Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, and produced by Jordan Aaron and Lauren Stack.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, and produced by Jordan Aaron and Lauren Stack.

Bethanne puts the spotlight on Middlemarch in this week’s Canon or Can It. Will the classic novel survive Bethanne’s critical scrutiny? Tune in to find out.

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and Autumn by Ali Smith.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned:

In the Dream House – Carmen Maria Machado

Flowers in the Attic – V.C. Andrews

To the Finland Station – Edmund Wilson

F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word – Rufus Lodge

Orbital – Samantha Harvey

Middlemarch – George Eliot

House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski

Imagine Me Gone – Adam Haslett

Dept. of Speculation – Jenny Offill

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing – Eimear McBride

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders

Autumn – Ali Smith

Episode Transcript:

Bethanne: Welcome to season two of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue. And as you might be able to tell today, I the Book Maven, Bethanne, have allergies. And so my voice has dropped about an octave. Thank you, dear listeners, for putting up with it. I promise we have a really great show. As you know, this season we're talking to leading authors, digging into the classics to decide which ones should stay in the literary cannon, and I'm also recommending some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all of that and more in this episode. And first this week I talked to Carmen Maria Machado, author of In The Dream House, and we talked about how she got into writing erotica, the politics of writing about sex and navigating creative work in a repressive environment. Join us in conversation as Carmen talks about her first forays into writing. I'm wondering, the first time you wrote a sex scene, was it for a short story? Was it an essay? And knowing yourself and knowing your process and your style, did you have any trepidation about it?

Carmen: If we want to be really technical, the first time I ever wrote a sex scene, it was when I was probably about 11 or 12 and I That sounds about right. Yeah. I went through this phase where I wanted to write out dirty sentences, but I didn't know how to do it. So I would be on my family computer and I would write the dirtiest sentence I could think of, which when I wasn't very dirty, I didn't know very much, but I was trying to marshal everything I knew and I would write these sort of sentences and then I got fined it that I would delete the sentence, I would write a different nonsense sentence and then I would save the document multiple times and then I would go and check and double check and make sure there was this other sentence. So I feel like kind of an origin story.

I mean, I also was reading, I read a lot of different sort of things when I was young, but I was reading VC Andrew, so when I was too young to be reading VC Andrews, so I feel like I also had encountered sex scenes. That's like an early text for so many of us. Totally. Yeah. I had encountered flowers in the attic and other books in those series and read them and not quite know what to make of it, but it was intriguing and titillating in its own weird way. I think that I was just in this place where I wanted to see what it felt like to do it myself. And then I feel like fast forward to my writing career and my life. Before I even got into grad school, I was writing on my own, I was writing erotica and it was just like a private, or not private because I was actually submitting it to things, but I was like, oh, I wonder if I could try this and see.

And I was pretty good at it. I really liked it. And then I remember this other kind of interesting moment. I was in my second semester at Iowa as a grad student and I was a runner up in this erotica contest for this magazine that was like a short-lived erotica magazine for women, for straight women. So essentially I was a runner up for this contest and they were like, okay, we're going to put it in a magazine. Do you want to put it under your name or under a pen name? And that semester I was taking a class with Alex Chee and I knew that Alex Chee had published erotica because it had said so in his bio. And so I met up with Alex and I asked him, and we had this long conversation about using a pen name. So I published that story and a couple other stories in various anthologies and stuff under the pen name Olivia Glass, which is my grandmother's first name.

And well, initially it was going to be Miranda, but Miranda Glass was like a cellist or something. I didn't want to mess up her Google results. So I did Olivia Glass and, and then at some point during grad school I was like writing about sex and I just want to fold this all into my practice. I just want to make it all kind of one thing. And so I started submitting work that had more explicit sexual content and I never looked back. I feel like it, it felt so correct when I was doing it. I take sex very seriously and I have a lot of thoughts about it and it's a very important part of my life, and this is true for many people. And I was like, I just so rarely read sex scenes in the perspective of people who are like me. I want to move ahead with that, but I

Bethanne: Also want to go back to filament for a second because you were submitting something under this pseudonym to a magazine for straight women. Was it because they had a contest? Was it because you weren't finding magazines that took the kind of writing you were doing for queer women? Or tell me a little bit more about that.

Carmen: I'm bisexual. Before I went to grad school, I primarily dated men. That was just as the arc of so many queer women go. It was like doing that until I realized, oh, wait. But yeah, I think I was intrigued by the idea, I mean the idea of a magazine centering any women's erotic desires, even straight women.

Bethanne: That's what I was getting to.

Carmen: That itself is still kind of revolutionary. Obviously I would've been also happy to write for a queer magazine, but the fact was there was just this magazine that had some funding. I mean, it didn't pay a lot, but it paid some money. And it's like how I also really love Magic Mike XXL. I mean it's a very straight, but also it's so much about women's pleasure that I don't mind that it has more of this sort of straight energy because of interested in something that I'm really interested in, which is women's sexuality and the way that women approach sex.

Bethanne:

What was the moment when you wrote something and you write about sex, like you say all the time now when you thought I've gotten there, I have put a woman right where she's supposed to be. Did you have a moment like that?

Carmen: I don't know if it was one singular moment. I mean, I think with my first book I had that story inventory, which was this list of sexual partners. That was a story that I wrote purely out of spite because I had been in a workshop where I had criticized a male classmates' sexual, but I thought sexist story, and he interpreted that as me being a weird prude who didn't like writing about sex. And I was so annoyed. That was his takeaway that I went and just wrotethe story. I was like, I'm going to write a story where every scene is a sex scene. But then of course I had to figure out, well, it can't just be that. What is the other thing happening behind it? And then eventually I figured it out and as I wrote the story, I was like, oh yeah, this is really good.

But I remember it feeling like there was a character who was at a loose end and trying to figure out what she wants and what she needs in this very apocalyptic moment. And I think for me, it felt so similar to how I think I've approached being alive, which is, yeah, what does it mean to be in a body in certain ways here? What feels like the end or something close to the end? I think that was a story that really just, yeah, it felt like a moment of kind of a revelation.

Bethanne: I think a lot of us feel closer to the end than ever, and yet here we are in these bodies and these bodies still want sex. These bodies still desire things. As you said, sex is something that's very important to you, and I don't think you just mean intellectually either. And so we have this and how do we approach the fact that we have needs and desires and all kinds of different ways that we want to look at them, assuage them, and interact with other people about them? Is there going to be an anthology, not necessarily from you about, I don't know, sex at the end of the world? How do we approach this? It's a huge question, I know.

Carmen: I think it's not even so specific as that. I also think that we are actually in a very anti-sex moment. We are in a very sex negative in the United States. The US has always been a very puritanical culture, even just compared to Europe for example. I think that we are also in this historical moment where sex is suspicious, literally. Obviously, we're also in this moment of queer policies, anti-trans policies, anti-abortion stuff, and people talking about getting rid of no-fault divorce, and all these really just unhinged. And it's like you boil it down and it's essentially queer bodies or women's bodies being out of control of the state essentially. And I think that's true culturally. It's funny, like they'll do surveys where people will say there's too much sex in movies and tv and it's less sex in movies and TV than there ever has been. We are just in such a wildly prudish moment in history. So to me, I think the project of thinking about sex not just as pleasure, but also as a political act is so crucial and so important and we really can't lose sight of it. And sex will almost always be the battleground. However tangentially conservatives will fight us on.

Bethanne: It's all about control and power. None of it is about pleasure or our humanity, and that's very frightening. Why can't we have hair wherever we want to have it? Or why can't we be sexy if we're sexy to our partner? Why do we have to apologize about ourselves to someone else and so on and so forth.

Carmen: I think also that the more we know ourselves, the more hard we are to govern. We are the agenda of these racist rancid pieces of s**t that are sort of running everything now and have been for a while. Yeah, their politics are not served by us knowing ourselves better.

Bethanne: We get to know ourselves better through our creativity and how to write a sex scene is much less important than writing a sex scene if that's what you want to write. It's really wild that we even have to think about is this going to fly? Is this going to be something that is okay to publish? And fortunately we have, you have the great Alex Chi. We have other writers from RO Kwan to Melissa FBOs, so many really terrific writers on sex and the body, and I worry that the people won't have the same freedom to write. And what do we do about that, Carmen?

Carmen: I think there's a few things to do. I think part of it is where you have power in your community or your space or in your household if you are the parent of children thinking about, obviously there's age appropriate sexual education, but this project of knowing ourselves also knowledge is a part of that. That we are entering every phase of our lives with all the information that we need to make decisions and choices about what we do with our bodies and what we want to do. And that is hugely important. And this is also why book Bans and these similar, very sort of regressive policies that again, are being fought for by these awful vial people. Their agenda is served by alienating us and by keeping us from knowing ourselves. And so fighting back against that, either as a parent or as a community member or as a voter, is really important. And then, yeah, it's whose work are you supporting? Who? And if you are a writer yourself or an artist yourself, yeah, how are you encountering yourself in your own work, whether it's writing sex scenes or anything else for that matter. I think that just thinking about where we can show up for the people who like us, want to know ourselves better, and that's a tall order and it's a tall order even at the best of times. And now as we are in the worst of times, it seems even harder, but it's still really important.

Bethanne: Thank you, Carmen, for joining us this week. You can find all of Carmen Maria Machado's books wherever books are sold. Now let's move on to Friday reads where we'll see what you've been reading this week.

Welcome back to Friday Reads, the last one of this season. Jordan, my producer. Hello, how are you?

Jordan: I'm doing well. I have my own little bout with the allergy season, so we're making it through.

Bethanne: We are, we are. What have we got on the docket today?

Jordan: First up, we've got from Alex Cera, who is reading to the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson.

Bethanne: So this one really interested me. It's subtitled a study in the writing and acting of history, and I want to make sure that no one confuses Edmund Wilson with Edmund White. Okay. Edmund White, still alive. Edmund Wilson was one of the most influential 20th century American writers and literary critics. And so Alex has put up an image to an Abe books page for a hardcover from 1940 of this really very influential book. Again, like the Influential Critic. The thing about it is not many people liked Wilson. He was called a fat ferocious man, petty, pretentious, and petulant, a failure at many of the most ordinary tasks of life. And that was by someone who was writing an appreciation of Wilson. But this 1940 examination of revolutionary thought around the world might just be something that's relevant right now. What do you think, Jordan?

Jordan: Yeah, I think definitely, revolution is in the air, I hope.

Bethanne: Yeah, right there with you. So who is reading what next?

Jordan: Well, speaking of a little bit of a reverence we've got from Danny Greer, who is reading a good and relevant book for the time they're reading F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word.

