suffered a stroke while sleeping in the middle of the night, an event that led to blindness in his right eye. His new memoir, The Beauty of Dusk, examines not only his physical condition but the emotional and spiritual counsel he sought from others in order to deal with it. On this weeks podcast, he discusses the experience, including his initial reaction to it. I woke up one October morning and I felt like I had some sort of smear some gunk or something in my eye, because t...
Mar 04, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 388•Transcript available on Metacast You probably take the index for granted. It might be hard to remember that the handy list of subjects at the back of a book, with the corresponding page numbers on which each subject is discussed, had to be invented . This happened in the early 13th century, and on this weeks podcast, Dennis Duncan talks about his new book, Index, a History of the, and about the earliest examples of the form. Whats really interesting is, its invented twice at the same time, Duncan says. So its one of those inven...
Feb 25, 2022•49 min•Ep 387•Transcript available on Metacast Jennifer Haighs new novel, Mercy Street which Richard Russo calls extraordinary in his review is about a woman named Claudia who works at a womens clinic in Boston. Its also about the protesters outside. On this weeks podcast, Haigh says the novel was inspired in part by her own time working on a clinics hotline. Obviously I am strongly pro-choice or I wouldnt have been volunteering at this clinic, Haigh says. But until this experience, I knew very little about what abortion actually means in a ...
Feb 18, 2022•54 min•Ep 386•Transcript available on Metacast Harley Rustads new book, Lost in the Valley of Death, is about an American adventurer named Justin Alexander Shetler, who went on a quest in the Himalayas that ended in his disappearance. One of Shetlers heroes was Christopher McCandless, whose story was told in Jon Krakauers Into the Wild. On this weeks podcast, Rustad discusses Shetlers life, including his use of social media and how that dovetailed and didnt with his spiritual journey. He was a very good-looking guy. Hes somebody that could b...
Feb 11, 2022•55 min•Ep 385•Transcript available on Metacast Ruta Sepetys writes Y.A. historical fiction that draws plenty of adult readers as well. Her new novel, I Must Betray You, is about a Romanian teenager who is blackmailed to become an informer for a Communist regime. On this weeks podcast, Sepetys talks about why she turned her focus to the epochal events of 1989, and about what she wants readers to see in them. What I want to get across is the strength and fortitude of the Romanian people, particularly the young people, Sepetys says. Oftentimes ...
Feb 04, 2022•57 min•Ep 384•Transcript available on Metacast Imani Perrys new book, South to America, joins a tradition of books that travel the South to find keys to the United States: its foundations, its changes and its tensions. Perry, who was born in Alabama, approaches the task from a variety of angles, and discusses some of them on this weeks podcast. It includes personal stories, Perry says. It is a book about encounters. It is a book about the encounter with history but also with human beings. And as part of it, self-discovery, to try to understa...
Jan 28, 2022•55 min•Ep 383•Transcript available on Metacast Jing Tsus new book, Kingdom of Characters, is about the long and concerted efforts of linguists, activists and others to adapt Chinese writing to the modern world, so that it could be used in everything from typewriters and telegraphs to artificial intelligence and automation. On this weeks podcast, Tsu talks about that revolution, from its roots to the present day. The story of the Chinese script revolution and how it came to modernize is really a story about China and the west, she says. Becau...
Jan 21, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 382•Transcript available on Metacast The writer and editor Robert Gottlieb does double duty on this weeks podcast. He talks about the life and career of Sinclair Lewis, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Babbitt, Lewiss best-selling novel about the narrow-mindedness and conformity of middle-class America in the first half of the 20th century. But first, he talks about his own new book, Garbo, a biography of the movie star Greta Garbo, whose impact on the culture was matched by the sense of mystery that surrounded her. I un...
Jan 14, 2022•51 min•Ep 381•Transcript available on Metacast Throughout the year, we hear from many of you, and are always glad when we do. From time to time, we try to answer some of your questions on the podcast. This week, for the second time, we dedicate an entire episode to doing just that. Some of the many questions addressed this week: Who are literatures one-hit wonders? What are some of our favorite biographies? What are empowering novels about women in midlife? How do we assign books to reviewers? Who are writers that deserve more attention? How...
Jan 07, 2022•1 hr•Ep 380•Transcript available on Metacast David Sedariss second volume of diaries, A Carnival of Snackery, covers the years 2003 to 2020. On this week's podcast, he talks about the diaries, and about being on the road again we caught him in Montana, a stop on his sprawling reading and signing tour. Ive been surprised by what people are willing to You want us to show proof of vaccination? OK, well do it. You want us to wear a mask the entire time? OK, well do it, Sedaris says. And then the book signings have lasted as long as they always...
Dec 23, 2021•1 hr•Ep 379•Transcript available on Metacast In 2007, Debby Applegate won a Pulitzer Prize for The Most Famous Man in America, her biography of the 19th-century preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. Applegates new book, Madam, is another biography, of a very different subject: Polly Adler, who ran a brothel and had many famous friends during the Jazz Age in New York City. On this weeks podcast, Applegate describes the challenges of running a business in the underworld. You have to depend on your reputation, Applegate says. You cant...
Dec 17, 2021•58 min•Ep 378•Transcript available on Metacast James Andrew Miller has written a series of oral histories about some our biggest cultural institutions: Saturday Night Live, Creative Artists Agency and ESPN. His new book, Tinderbox, follows HBO from its start in 1972 through its transformative Sopranos years and up to the present day. One of the things that struck me was just how emotional people were, Miller says on this weeks podcast. First of all, HBO was a place that people didnt date, they married. There were people that were there for 2...
Dec 10, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 377•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this week, several editors at The New York Times got together (virtually) for a live taping of the podcast to discuss the Book Reviews list of the years 10 Best Books. (If you havent seen the list yet and dont want spoilers before listening, the choices are revealed one by one on the podcast.) In addition to the 10 Best Books, the editors discuss on this episode some of their favorite works from the year that didnt make the list. Here are those additional books the editors discuss: The M...
Dec 03, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 376•Transcript available on Metacast The novelist and Nashville bookstore owner Ann Patchetts latest book is a collection of essays, These Precious Days. Its anchored by the long title piece, which originally appeared in Harpers Magazine, about her intimate friendship with a woman who moved to Nashville for cancer treatment just as the coronavirus pandemic started. On this weeks podcast, Patchett talks about the collection, and about where writing essays fits into her creative life. I write essays while Im writing novels too someti...
Nov 25, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 375•Transcript available on Metacast 