Bethanne: It's by Rufuss Lodge, and the title on the jacket actually has asterisks in the middle of the F and the K, but we all know it's “f**k”. So it's a bright yellow and black book jacket, a really fun use of very old fashioned tariffs and flourishes because who among us has not dropped the occasional F-bomb, whether involuntarily or with deep sincerity? I don't listen to that many audiobooks, but I think this one might be best appreciated through earphones. If you don't know where we in the English language got this ever useful, epithet, largest little volume will prove lightning, but it might even more enlightening when it comes to the various famous people who have effed up and let's slip the frigging freaking fudging fabulous F word Jordan. So I love that one. And finally a little bit more serious, but still very, very interesting.

Jordan: Yeah. We've got one last one this week from Emma Vardy, who's reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

Bethanne: I will tell you right now, I love this book. I reviewed it for the LA Times and I think it has deserved every prize it's been nominated for or won, including the 2024 Booker Prize. It's a space pastoral, as the author says, the very opposite of a space opera in sci-fi because she follows six astronauts who are on an international space station during a single day's orbit of earth. And Harvey said she wanted to focus on what we know about space rather than write something speculative. So while she was working on it, she watched a continuous live stream of earth from the International Space Station. It took her more than a decade, but I think the resulting novel is really beautiful and unusual, so check it out. Thank you, Jordan. I think that's it for this edition of Friday Reads.

What Becomes a Legend Most, I have to say, Middlemarch by George Elliot is a legendary novel for so many of us. It remains a lifelong favorite, and yet I think there are also some interesting points of weakness in some of the characters. And this week I'm going to talk about Dorothy Avan, and I hope I'm saying her name correctly, because if I'm not, then I am no credit to my school program, which I also talk about in this week's canon or Canon. Once upon a time, I was a young woman who had been admitted to graduate school and planned to earn a doctorate in English literature. Before my first semester began, I visited a college friend who was already almost finished with her own doctorate in history. “What do you plan to work on,” she asked. “Oh, sex and death,” I responded, believing I must sound impossibly sophisticated.

She looked at me with kind pity in her eyes, but what do you want to say about sex and death? All I knew about life in academia was that it offered me the chance to pursue a life of the mind. I knew I wanted that but I had no idea what that entailed. I'd known quite a few classical musicians because I'd been a serious violinist for a time, but there wasn't anyone in my family's social circle who was a scholar. Although my father-in-law had been a professor at West Point, his field was computer science. The dinner table conversation at my in-law's house was more about football scores and local politics than big ideas. I yearned to learn more about big ideas, to talk about them, to appreciate great art, but I didn't have the first clue about finding out how that might happen. I was terrified of asking anyone for help.

Lest they discover how naive I was, so I did what I'd always done as an overachieving young woman from a rust belt background, I forged ahead and trusted that by following various kinds of instructions, I'd figure it all out. TLDR; I didn't. I'm still doctorate-free. I did earn my master's degree and I now have a slightly better idea of what goes on in the life of the mind.

Gentle readers in so many ways. I was exactly like my favorite heroine of English literature. Dorothy Caban, nay Brook Dorothy sprang to life in 1869 as George Elliot, who was born Marianne Evans and used a male nom de plume for all of her major works. Wrote a long piece called Ms. Brooke. She'd already begun notes for a project she called Middlemarch, and when in 1871 she determined that the works belong together. They originally appeared together in serialized newspaper installments.

Dorothy Brook marries the Reverend John Caban because he's writing a master work with the working title of the Key to All Mythologies. Oh, the free song. Our Ms. Brooke certainly feels one, believing that she can be the ultimate. Help me to such a great man as Rebecca Mead whose take on Elliot's work. Middlemarch and Me came out in 2014, writes I loved Middlemarch and I loved being the kind of person who loved it. Well, exactly, but more to the point. Dorothy Brooke might have said exactly the same thing. Age 19, an orphan who lives as her uncle's ward along with her younger sister, Dorothea is certainly bright and energetic. She likes to renovate the cottages of farmers on her uncle's estate, but educated and focused. She is not. During her honeymoon with the 45-year-old Cavan, she discovers he does not intend her to be his Emmanuel.

He returns to his moldy FU utilities as will Lattice law, the much younger and future recipient of Dorothy's affections calls them and pays his wife very little attention. Dorothea didn't have the opportunity to attend college, let alone university, but as I hope you'll see from my own experience, even an educated woman can get lost on the past to her life's purpose. Like Dorothea, I thought the life of the mind was the way forward. Like Dorothea, I discovered even the most direct path can contain detours. I'm pretty sure George Elliot, Maryanne Evans understood those things better than either Dorothea or I, which is one of the reasons Middlemarch stands the test of time. I'm canon-ing this great novel. So for this week's six Rex, I really wanted to talk about experimental fiction. And while I know Carmen Maria Machado's book is not fiction, it just made me think of some of these powerful books I've read. So I will try to get through six recommendations in under three minutes. Jordan, my producer is here with the stopwatch. Jordan, are we all set?

Jordan: We're rolling.

Bethanne: Alright. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I feel inadequate to the task of explaining this 2000 novel, which is groundbreaking metafictional and even has a bit of engineering built into its design. It's also a family saga. I told you I'm inadequate to the task, but if you haven't read it or at least try to read it, I highly, highly recommend it, and I rarely say highly twice. Next up, Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslet. It's an account of a family destroyed by mental illness and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Haslet wants to ask tough questions about depression and its ilk. What do we inherit? What can't we inherit and yet want to? How do our actions affect our effect? Somehow Haslet, and this is why he is nominated for and wins awards, infuses father John and son Mark's struggles and failures with compassionate humor.Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill is amazing. An unnamed American woman tells us about her life in chapters about the length of index cards. Does anyone remember the blog index? Love that this narrator makes quotidian scenes come alive, and that makes a lot of sense when you realize, although she's now at home with a baby and consumed by repetitive chores, she once wanted above all to be an artist consumed by her work. Offill defines human limits as much by what she leaves out as by what she puts in.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride is the Irish author's debut, and as Anne Enright wrote about it in The Guardian, it's a book unlike any other, McBride seems to have invented her own syntactical system. She's telling a story in English, but perhaps the titular protagonist is thinking it in Gaelic or Irish. I can't remember which one is which. Perhaps her poor brain has been so fragmented by abuse and neglect or Irish girlhood, as Enright also writes, that she can only think in this twisted grammar as she tries to determine if she'll ever make it to adult womanhood.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, what can I say? The Tibetan idea of the bardo, a space between life and death has some equivalence to the idea of purgatory, but of course with far less judgment in the bardo spirits may not have sinned in the Judeo-Christian sense, but they do have unresolved attachments. Saunders's brilliance is to remind us that while mourning his dead son, Willie, the clearly alive, Abraham Lincoln was as much in a bardo as any lost soul.

Finally, Autumn by Ali Smith. Smith has since finished her seasonal quartet, but this was the first book. And it's also according to some, the first Brexit novel, a story of England untethered and also unmoored shown fantastically through a not quite 40-year-old woman's friendship with a centenarian, her memories are still in the making, his are already history. What connects past and present, especially when an entire nation wants to control its own destiny in an uncontrollable world. There we go. Jordan, how did I do?

Jordan: Well, we finished out the season with one last bookshelf falling to the ground. I came in at three minutes and 32 seconds.

Bethanne: Oh, well, I really appreciate all of your service with the stopwatch, Jordan, and I will see you and all of our listeners next time. Well, that does it for this episode of the book Maven, A Literary Review. Follow us on substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue, is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

George Orwell makes another appearance on the TBM podcast, this time with his novel 1984. Will Bethanne let another Orwell book live in the canon, or will she kick this ‘mother of dystopian novels’ out for good?

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists, this week focusing on feminist dystopian classics. Titles include: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Power by Naomi Alderman, Severance by Ling Ma, Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch, The City We Became N.K. Jesmisin, and Afterland by Lauren Beukes.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned:

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami,

Show Don’t Tell: Stories by Curtis Sittenfeld,

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir by Deirdre Bair,

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Ngih Vo

1984 by George Orwell,

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel,

The Power by Naomi Alderman,

Severance by Ling Ma,

Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch,

The City We Became N.K. Jemisin, and

Afterland by Lauren Beukes.

Transcript

Bethanne: Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: a Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but this week, I talked to Laila Lalami about her latest novel, the Dream Hotel.

We discussed the role of community in freedom, the impact of technology on identity, and the relationship between dreams, privacy, and personal integrity. Join us in conversation as Laila discusses her exploration of immigration and dystopia in The Dream Hotel.

I don't think that people understand how much immigration is based on. Selection and eugenics and things like that. And so, in the Dream Hotel, I found so much that spoke to the immigrant experience. How does that resonate with you, especially because you've written before about the immigrant experience and what it is like for people to come to this country specifically?

Laila: Yeah, this is a fascinating question. When I set out to write a book, it was. I started working on it 10 years ago, and it was a book that came to me as a question, like, what if we keep going like this? And data collection continues to be more and more. Precise, granular, and invasive, the next step is our interior lives.

What would happen if we lose privacy in our dreams? It was just a question, and that was what the book started as for me in the form of a question. Then I set that aside and ended up writing The Other Americans. I picked up the manuscript again in 2020 and finished it last year. Interestingly, this idea of estrangement was that our relationship with technology almost encourages an estrangement from the self.

Where we start obeying these extremely arbitrary rules about how we present ourselves in public. So, for example, you might take a picture of yourself instead of a photo. This way, you might angle the camera at 45-degree angles because that's more flattering. Whatever flattering means, you might post it between this hour and that hour because that's when you'll get the most views.

You might answer your comments this way because that's what will get the most engagement. We are training ourselves to behave in ways that satisfy these algorithms. But in the process of doing that, we estrange ourselves from our instincts, our beliefs, and our morals.

From our sense of what is correct and estrangement from the self, we have these different selves, the cells we present to the public, and all that. First of all, it is a feeling that is universal and deeply human. But I think what happens in immigration is that you move from one country to the next, you have to build a new identity.

Sometimes, that process might involve taking on new names and all of that. So yes, I can see a connection; indeed, the book can be read as a dystopia. You can read it as a reflection of the past and that experience.

Bethanne: I was thinking very specifically at first about the experience of immigration as a kind of fragmentation in the sense that you're talking about because when you do go to a different country to live as opposed to simply visiting with a visa and a passport, you have to break your identity down into all of these documents.

Sarah, of course, has her identity broken down in slightly different ways because of the digital and invasive nature. And Layla, what you were talking about is speaking to the idea that we want to give away all the things that make up an individual? And if we do choose to give some of it away, how do we understand that?

So I guess in the case of Sarah, who is already being held in this detention center when we meet her, that's not giving anything away. We know that she was living a, you know, new mom of twins, she's married, she's living a very everyday life, and it turns out that because of some things in her dreams.

She can be detained and told, look, we don't want you to do anything terrible, so we're gonna hold you until we're sure you won't. It's a wild, wild idea, and it's also an idea that came from the question you asked. When did you know? That this is where Sarah was. When did you know that she was in this place?

Laila: Yeah, remember I said earlier that I started working on the book in 2014? So initially, my idea had been, okay, I'm gonna imagine a future in which dreams are no longer private. How would I get there if I were to imagine this world? Immediately, I had the idea of a device that would help you sleep because of most of the technology that we use.

It has become a part of our lives because of its convenience. So if I can create a device that helps me sleep, especially since I'm an insomniac, and I would be like, yes, I'll sign up. I'll get this device. If you can guarantee me nine hours of sleep, sign me up. I will do anything, right?

And, of course, the fine, that's the device. Then I started working on how the novel started, which began in this tech company. But after I wrote a couple of chapters, I just. I couldn't stay in the tech company. I couldn't make myself and use my imaginative powers to remain inside the tech company for 400 pages.

I just didn't. I worked at a tech company long before I wrote my first book, so I knew about the culture and what goes on there. But I didn't have fun with it and didn't want to stay in it. So, I set the book aside and decided to work on this other manuscript that I had also. But when I returned to it in 2020, I thought, "Wait a minute."

If I were to use this device, the idea for the book would be that it's liberalizing the fact that we are losing our freedoms. Your dreams are deeply intimate. No one else shares them with you. You can be as close as you want with another human being. Say, for example, your partner, and you can share many of your thoughts and feelings, your petty jealousies, and the less savory aspects of yourself with that person who loves you and doesn't judge you.

You can have all that, but that doesn't mean they can share this part of you. That part of you is yours. It is intimate. It belongs only to you and to me. It starts getting into these ideas of personal integrity, like basically the fact that you own your body, you own your mind, it is yours.

You think about it; everything inside it belongs to you. It's a human right. If we keep having this data being collected about us, and let's say that in the world of the novel, I have literalized a debt loss of privacy, to the extent that you know your dreams can be seen by these tech companies.

Let's say I've literalized it, then. What would be the next logical step? How can I make that idea come out more? Since this is all about the loss of freedom, I will put this character in a semi-carceral, confined environment. So think asylum, think psychiatric hospital, think leprosarium.

All of these areas that you think of as being locked, Ward. Yes. Yes. Yeah, exactly. They're little mini societies, and I will put my character in there to literalize that idea and then see what happens next.

Bethanne: Do you know what I think is hilarious about this? And there's not much hilarious about it on the page, but I.

What is more boring than hearing someone else talk about their dreams? Layla? Yes. Yes.

Laila: But not in this

Bethanne: book, I don't think. I hope not. Not in this book. Not in this book. And here's the thing. This is what is so essential about the privacy you're talking about, to each of us. Our dreams are exciting because of all the parts of us that make up those dreams, and there is no one in our life saved, perhaps for a parent.

Who has all of that except us? And then, of course, the fact is that we start as children and become adults. So even parents don't have access to everything in our lives, but our dreams have that access.

Laila: Power is most successful when it has been internalized. If we look at it, then we are surveilling ourselves.

My fear with technology is that we are in the early stages of that, where we are internalizing, oh, I have to post at this hour. I have to have this many followers, and I, you know, have to do this, and I have to behave in specific ways online. I agree to the terms of service, and my phone has to know how many steps I take every day, and it tracks me from this.

We accept all this. And where are we headed with that? Are we bringing yet another form of control into our lives, and we have begun to internalize it? So, the book internalizes that control by saying, "Here's a device that gives access to dreams and kind of opens up."

Drawing parallels between things like patriarchy, colonialism, and surveillance, like all of these are systems of power, and none of them would survive without the surveillance that allows it to remain in place.

Bethanne: That is fantastic, and I could end there, but there's one more thing that I have to bring up because this is very important.

Her being a new mom. It is crucial because there is perhaps no time in any person's life, any person who bears a child. That is the time in your life when you become public property. Oh my

Laila: God, yes. No, I get exactly what you're saying. I mean, yeah, I get it. Yeah. And so.

Bethanne: It's not just that Sarah is already in this state of belonging to a state, but also she's in a state where she realizes that she can't be free without her children.

Her children are vital to her, but it's a time when you also realize your ability to rely only on yourself. Is that an act? Yeah.

Laila: Yeah. It's a very vulnerable time in people's lives. And I get what you're saying about like the loss of privacy, the fact that you're in hospital rooms and strangers are coming in and you're entirely at their mercy.

And then, of course, when you meet your child, they'll roll your life for the next few years, the absolute desperation for a good night's sleep. Again, technology has all the answers and is undoubtedly very convenient. Still, its costs are just now beginning to reveal themselves.

Bethanne: Thank you, Layla, for joining us this week. You can find all of Layla LA's books wherever they are sold. Let's move on to Friday reads, where we'll see what you've been reading this week.

We are back with another round of Friday reads, a post sharing what you all are reading. As always, my producer, Jordan, is here to help me comb through. So what do we have up first, Jordan?

Jordan: First, we've got from Kurt, whose hashtag for Friday Reads is Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Bethanne: This is the cover of Curtis Seinfeld's new book of short stories, which Kurt has put up.

It is a woman floating in blue water. She's down toward the bottom of the cover with her hands behind her head in a one-piece bathing suit, and then the titles are in yellow. It's really striking. And what I wanted to say about this is that Seinfeld is one of those authors who switches between short fiction and novels with great aplomb.

Suppose you haven't read her most recent. Novel romantic comedy. It's hilarious. Don't waste any more time. Anyone who loves Katherine Haney or Haney, however, Katherine, I've forgotten how you pronounce your name, Karen Russell, who's more sci-fi, but still very fun, very funny. This is an excellent short storybook for women looking for something that isn't necessarily light but has.

Heart and compassion. So there we go. What's next?

Jordan: Second. Today, we've got from Esther, who says, as a lifelong reader of biographies, I'm really enjoying Deirdre Bair's memoir Parisian Lives about writing the biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. Bair faced enormous challenges, including finding research and money, balancing work and family, and dealing with sexism.

Bethanne: There's so much going on in the lives of both Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, and I'm not surprised. Deirdre Bair, a well-known biographer, received a national book award for the Beckett biography, which came out in 1978. She was also nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize twice, once for Simone de Beauvoir and once for a biography of Carl Young.

So she's gotten a lot of kudos for her biography skills. And let me tell you, everything I know about biographers shows something like this. It is a labor of love and expertise and something that can make fantastic reading. You know, you would think, Deirdre Bear, who's that?

I mean, I know who Samuel Beckett is, and I know who de Beauvoir is, but somehow, Bear is so talented that her placing herself in this one just makes sense. It's a really fantastic book. I highly recommend it. It just happens that I read it. I don't always pick Friday Reed's recommendations that I've read, but in this case, I have. I guess I've read all three this week.

I don't know Jordan, and I don't know what's going on with me, but what? This is our last post.

Jordan: Our last post today is from a library that says it's Friday. What are you reading? And shared a lovely cherry blossom themed graphic.

Bethanne: This is precisely why I chose it; it's because of the library thing. Hello? Library thing.

Tim, I thought that cherry blossoms were so perfect here in DC. It's been a big cherry blossom week. Everything's gorgeous, and The Chosen and the Beautiful by Ngih Vo is also gorgeous. This book is a sci-fi take on The Great Gatsby. I happened to have been talking a great deal about The Great Gatsby last week in a conversation with Andrew Keen that I'll share.

In the newsletter at some point. But this one by Nivo enchanted me. Not just because it had the sci-fi aspect but because VO as a queer Asian novelist has a really different take on the class structure that is so vaunted by so many critics in The Great Gatsby. So. check this one out.

Definitely get out and see any blossoms in your area. Jordan and I will be back next week with some more Friday Reeds. Thank you, Jordan.

The Dream Hotel is Layla Emmy's latest novel. In it, we learn a lot about what it means when people's lives are interfered with by an overreaching, overarching government, or, shall we say, a regime of a sort. And so, in this week's Canon or Can It, I wanted to take a look back at that mother of all dystopian novels, 1984 by George Orwell, but there is another book.

I'm in contention with 1984, and I'll let you find out when you listen.

Do you think it's a coincidence that just as the dystopian The Dream Hotel comes out with its description of a police state, we're also seeing a new season of Black Mirror, which is also dystopian, and at the same time we're all talking about the Mother of all Dystopias George Orwell's 1984? By the way, that was published in 1949.

It shouldn't be a coincidence. My friends, I don't think so. We are just beyond the 40th anniversary of 1984, the actual year, and still, we're living in Big Brothers' world. It's an Orwellian story, no doubt. Inspired. Not just because of the rise of fascism among the Axis powers but also because of the rigidity of life in wartime, England tends to resonate with readers due to its themes of brute power, free speech suppression, and dystopian dismissal of facts.

The regime Orwell writes about is known as “the party” and its preferred means of communication is referred to as newspeak, which attempts to eliminate all cues about identity, emotion, and privacy, as many of us around the world watch groups that would eliminate those things to the parallels in real time to 1984, grow more frightening, even scarier.

Some people have adopted the slogan and made Orwell fiction again. Still, they are members of the far right who think that what they call woke politics are responsible for the rise of censorship. If you ask me, and I realize nobody did. Those sloganeering have got the wrong end of the manuscript. Those in academia and the media who have attempted to change how we refer to people in different groups may have made mistakes. Still, they've made those mistakes in the service of historical justice and deep compassion for lived experience.

They haven't. To give an example that just popped up this week, no one has attempted to incorrectly revise history so that it sounds like Freedom Fighter Harriet Tubman was collaborating with the Confederacy. The party, or well-invented, loved to create false narratives and loved even better to encourage its, Hmm.

Is citizens the right word? Well, its inhabitants used double thinking whenever they felt confused by something, like informing a neighbor or looking away when someone was arrested for carrying a classic novel. One of the smartest things about 1984 is how Orwell demonstrated that language can be weaponized.

I recently watched a silly show in which two security guards listened in as an intelligence officer conducted a routine investigation of an embassy employee through a series of blunt questions about the employee. Mother's health, the officer reduces her to tears. He made her cry without laying a hand on her, says one guard to the other.

That's raw power. Orwell reminds us that the cruelest torment isn't always physical. It's psychological. And that's where Orwell also lost me long ago. If you've read 1984 and you think it's a masterpiece, please continue to do so. However, in 2023, I read and reviewed a retelling of 1984 called Julia by Sandra Newman.

Here, Winston Smith's lover, Julia Worthing, takes the stage and makes it her own, too. I'll spare you the agony of quoting from my review. Still, Newman's version of Oceania shows a greater understanding of how things might have come to be in the party's control and a much greater understanding of how those not in the patriarchy learn to manipulate it.

Julia is a highwire act, for sure. The literary establishment does not like to see its sacred cows tipped. But I stand by my review and say that if 1984 belongs in the canon, so does Julia. Sandra Newman dives so deep into how women and femmes might have found ways around fascism that it's less a retelling and more a revisioning of its source material.

George Orwell, after all, was more of a sociologist at heart than a psychologist—and one more thing. The greatest poets, Dramatists, and novelists have always known that a powerful story deserves more than one telling. By building out Julius's story and blowing up Winston's essential weakness, Sandra Newman has followed in the footsteps of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes Dickens, and scores of others, responding to a fellow artist's statement with one that.

Only she could have written. I am Canoning Julia by Sandra Newman, and I welcome your comments on that decision.

Our themed book list, Six Recs Are Back Again, is back again, as always. This week, after The Dream Hotel by Layla Ami, I thought I would give you some new feminist dystopian classics. I've never talked about any of these before. If I have, excuse me. I get excited sometimes about some of these authors.

They're so good. But if you are a Book Maven subscriber, listener, etc., these books are all new to you. So, Jordan, I will make six recommendations in less than three minutes. And if I don't make it, I know the bookshelf falls over, but I will be pretty good today.

Jordan: Alright, well, we'll see how that goes. And for now, we're rolling. Okay,

Bethanne: So first up, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. And this has a band of survivors, in case you haven't. I've seen the TV show or read the novel, and they're mainly from Canada. The author herself is originally from British Columbia. So they have become a performing troop staging King Lear in all places around the Great Lakes.

Another ragtag group of survivors is the New York Times, named Station Eleven. One of the top books of the 21st century, and something that moves me every time I read them or see the show, are the sort of amateur museums, one of the characters put together that have things in them, like laptops that can't be operated.

These things could become museum artifacts, but we don't think of them that way right now. Next up, Naomi Alderman's The Power is a very powerful book. It's about young women worldwide discovering they have power at or really at their fingertips, and society's turned upside down.

It's a book within a book. Supposedly, a man wrote this manuscript, which was stolen by a woman with the real author's real name. However, a female-dominated society might not be all good. Severance by Ling Ma. Many of us know this one because it came about around the time of Covid, the global pandemic. And in Severance, which did come out before COVID-19 began, a virus infects offices and turns employees into zombies. People started to flee, and Ma was inspired by events like Hurricane Sandy and Sars, et cetera, but received so much intrusive PR that she no longer accepts interviews focusing on this novel.

Onto The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch, and this is about what it might be like if Joan of Ark were an eco-warrior. So, in this dystopian future, human beings have become devolved. They're sexless, they're hairless, they're powerless. They can't fight back against a cult leader, but freedom fighter Joan helps them revolt against a ravaged earth and a person who might suck them all dry.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin is sci-fi, and this one is really amazing. I don't want to describe it too much because this book has layers upon layers. Just read the series The Fifth Season. But the stillness is a supercontinent. In every fifth season, catastrophic climate change occurs.

And so it's really about these three Orogenes, these characters who have the power to help save the earth. Jemisin delineates a great deal of womanly experience through those three characters.

Finally, Afterland by Lauren Beukes, a South African novelist. In Afterland, there is something called The Man Fell. 99% of men and boys have been wiped out, but Cole is determined to keep her son Miles safe from harm. Meanwhile, they're on the run from her sister, who has a really creepy purpose in finding them. I recommend all of Beukes’s work, but if you like this one, read The Shining Girls. You won't be disappointed.

There we go. Six Recs. How did I do?

Jordan: We came in at three minutes and 43 seconds today, so, the shelf will call once again.

Bethanne: You know what? That's not too bad. Thank you all for listening and putting up with my descriptions. I appreciate it. And Jordan, thanks, as always.

Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven: A Literary Review. Follow us on substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week.

The book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. Our producer is Christina McBride with engineering by Jordan Aaron and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

Canon or Can It returns this week, focusing on Gone With the Wind, which lives in infamy for its portrayal of American chattel slavery as secondary to its romantic narrative.

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists, this week focusing on books with phenomenal TV adaptations. Titles include: Restoration by Rose Tremain, The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri, Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan, In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner, Savage Coast by Muriel Rukeyser, and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned:

The Jackal's Mistress, Skeletons at the Feast, Secrets of Eden, Tran-sister Radio: A Transgender Love Story, Midwives, The Flight Attendant, and The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

The Vermont Brigade in the Shenandoah Valley by Aldace Walker

This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust

The Heart of American Poetry and Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara

Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie

Nighttime is My Time by Mary Higgins Clark

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Jubilee by Margaret Walker

Restoration by Rose Tremain

The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan

In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

Savage Coast by Muriel Rukeyser

Half of a Yellow Sunby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode. But first…

This week, I talked to Chris Bohjalian about his latest novel, The Jackal's Mistress. We discussed recounting difficult historical events, finding empathy through fiction, and the process of researching for this book. Join us now in conversation as Chris talks about The Jackal's Mistress as a uniquely American work of fiction.

BP: Does it feel big, The Jackal's Mistress to you?

CB: First of all, Bethanne, thank you. It's always great to chat with you.

BP: Thank you. Likewise.

CB: It's my 25th book. Now, the fact that it's my 25th book doesn't necessarily mean it is a big book. 25 books are only a testament to my longevity, not necessarily my talent.

BP: But, you know, even if we were to take talent out of the equation, this book feels... it has the feel of relevance. It feels like a very American book. I'm not trying to say Great American Novel. Not at all. But it’s a very American book, and it’s a book for our time right now.

CB: I hope so. The fact is there is a lot of Civil War literature.

BP: There is. And yet, like World War II literature, it never seems to run out of relevance. There’s always a place for something that helps us see things in a different way.

CB: And the thing I love about Civil War fiction versus Civil War history—and I love Civil War history too, make no mistake—is that Civil War fiction tends to focus on individuals. Women, men, you get up close and personal. Whether it’s the remarkable short stories of Ambrose Bierce, Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier), or Dolen Perkins-Valdez. When you write about individuals in the Civil War in fiction, I think you see the conflagration in ways you might not when you're watching the sweep of armies across Gettysburg or Georgia.

BP: These people were real. And it’s not simply a bunch of facts. There’s writing about them. There are historical documents. It's a story that I wonder how it got lost like this. I mean, it was meant for you clearly—because how else did it get lost like this?

CB: Yeah. All we know about the two principals, Henry Bedell, a lieutenant with the Vermont Brigade, and Betty Van Meter, who lived in the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, 20 miles southwest of Harper’s Ferry in Berryville, all we really know about these two people begins with a Middlebury College valedictorian from the class of 1862 named Aldace Walker. Because attrition among officers was so high by 1864, this kid is a major in the Vermont Brigade, and before he turns 30, he writes his memoir, The Vermont Brigade in the Shenandoah Valley. About five or six pages in, he refers to what he calls “one anecdote.”

The anecdote is the story of one of the lieutenants in the Vermont Brigade being left for dead and kept alive by a rebel woman who literally kept him alive, for lack of a better word—and this is not the word Walker used, of course, “karma.” She’s thinking, “If I can keep this horrific Yankee blue belly alive, maybe my husband will someday come home to me.” That’s fundamentally the true part of the story, and that’s really all we know. There are other less important but interesting footnotes. For example, in 1915, Betty Van Meter was given a citation by the Vermont legislature for keeping a son of Vermont alive in 1864. Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, the notoriously curmudgeonly Edwin Stanton, was so moved by her efforts that he tried to move heaven and earth to see if he could find her husband in the Union POW system. When I spoke to historians about this story, most of them had no idea because historians focus on the sweep of armies, or they focus on very specific, interesting macro changes in the country, such as Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, which examines how 620,000 dead Americans dramatically changed our view of death, religion, the afterlife, and, of course, medicine. They’re not focused on Henry Bedell and Betty Van Meter in a farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley doing this unbelievably dangerous thing because there’s Jule Early’s Confederate army. There’s John Mosby, who led his guerillas, and hanging Union officers. What Betty Van Meter did was treason. So, the few historians who’d heard of this anecdote knew very little about it, and they all asked me the same thing: What have you learned? Do you think they were lovers?

BP: Oh, I’m banging my forehead. It matters not one whit.

CB: No. What matters is the unbelievable humanity of this woman who makes this decision, for whatever reason.

BP: I think people who write stories, who write novels, and who have developed great empathy and compassion in reading and writing—considering what stories can do for us—are going to have a role in standing up, not just in the face of whatever comes, but, and this is something that is relevant to The Jackel’s Mistresss, as you pointed out in the days afterward. Because those stories we have from the Civil War now, the testimony we have from someone like Aldis Walker and you point out in your afterword, he became a truly, truly gifted writer and lawyer. He was a really important person. This is the work we have to continue doing. And it isn’t always about history books with numbers and dates. It’s also about foregrounding the stories, as you said, about Betty/Libby and karma and kindness, and making sure people see those because there are already stories about cruelty and callousness, and that seems to be such an important part of it. To me, I don’t know if I’ve read all 25 of your books.

CB: Oh, you don’t want to. Some of them are absolute train wrecks. I’m responsible for the single worst first novel ever published, bar none.

BP: That’s an amazing achievement! You’ve given yourself, however, that award—well, I don’t know if it stands, Chris, but I will say I’ve read many, and I believe that Secrets of Eden – that was something that hit me when I read it: the compassion for the characters. And I wonder, where do you attribute this? Maybe you wrote a novel that wasn’t as good as a later one, but I’m looking at you, even though our audience won’t see the video. I am looking at your incredible bookshelves, which I’ve had the privilege of seeing on various Zooms and things before. Where does this deep compassion come from for you? Does it come from reading? Does it come from something else? Where does this deep compassion? We mentioned Luis Urrea earlier before we started recording, and he has always said, “Fill your pen with compassion, or don’t pick it up.”

CB: Oh my God. His story, my God. The whole idea that a writer’s career begins with the murder of his father is just unbelievable to me.

BP: Unbelievable.

CB: So, where does the compassion come from? If I have compassion… you know, I view The Jackal's Mistress fundamentally as a Romeo and Juliet kind of love story about doomed lovers from opposite sides of the wall. But I grew up in a lot of places. At one point, I went to five schools in six years, in three states. I wasn’t an army kid…

BP: Oh my goodness!

CB: … we moved around. We moved around a lot. And so I was always that kid trying to figure out the mores and the culture. Scott Fitzgerald talks a lot about how writers are observant. You’re always that kid with your fingers pressed against the glass, from the outside looking inside at the party, wondering why you weren’t invited. I think that’s why I’m a writer: I had the great, weird blessing of moving around a lot. I always knew my parents loved me, but it’s only in the last 25 years that I’ve really begun to understand their demons as well as their angels. Maybe that’s where my characters come from—hearts and souls. The whole idea that my parents were damaged, and I loved them, and they loved me. And heaven knows I’m a mess.

BP: But we can love each other, even when we are imperfect—perhaps even because we’re imperfect.

CB: I love that.

BP: Thank you.

CB: And I think you’re definitely onto something. We all know that fiction makes us more empathetic. Fiction makes us better, kinder, gentler, people because, you know, to paraphrase Atticus Finch in Harper Lee, you really don’t understand a person until you walk in their shoes. Again, not wanting to go crazy with the politics here or say I’m a champion for anything—because God knows you don’t want me championing any of your causes! God knows if I champion your cause you are going to lose! Okay, The Jackal's Mistress, as we talked about earlier, is my 25th book. So, I’ve been doing this countdown on social media from my first book to 25th.

BP: Yes, I’ve been watching this!

CB: Yes! And recently, we did my seventh novel, a 2000 novel called Trans-Sister Radio: A Transgender Love Story. Of all the books I’ve posted so far, including even Midwives, which, you know, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection, and a movie with Sissy Spacek—Trans-Sister Radio has elicited the most comments on my social media, with readers talking about how this was their introduction to the trans community. I’m really glad you wrote it because I understood things I didn’t understand before. And it’s a novel, you know, one published 25 years ago. You mentioned Secrets of Eden, a novel about a minister and a domestic abuse murder-suicide that might actually be a double homicide. That was an introduction to many of my readers to the epidemic of domestic abuse—domestic violence, not just in this country but around the world. And that’s another example of what fiction can do.

BP: That is a great example of what fiction can do, and I hope that The Jackal's Mistress will, for many readers, be an introduction to the stories we don’t often hear about any war, let alone the American Civil War. So, I have to ask before you go, what comes next? Is it going to be a new novel? Is it going to be a movie? What’s next? I mean, come on—you know The Flight Attendant, Chris, that was amazing!

CB: No, thank you. Thank you. All, all props to the flight attendants Kaley Cuoco, showrunner Steve Yockey, Max, and Warner—um, I love the TV series. It was really fun and great. Okay, what's next? And it's all done. It comes out in August 2026. It’s a novel called The Amateur, and you're going to love it. A lot of it is set at Smith College in 1979 and 1980. It’s about an aspiring LPGA golf superstar: a young woman who, the summer before she’s about to start college, accidentally kills a caddy at a swanky country club when she drives a ball through the practice net and hits him in the forehead.

BP: Chris, I’m going to be begging Todd Dowdy, our beloved Todd, for some kind of PDF immediately. I can’t wait. How exciting is that? That’s going to be huge! But in the meantime, you’ve got a lot to do with The Jackal’s Mistress now, and I hope everything goes so well. I’ll be talking it up with my usual enthusiasm.

Thank you, Chris, for joining us this week. You can find all of Chris Bohjalian’s books wherever books are sold. Now let’s move on to Friday Reads, where we’ll see what you've been reading this week.

Readers everywhere, welcome back to another Friday Reads session where I talk to you about what you are reading online. And as always, Jordan, my producer, is here to talk with me about the posts you’ve put up. So, what do we have this week?

JA: Our first post today is from Tracy Wise, who says #FridayReads: “I think I may have fallen in love with Frank O'Hara's poetry. Well, better late than never.”

BP: It’s edited by Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry, and Tracy’s put up an image of the book. Since she mentions Frank O'Hara, I just want to say that Frank O'Hara was not only one of our nimblest poets but also someone who sadly died way too young at around 40. O'Hara’s Harvard roommate was none other than Edward Gorey—I love that. You should fall in love with Frank O'Hara the way Tracy has, and I recommend starting with his Lunch Poems. They’re really, really beautiful. This compendium by Edward Hirsch is a beautiful and deeply personal look at American bards through the centuries, from Phyllis Wheatley, the first African American woman to publish poetry in the United States, to Joy Harjo, who has been our poet laureate and is Native American. There are 40 poems, from the immediately recognizable like Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” to the downright enigmatic like Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”—or maybe it’s not that enigmatic. I’m not sure. Finally, I’ll tell you that if you're a fan of the full breadth of American literature, whether it covers the personal, the political, the natural, or the fantastical, this is a beautiful volume to add to your shelves. What’s next, Jordan?

JA: Our next post today is from Gemma Bristow, who says #FridayReads: Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, an accessible and readable attempt to define the most effective solutions to environmental problems based on data.

BP: This is very interesting because Ritchie is a data scientist at Oxford University and is attached to the Our World In Data project. She’s also a follower of big optimist Professor Hans Rosling. So, more on the big optimist in a moment. Gemma has put up a book jacket, and the reason I love this one is because it’s got its library garland wrap on it. Anyone who’s ever worked in a library knows what I mean—the plastic that signifies, “I’ve checked this book out of a library.” I love that. The subtitle of Ritchie’s book is How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. That’s big optimism, right? Let’s all hope the author is correct. But even if she is, there are some things she fails to address at all, such as geopolitics and their influence on what happens with sustainability and environmental initiatives. So if you're a fan of other big optimist authors like Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Derek McCluskey, or even Bill Gates, take a look at Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World. Alright, last up, Jordan. Whom do we have? Is it whom or who? Uh, one of these days, I’ll get it right every time. But not yet.

JA: Well, we’re all working on that one. I’m always, uh… But our last one today is from Lisa Unger, who says: “The word ‘honored’ doesn’t begin to cover how I feel about being asked to write a foreword for a new edition of Nighttime is My Time by the late GOAT Mary Higgins Clark. There’s not a crime fiction writer working today that doesn’t owe her a debt of gratitude for her trailblazing work.

BP: Lisa Unger is one of my favorite suspense and crime writers. Uh, and yes, I do read her work and it’s very, very good. But I also love the fact that Lisa is friends with several other amazing women who write crime fiction, like Alair Burke, Laura Lipman, and others. I’m going to forget some names, but they’re excellent friends. They’re just wonderful people to be around. And so the fact that Lisa has been tapped to write this new introduction to Mary Higgins Clark’s Nighttime is My Time is pretty amazing. The image of Lisa’s hand holding a copy of the new edition of the book in front of a bookshelf—probably her own—is so cool. And if you’ve never read Mary Higgins Clark, the Queen of Suspense, it might be because she died in 2020 at the age of 92. What I mean by that is she’d been writing for so long—51 suspense and mystery novels. A little anecdote: An editor of mine once interviewed her at her New Jersey home when she was a mere 72 and almost knocked her down the stairs. I thought, “Oh, that would’ve made for a good plot—figuring out what happened!” But fortunately, Mary Higgins Clark did not die that day, and she lived to 92. Many, many writers, as Lisa Unger says, owe her a debt of gratitude for what she’s done. Nighttime is about a private high school’s 20-year reunion class—and that’s at least what’s left of it, because the women who aren’t dead have good reason to suspect every male attendee at the reunion of killing the other women in the class. So this one’s a great read! If you’re a fan of Carol Higgins Clark, Mary Higgins Clark’s daughter and frequent co-author, Sandra Brown, Fern Michaels, and Iris Johansen.That’s it for this week’s Friday Reads. Thank you as always, Jordan, for helping me out here.

The Jackal’s Mistress looks to find empathy for our history while maintaining moral clarity about enslavement in America and its role in bringing about the Civil War. While Chris Bohjalian aims for objectivity around events in his novel, he also wants to change the perspectives that are sometimes found in older works based on Civil War history.

One such work is Gone With the Wind, which lives in infamy for its portrayal of American chattel slavery as secondary to its romantic narrative. In today’s canon, we’ll dive into Margaret Mitchell’s novel.

When it comes to Daddy, I want a pony. No little girl in literature fits the bill better than Bonnie Blue Butler, daughter of Rhett and Scarlett, in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. Daddy Rhett provides every toy available on two continents and a princess's wardrobe. Little Miss Butler has no idea. These gifts have less to do with her cuteness than with the power struggle between her parents. Since this battle royale occurs in the wake of the American Civil War, Mitchell's symbolism makes sense. Personal relationships echo matters of state.

Many will conjure up Clark Gable as Rhett and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett from the 1939 film adaptation. Perhaps it was even one of your favorite films. I mean, it was a frequent enough rerun on the 11 o'clock movie. Viewers still quote its well-known lines, from “Fiddle-dee-dee, I'll think about it tomorrow” to the apocryphal “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.” By the way, in the novel, it’s merely “my dear, I don’t give a damn,” but that doesn’t have the same ring.

Those memories have little to do with one of the reasons the Union went to war with the Confederacy, which was the issue of abolition for enslaved people. It’s important to note how completely, and almost nimbly, Margaret Mitchell sidesteps the causes of the Civil War in favor of Southern belles. Mitchell, raised in a well-off Georgia household, had some college education in the North, but her childhood memories of stories about the South imprinted on her in a lopsided manner.

Despite her mother’s encouragement to broaden her education, Mitchell didn’t broaden her own perspective. Gone with the Wind is a paean to the moneyed white Southern landowners and their pre-war glories. There might have been a place for such a take, at least in 1936, had Mitchell chosen to focus on Scarlett’s journey or zoomed in on Rhett and Scarlett’s marriage as it dissolved, with some backstory on how the war affected them. That take might still be relevant. Think of Faulkner’s The Unvanquished, or The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, or Jubilee by Margaret Walker—books about the same war that offer a more balanced view of all the inhabitants of the American South. Because if you’re looking for a balanced view, Gone with the Wind will not provide it.

Some historians and critics praised Mitchell's attention to Southern women and the hardships they faced during the war and Reconstruction. She was certainly a gifted storyteller. The novel won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. However, Mitchell focused not only on white Southern women, but also portrayed black Southern women in a way that verges on farcical. For example, Prissy’s line “I don’t know nothing about birthin’ no babies” comes straight from the pages of the novel. Except in the novel, Prissy says that not while Scarlett is giving birth, but while Prissy herself is in labor. From characters who use deliberately nasty and antiquated terms for people of color, to insinuations of enslaved workers being carefree, to Scarlett’s abuse of Prissy at a critical moment, the novel displays an entirely careless portrayal of Northerners as callous carpetbaggers.

Gone with the Wind is a novel rife with racism and stereotyping. The film version improved these dynamics ever so slightly, but Hollywood wasn’t much better at addressing racial injustice when adapting it for the screen. David O. Selznick, who produced the film, failed to heed NAACP Secretary Walter White's recommendation of hiring an African American expert to more carefully address the depictions of the black characters in the film. Instead, Selznick employed two white people, one of whom was a friend and colleague of Mitchell herself. Even if Mitchell had been anti-racist (pro tip: she was emphatically not), you can read any number of articles and blog posts about her unfortunate views. Once she chose to publish, the book itself became permanently racist.

It may have been old Jeff Davis who originally said, “The South shall rise again,” but that bitter strain of Southern discomfort got served up again by Mitchell’s book and its nostalgic if mistaken brew. I won’t sip from that concoction again, and neither should you. I’m canning Gone with the Wind not to preserve it for the future, but to eschew it, along with other toxic attempts to resuscitate a longing for a way of life based on cruelty.

Welcome to another edition of Six Recs, where I try to give you six themed book recommendations in less than three minutes. And Jordan, my producer, times me. You know, if I don’t manage to do this in under three minutes, then the bookcase falls. But this week, we’re talking about countries that have been at war with themselves, because of course our interview is with Chris Bohjalian on The Jackal’s Mistress. So I’ve got six different countries and six different novels. I’m going to start, Jordan, whenever you tell me the stopwatch is set.

JA: We’re rolling.

BP: First up, Restoration by Rose Tremain, which is set during the English Civil Wars of the Cromwell era. If you’ve seen the movie adaptation starring Robert Downey Jr. and surprisingly Meg Ryan, as an inmate in an asylum, you haven’t actually experienced the power of Tremain’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Oliver Cromwell’s powerful, brimstone-scented fist came down on the land then, really, really hard. I think the book is excellent.

Next up, The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri, which deals with Syria and its civil war in modern times. The story follows Nouri and Afra Ibrahim, who have no choice but to leave their country for Great Britain, but their journey is complicated by disability, grief, and deprivation. The book doesn’t explain the war itself, but its portrait of what refugees face is authentic and compassionate.

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan is an incredible novel of the Sri Lankan Civil War from the 1970s. The author, whose parents immigrated from Sri Lanka to the United States, focuses on how women—whether civilians or soldiers—are affected when a country is split in two. This book has won two huge prizes and deserves much more attention. Pick it up.

In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner is set in Cambodia. If you are listening or reading along and don’t know the history of how the Khmer Rouge decimated Cambodia in the mid-seventies, read this novel immediately to understand that genocide knows no borders. The terrorists killed 25% of the population.

Savage Coast by Muriel Rukeyser is Rukeyser’s account of the Spanish Civil War, written during that time in the 1930s, but it wasn’t published until the 2010s. It has more to do with her personal experience than with literary fiction, but it’s an important account because it dives deep into how violence and allegiance make strange bedfellows—and wartime partners do too.

Finally, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I have to say: caveat lector, Adichie is a well-known turf. However, she is also a stunning novelist, and this book about her home country’s secessionist Biafra, which existed independently for just three years, is a testament to those who fought for its independence and what they endured.

That’s it for this week, Jordan. How did I do?

JA: Well, we came in just under the wire at two minutes and 52 seconds.

BP: Oh, not too bad. Thank you so much, and see you all back here next week for another six. Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, a literary review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week.

The Book Maven, a literary review, is hosted and produced by me, Beth Ann Patrick. It’s produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

We’re back with a Pop! Goes The Culture this week, focusing on The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Bethanne decides to do something different this week and focus not only on the book, but on Alice Walker’s cultural impact as well.

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists, this week focusing on books with phenomenal TV adaptations. Titles include: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman, The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carré, Patrick Melrose (series) by Edward St. Aubyn, and The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned:

Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee,

Authority by Andrea Long Chu,

Towards Zero by Agatha Christie,

The Thinking Heart by David Grossman,

The Color Purple by Alice Walker,

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood,

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn,

Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman,

The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carré,

Patrick Melrose (series) by Edward St. Aubyn, and

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to Season Two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we’ll talk to leading authors, dive into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I’ll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We’ll have all of that and more in this episode. But first, this week, I talked to Min Jin Lee about hunger. We discuss consuming knowledge, relishing experiences, and the radical nature of a smart and hungry woman. Join us now in conversation as Min talks about the importance of food in her writing.

BP: I know Pachinko, for example, well Free Food for Millionaires as well—there’s so much about food in your writing. So, I wanted to talk about how you learned to write about food. You certainly weren't a food writer or a food journalist when you began writing fiction. Were there challenges in that? Was it something that came very naturally to you?

MJL: That's so interesting. I don’t even think about my food writing at all. I have actually done some food writing. I’ve written for Travel and Leisure and S Traveler and Food and Wine. I’ve written little essays and pieces, but…You know what? MFK Fisher, who is the great OG food writer, was asked why she writes about food, and her answer was: "No, I write about hunger." Isn’t that good? Isn’t that the best? It’s so good—it gets right to the heart of things. And I definitely feel like a hungry person sometimes. There are so many things I want to be nourished with, and whenever I do feel nourished by something or someone, or by a moment, I do feel joy. Because I don’t expect happiness in life at all. At all. As a matter of fact, I’m a little bit of a Grinch.

BP: There's the headline.

MJL: Min Jin Lee is a Grinch! So whenever I’m talking to young people and they say things like, “Oh, that job doesn’t make me happy,” or “That situation makes me really unhappy,” or “I’m really traumatized about something,” I just think, “That sounds fine.” I don’t even get troubled by it. I always kind of think, “Yeah, that’s life, pal.” I usually say something that sounds really tough, but I always say, “Seeking happiness is very sheep-like behavior. We get into a lot of trouble looking for happiness. I don’t think it’s something you go looking for. It comes to you now and then.”

BP: Happiness is definitely not something you get to have all the time. I completely agree with you, but I want to go back to something you said a minute ago about being a very hungry person.

MJL: Yeah, I’m hungry.

BP: What does that mean? Since you know you can’t be happy all the time, what does hunger mean? Because hunger doesn’t mean you’re always going to be satisfied, does it?

MJL: But I really respect my appetites. I respect my hunger, I respect my appetites. And if the world says that, especially women, that we’re not supposed to be hungry, for me to say that is actually a very threatening thing to the world.

BP: It’s radical. It’s radical for women to say we are hungry, that we want more. Something I’ve talked about, and I think I wrote about it in my memoir, is growing up and how the biggest or best portion was always reserved for dad. Because in my family, like so many others, dad was the one who went out to work. So the women were always saying, “You don’t get that beautiful pork chop,” or “You don’t get the delicious crusty corner of the casserole because that’s for the man in the family.” And I’m not blaming my parents for that. That was the reality. But I definitely blame society for that—telling women, “Hold back. Hold back.”

MJL: I recently… so you asked me about cooking and food writing, and I gave you the MFK Fisher quote because I think talking about food is, in many ways, a lovely and polite conversation. But the root of everything for me is that I have this enormous appetite. And I’ve been made to feel ashamed for having it for most of my life. It’s exactly what you said about dad getting the beautiful pork chop, or how we have to save the best for the men. In Korea, that thinking lasted for a very long time—men get to eat first, the sons eat with the men, but the daughters are in the kitchen. And I think there’s something wrong with me or right with me… I want to eat. And if you make me feel ashamed of it, you’re telling me I shouldn’t be human. That I shouldn’t have energy. That I shouldn’t keep going. This is my right. I have a right to my appetite. I feel like that is as much of a feminist gesture as anything else.

BP: You know, this is incredible to me that you said that, Min, because… at some point last year, my doctor wanted me to take one of these semaglutide injections—just like every woman I know seems to be on one of these. So I tried it, but I stopped. She asked why I stopped, and I said, “Well, I had absolutely no appetite at all.” And she said, “Well, that’s good. We want to get your weight down.” But I said, “No, having no appetite made me feel less than human. I didn’t feel like a human being.” And the doctor—oh, she clearly didn’t understand. She’s a very thin, health-conscious person, great, certainly not at all someone with disordered eating, but she couldn’t understand that someone with more weight on their body would rather feel human than feel no appetite. That really shocked me.

MJL: I really respect you saying that. I understand that a lot of people are taking semaglutides, and everyone has a personal journey with their weight and health. But what I really love about what you said, as a metaphor and also as an allegory for our lives, is that our hungers, our appetites, our weight… Even the word “weight,” right? The word “glory” is actually another way of saying “weight” or “significance.” Are you expecting me to give my glory and my weight and my significance and my gravitas away? And for what?

BP: Say that again.

MJL: What do I get in return if I gave away my glory? What do I get in return? Tell me what I get in return because, unfortunately for the world, I’ve been a very educated person. I’m a very well-read person. And I’m in good company. Sister,

BP: Yes, you are a very well-educated, very well-read person. And the unfortunate thing for the world is that a well-read woman is a dangerous thing.

MJL: A well-read woman… I mean, first of all, we’re well-read women and we’re writers. We might as well be anarchists. Yes, with really good manners.

BP: You know, this is a good time for me to remind our audience that Min is also an attorney—and a really good one. So, you know, tell me what I get in return. As you said, you’re a great negotiator. And this is the thing—don’t ask me to give up. For instance, we’re talking about all these hungers, and hunger means so many different things. It’s not just about food. And hunger—when we recognize it, when we try to fulfill it, we don’t always fulfill it—but when we try to fulfill it, that is a radical act.

MJL: Yeah.

BP: Especially, as you said, for women to say, “You know, I’m just going to eat this entire package of cookies,” or “I feel like eating a bowl of kale,” when it’s what we want, instead of what someone else wants. And that’s the radical part of it because it doesn’t have to be about sweet things, soft things, or fattening things. It’s about determining what we truly want. And that is something we women, especially women… we were both born in the 20th century. Sometimes you hear a kid when you’re teaching refer to it as the 1900s, and I think, “What happened?!” But that is a radical act. As you said, Min.

MJL: I love the allegory of hunger, appetite, nourishment, and food. And if I did want to eat a package of cookies—which I have done—and I’m not ashamed, you will not make me feel ashamed of wanting to have done that, and it’s because I wanted something else. Because there was no way that package of cookies gave me the nutritional value I needed. And I think just saying it all of a sudden makes me realize I don’t need to eat a package of cookies anymore.

BP: Right. Right.

MJL: Because what I really wanted wasn’t just the package. Maybe what I really wanted was something delightful, sweet, and almost forbidden. And this was the only thing I could get—maybe the $2.99 package of Hydrox was what I got because I couldn’t afford Oreos. Right? But you know what? Coming from parts of my life where I couldn’t afford things, I know exactly what it’s like to buy something that’s a day old as opposed to something that’s fresh out of the oven. And when I couldn’t walk into restaurants or stores. And I think now that I can tell that and be honest about it, you can’t hurt me anymore with that. And I think that’s the freedom of saying, “I’m hungry.” It’s not that I can’t do it, but in order for me to even get that nourishment, I had to say it. I was so uncomfortable in my skin going to a place like Yale, where there were so many written and unwritten social codes that I was trying to understand. I was so embarrassed. I didn’t have the right language, the right clothes, the right conversations, or the right experiences. And I remember being in certain spaces where I was eating away from my household, surrounded by food I’d never had before—endless muffins…

BP: Waffles, peanut butter toast whenever you wanted it…

MJL: … as much as you wanted! And I remember gaining all this weight, and then also becoming a sexual person, right? All of a sudden, there was access to your body, the idea that someone else might want pleasure from you—but you not even knowing what pleasure is.

BP: And I think that’s so fascinating because, a couple of minutes ago, you said, “You didn’t have the right experiences.” I had a similar experience. Of course, it’s not completely analogous because I happen to be white, but I went from the Rust Belt to Smith and also didn’t have the right experiences. I didn’t have the right family vacations, I didn’t have the right genealogies to talk about. And I’m not talking about going back to famous people, just that I didn’t have the right aunts and uncles, you know? That sort of thing.

MJL: Shame on you, Bethanne.

BP: I know, I know. And the food, in particular, at Smith was really amazing. I mean, amazing. We had brunches on Sundays with omelet stations, trifles, and all kinds of stuff. And you think, “I’m working really hard, visiting privilege, so I’m going to have this.” And I think I gained the freshman 15. I probably got rid of some of it. That's not the point. I think what you said about visiting privilege versus having it—uh, being in it—are different. They're different aspects of life. So, talk more about visiting privilege.

MJL: It's shocking. It's almost shocking to visit privilege, especially because, you know, it's not yours to keep. You're not even questioning why people have it. You're like, “Oh, I can't have it more than these three hours that I get to visit this room.” And I find that to be fascinating.

BP: Correct.

MJL: We're going back, but the three at the women's center. Where I took these classes with this really, like, such a sweet young woman. Like, if I could find her right now, I'd give her a hug. This young woman very had this clipboard, and you know, gave us a reading list of all the books that we were supposed to read, and every week she would do these little exercises with us to try to teach us about how to taste food. Like, she would actually try to teach us how to taste food and then teach us about how to manage. She wasn't telling us to eat this number of calories. She actually taught us about abundance. The idea that you could trust your body, that you could trust you, that you would come through for your hunger. And then you'll stand up for your right to eat. And I remember thinking like, “Holy smoke! What a way to think!” Like, you weren’t gonna become a model.

BP: That’s radical.

MJL: It is radical! And when you tell a person, the idea, when you tell a person who's been told to eat less their whole life, that the exact opposite thing, which is, “No, I don't want you to eat more. I don't want you to eat less. I want you to know that you have the right to eat that.” I want you to eat that. I want you to be healthy and strong, and that you will have the power and the energy to continue. Like, if you explain it in that way, and not about like, “You want to be a size two for reasons that are not clear to me.” And also, what do you get in return? Like, I think it was— it came at such the right time in my life to be told to tell a 19-year-old woman, who’s filled with self-hatred for the skin that she's in, that you have the right to be here. Like, it’s mind-blowing.

BP: That is mind-blowing. And it makes me think, I, you know, again, I know we're not talking really deeply about your actual fiction right now…

MJL: but I... But it's actually all of my fiction.

BP: This is all, this is everything. Forgive me if I mispronounce his name, uni. Is it Honney? So, it makes me think of the very beginning of the family in Pachinko because he is someone who could so easily have been left to wither and die. Families did not have to allow children with challenges like his to keep going. And we know about so many times and places in history where a person who is deemed by society—and that, of course, includes women throughout history—to be of less use. The very fact that he was allowed to live, let alone marry, and then have all of these people who came afterward. That’s pretty radical, man.

MJL: I think so.

BP: I really think so.

MJL: I mean, I don’t know how you feel about this, Bethanne, but when you're at Smith incognito, in a way...

BP: Uh-huh. Right, right.

MJL: Exactly. Like when people don’t know you. And I, ‘cause I think it’s interesting about whiteness because whiteness hides so many things. Like, whiteness does not always equal power and privilege. I study this. Like, I’ve written about this for The Great Gatsby because The Great Gatsby is a novel about whiteness in America and about being an outsider. It’s not about black people. It’s about white people and people... Yes. Keep saying it’s a universal story, and it is, but it isn’t as well. It’s both things. And I think that we’d miss an opportunity to study whiteness in America when we don’t study The Great Gatsby, because every single important character is actually not from New York or New Jersey or elite.

BP: That’s exactly it. Yes.

MJL: And when I think about the experience of all of us who don’t fit into a certain mold where people expect great things from us, it’s painful. It’s painful because you’re underestimated. But I also want to say, like, Uni, it’s also an opportunity to rise where they don’t expect anything from you.

BP: Yes.

MJL: My entire life is about being underestimated. Like, every time I go into a room, people think I’m nothing. I’ve had that experience over and over again. And then they go, “Wait, I should know who you are.” And that’s where I’m like…

BP: And what... wait a minute. Even now, I mean, you are an internationally bestselling author. You’re someone that people pay to hear speak, and they still underestimate you?

MJL: Routinely, and it’s fine. I think this is like the amazing thing about being a middle-aged Asian lady. And when I was a young Asian American lady, it was something else too. But people are surprised that I speak English still, and it’s fine. And you know what? It’s really, really fine because I can only change me, right? And if I go around constantly, endlessly despairing and heartbroken about the state of affairs, I don’t think I’d get much work done because there’s a lot of reasons to despair. There’s a lot of reasons to be upset, and I have all sorts of responses, emotional responses to the world, but the thing that I really need is I need to keep doing my work, and I can’t keep doing my work and honor my obligations until I have a certain core idea that the world thinks this, but I am still me and there’s nothing wrong with me.

BP: Absolutely nothing wrong with you, and also nothing wrong with your hungers, regardless of how others see them or underestimate them.

Thank you, Min, for joining us this week. You can find all of Min Jin Lee's books wherever books are sold. Now let’s move on to Friday Reads, where we'll see what you've been reading this week.

Welcome back to another week's Friday Reads, where we talk about what you tell us you're reading from the interwebs.

As usual, my producer Jordan is here to talk through these with me. So, what have we got up first this week, Jordan?

JA: All right, our first post is from Hannah, who says: This week’s hashtag Friday Reads is Authority, the forthcoming book of essays and criticism by Andrea Long Chu, accompanied by a 2-21 Baker Brown from Red Beard Brewing in Stanton, Virginia. Perfect start to a literary weekend.

BP: I love it. You got Stanton just right. That’s, I’m so proud, living in the old Dominion as I do. So, Andrea Long Chu is a cultural critic whose recent New York Magazine takedown of former New York Times op-ed columnist Pamela Paul was an uncommonly elegant high-wire act. Since her canonical 2017 essay on liking women, Chu, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. Yes, queen. Long Chu is who I'd like to be when I grow up. Fearless. Fierce, feminist, and fair. Her book, I think, is for fans of cultural critics like Corina Chicano, Emily Nussbaum, and literary critic Merve M Ray. So enjoy it. It's going to be coming out soon, and I think you will all find a great deal to love and debate in it as well. So, what’s next, Jordan?

JA: Alright, the second one we've got today is from Anna, who says, My hashtag Friday Reads recommendation is this rather smart new edition of Agatha Christie’s Before Zero.

BP: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Isn't it Towards Zero by Agatha Christie?

JA: Oh, um, yeah, yeah, I guess.

BP: 'Cause the book says Towards Zero, but...

JA: Yeah, I read that like Ron Burgundy. Just whatever's in front of me is what’s gonna come out.

BP: So, Towards Zero, and I love what Anna says. She says, "I like to read or reread a novel before I watch the TV or film adaptation so that I can see what they’ve done with it." The double twist in this one is brilliant. Have you seen the adaptation yet? Well, in America, we probably haven’t because it’s a BBC adaptation, but it stars, among others, Angelica Houston and Matthew Reese. So it has to be kind of fun, right? It is a gorgeous edition of the book. It might be a Folio Books edition. I’m not sure about that. Most of us know Agatha Christie’s name, but I have to say, it is worth rereading her novels from time to time because there’s a reason they keep getting new covers as well as new adaptations. And this one is set in the thirties. It’s about a British tennis player who goes to stay with an aunt at a Cornish estate. And Christie aficionados may want to know it’s her last novel featuring Superintendent Battle. This is for fans of all the Golden Age mystery authors: Dorothy Sayers, Nail Marsh, Marjorie Allingham, but... If you like your mystery novelists in a more contemporary vein, this would be great for fans of Martha Grimes, Tana French, and Deborah Crombie. So, our last Friday Reads for the week. What is it?

JA: Alright, our last one is from Erica whose hashtag Friday Reads and hashtag Shabbat Reads is The Thinking Heart by David Grossman, essays on Israel and Palestine.

BP: I really appreciate this one. Erica uses the hashtag Shabbat Reads. I think she may have invented it. And I just love the idea that at Shabbat, the day of rest, you might be reading. That reading is not necessarily work. It’s something that can be about a more meditative state of mind. So, this book has a beautiful, simple white cover with blue and green, almost watercolory lettering. Grossman is a very well-known Israeli novelist. He’s won the Booker Prize for his fiction, and he has been thinking, writing, and talking about the Middle East in prose for decades. He holds the Jewish state to account, but more importantly, he considers in these pieces what peace might look like, or could look like, in the region. The 11 essays in The Thinking Heart all appeared in newspapers and journals as Grossman grappled in real time with October 7th and its aftermath. This is for people who love thoughtful, serious writers like Orhan Pamuk and his writing about Turkey, Nathan Thrall, who has written about Syria, Nicole Krauss and her fiction about the Jewish diaspora and history. So, I think that anything by David Grossman is going to be beautifully written and is not any kind of knee-jerk anything. This is someone truly thinking with his heart. Thank you, Jordan, so much for these reads this week. We will have more for you next time.

This week, I am doing something a little bit different. I'm talking less about the actual adaptations of the book I've chosen and a little bit more about the issues surrounding the author, her book, and some politics that come up because of the author's beliefs. So, it's The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

Most of us know something about this book if we haven’t read it already or more than once, but we may not know everything about it. We also may not know how a few of these issues affect the way we look at Walker and her work in general. So, let’s see how I handle things. Thanks for following along, and let’s get into The Color Purple.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker was made into a feature film in 1985, directed by Steven Spielberg and featuring Oprah Winfrey as Sophia. In 2005, a musical adaptation opened on Broadway, and Oprah Winfrey was one of its producers and investors. Guess who else was? That's right, Harvey Weinstein. Mr. Hollywood Casting Couch himself. In 2008, the BBC made it into a radio drama, and in 2023, Spielberg, Winfrey, and Quincy Jones teamed up to produce a new film version based on the musical. It's clear that Oprah loves Walker's novel and its story. We all know a great deal about Oprah Winfrey's backstory, and some of it sadly intersects with Walker's protagonist, Celie.

So, why would a beloved novel that's won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and been adapted at least four times by large media outfits be unavailable in Israel? The answer: acclaimed author and activist Walker declined to have her 1982 book published in Israel as long as that country maintains what Walker calls a system of apartheid, referring in part to Israel's strict separation between Jewish and Palestinian residents on occupied land and more broadly in Israel.

You can easily learn more about that. Walker herself says she's not anti-Semitic but pro-Palestinian. While recent events have demonstrated Israel's hostility towards Palestinian people, we've also seen critiques of Israel's actions progress into anti-Semitic rhetoric. Alice Walker has a right to speak out against Israel and support Palestine, but what about her support of well-known Holocaust denier David Icke, who developed a theory that child-sacrificing lizard people run the world?

I am not here to debate what Walker means by apartheid, nor to compare global systems of apartheid, nor even to argue about Alice Walker's long-documented stance against Israel. And while Walker has written and talked about racism in the United States, she's also been taken to task by African American critics for how she portrays the male characters in The Color Purple.

The book is frequently on lists of challenged and banned titles due to its content about violence, sexuality, and explicit language. So, let's take a few minutes to discuss, shall we say, "artists with issues." Walker isn't one of the monstrous men that have been called out for sexual predation, the most recent in the literary community being Neil Gaiman, but she's also not an innocent when she takes action personally or professionally.

Alice Walker stands behind her deeds and her words. What do you do if you disagree with her? Do you choose not to read her work? What if you've already read it and loved it? How do you feel? Then what do you do if, as is the case with someone I know, you've used essays by Walker in a university classroom for years, despite being aware of the fact that some of your students would find her views repugnant? Put it another way:

Do you still watch Woody Allen movies? Do you appreciate the paintings of Picasso? How do you feel about Flannery O'Connor's fiction, knowing that she too was an anti-Semite and a racial bigot? These questions are just the tip of a massive iceberg of conflicts between the personal morals and public works artists create.

Alice Walker is both a person and an artist of extremes whose choices underscore some of the topics she includes in The Color Purple, which is a novel of extremes stuffed to the gills with different kinds of suffering and misdeeds. While a book like this might serve a broader purpose, it's useful to consider how its creator affects its content.

It is time for another themed book list. Six Recs is back, and for this week, I decided, since we're discussing Min Jin Lee and her novel Pachinko, which is currently doing really, really well on television, that I would talk about some fantastic television series that are truly excellent adaptations of their original novels.

So, we'll see what you think. A little bit different, but as usual, Jordan, my producer, is here to time me and see if I can get six recs in under three minutes. Otherwise, the great bookcase of shame falls. So, Jordan, are we ready with the stopwatch?

JA: We're rolling.

BP: Alright, here we go. First up, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. The 2017 CBC production directed by Mary Herron and written by Sarah Polley will surprise and shock you, even if you've read Atwood's excellent 1996 novel. As usual, the author's genius lies in placing believable characters into situations rife with social ills. No one here gets out alive, even if they're not part of the body count.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, and yes, that’s how you say her name. Who is more electric in this very dark HBO mystery adaptation: Patricia Clarkson as Adora Crellin, or Amy Adams as her daughter Camille? I can't decide. It's set in small-town Missouri, and Flynn's savage plot gets tons of atmosphere, especially the enormous family home with its wraparound porch and fastidiously decorated rooms.

Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman is what happens when a series takes on a life of its own, as did this seven-season Netflix adaptation of Kerman's origin story of privilege, drug running, and a prison sentence. The series accomplished more of the activist author's goal, which is drawing attention to our criminal justice system and how it fails everyone.

The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carré. Two words: Florence Pugh. You won’t be able to take your eyes off of her in Park Chan-wook’s take on Le Carré's 1983 novel about Anglo-Arab-Israeli espionage. Michael Shannon as Gadi Becker and Alexander Skarsgård as her Israeli lover, eh, they're fine and all, but Pugh, the ultimate honey trap, cannot be ignored.

Patrick Melrose by Edward St. Aubyn. Call me a "Cumberbitch" if you must, but who besides Benedict Cumberbatch could take on St. Aubyn's autofiction-esque five-novel self and carry that protagonist through a hallucinatory journey from childhood to adulthood? Written by David Nicholls and directed by Edward Berger, the 2018 production is A+ television.

Finally, The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis. This 2020 Netflix take on Tevis' 1983 novel about a 1950s female chess prodigy transcends eras, largely due to Anya Taylor-Joy’s flame-haired, doe-eyed turn as Beth Harmon, a Kentucky orphan whose difficult childhood led her into addictions to alcohol and drugs that jeopardized her genius and, at times, her life.

There we go. Six recs in.

JA: Alright, well, after a few weeks of collapses of the bookshelf, we're back under the three-minute threshold at two minutes and 37 seconds.

BP: Ah, fantastic. I did it. I did it. I love it. Thank you. Thank you, Jordan. I'll be back next week with another themed list of six recs.

Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven: A Literary Review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week.

The Book Maven: A Literary Review is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It’s produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

This week Ethan Frome takes the stage in another installment of Canon or Can It.We’ll discuss how it exists within a context of similar works from the same era, and how maybe with a little experience, we can identify better novels to give canonical bona fides.

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, Improvement by Joan Silber, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt,. . .And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmeyer, A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska, and Dixon, Descending by Karen Outen.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned: The Gray Wolfby Louise Penny, part of her Three Pines series.Drawn Testimony by Jane Rosenberg, The World According to Garp by John Irving, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Rainbowby D.H. Lawrence, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, 'Tis by Frank McCourt, Teacher Manby Frank McCourt, And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, Dixon, Descending by Karen Outen, Improvement by Joan Silber, and Joan Silber’s upcoming book and Mercy.

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode. But first… 

First, this week, I talked to Xochitl Gonzalez about how experience can help us as writers.

Join us in conversation as we talk about what's inspiring her as she develops her new book. 

BP: Not everyone writes a book when they're 23 and gets on the New Yorker, you know, five under 35 or 500 under 40 or whatever their lists are, some people come to writing after  other pieces of life, whether it's  jobs, raising families you know, not knowing what to do with ourselves. There's just all kinds of ways that you can, let's say, delay writing a book. But those delays, and you've talked about this before can add to the writing. So I wanted to talk with you today about that. What do you think? 

XG: Oh my gosh, you know, so much. And it's funny because I'm working on my third book now and it's a character just looking back, like, let's see, she's probably about 32 at the time that she's telling the story looking back on something that happened when she was about 28 and I was …

BP: All that way back.

XG: Yeah, you know, not, not that far, but I was thinking about how there’s a phase like in your 30s where you start to put patterns together and like, you know, you start to, you've seen things enough that you're like, oh, I see, like, this is like, an unavoidable now that I can see, like, I've now lived just a little bit longer that I'm like, I understand this, what it would happen now in a different way. And I think, you know, one of the things that I think is so great about aging and doing things a little older is that you not only have more access to people and like experiences and behavior, but you have access to the way that your own viewpoint has changed at different phases of your own life. You know, like, and like, so I think about like, if I'm writing a character like with my last book, even I was thinking about it was so fun because there was like a character who was in college and the way she was seeing a professor who was probably in his late thirties, you know, like very late thirties and he's getting a divorce and to her, he's like this sad old man, you know, like but that is how you saw people even though, you know, right? Like, it's like he's only about 40, but like, like, I think it's also the access to how the world is seen at different phases of our life and how we would react to like a 60 year old character is going to have conflict in a very different way than a 28 year old character is going to have conflict, right? And it's just interesting to kind of use that knowledge of watching all the people in your life age, and how they see things differently. And if it's like, it's just this awesome thing to understand and see. 

BP: Writing when you have more experience, while your novels have a lot of fun stuff in them, they have a lot of serious stuff in them as well. And some of the serious stuff  is, you know, some of it is interpersonal. Some of it is bigger. Some of it is, you know, on the political stage, whether it's about sexuality and identity or, you know, power given to a territory, sovereignty, if you will. And you know, all of those kinds of things. Did you find that was something that grew out of the way you wrote, or was that something that you decided, I need to learn how to do this because these are the things I need to write about.

XG: I think that what I found is that in the realm of media, right? Like, I went into fiction before I ended up becoming a non fiction writer, so like, it's the opposite. But, you know, for my first book in particular, and then I think I just sort of realized that these are the things that I'm fascinated with. But in my first book, I really took on, I was trying to find, invent a plot that was entertaining in order to call attention to something that I felt media could not fully realize, like in a humanistic way, like it kept it sort of two dimensional, and unless you knew people living in Puerto Rico, let's say, or people that were, you know, Puerto Rican Americans, like in the diaspora you might not have any sense of feeling about it. You know what I mean? And I think and I was feeling this sense of real sadness around gentrification of my own hometown in Brooklyn, and I felt, I don't think I could read read dozens of articles about the situation in Puerto Rico or about Brooklyn gentrifying, and none of them make you feel the way humans feel, and so I had to invent a story to walk people through these feelings, to try to create some empathy, where I didn't think there would, there was awareness enough to feel empathy. 

BP: And that is, of course, another one of the things that's so important about  having some experience under your belt before you start writing is that empathy, isn't it?

XG: I think that that's right. And I think, you know, and I think even with the second book, I just, I wanted to talk about this idea, you know, this word erasure kind of became very buzzy, but I was like, but you know, it's an actual process that has happened over time. And I kind of wanted to look at that and then how that impacts people, you know, like, because I, as a creator, like, you know, as a creator doing, you know, working on adaptations of my book for in Hollywood was seeing the lack of like sort of rungs in the ladder between me and like the person that had come before me. Like, I'm like, Oh my gosh. And how that was making my job harder to some extent, because there wasn't cultural fluency, let's say between me and the people that are around the side of power. And that like, and sort of from that, I had this idea for the second book, but I think the main thing about the second book is that then it was really important for me, the villain, obviously one person's a murderer in the second book, but like the villain of the book. 

BP: Don't spoil it for me. No, I'm kidding.

XG: No, but it's less of a person. It's less a person than its systems. You know, it's like systems and the way systems operate. And it was really important for me to show that there are good, well intended people that work within systems. And so, you know, that same sort of sad 40 year old man, he's a professor, and it was important for me as a fiction writer of a certain age, because I think when you're young and you're mad, there are good people and bad people. And I think when you're older and you've known people, you're like, there are people with opinions that cause good, and there are people with opinions that sometimes cause bad, and they might be good people, but they believe this thing.

BP: And, there are, because this, this week, as we know, we've had some awful news in the literary community, there are people who, can have these lovely, you know, genteel conversations and you think, oh, what a great, great person that is. 

XG: That's right. Well, and I just, you know, I think one of the things that I've been thinking about and that also age kind of gives you is like, it's like  just because somebody has become very good at something, anything, you know, like, that doesn't mean that they are a good person. Like you can be very successful and be a sort of fundamentally kind of rotten human being, like, and having money or status doesn't equate to virtue. You need to, not only do you need to move through the world for, I think, a few decades to kind of really see that because you don't presume you can't just presume them to be bad. That's just a caricature, but really understanding it right. Like, I think you have to move through the world for a few years. But I also think that that was a case where like sort of understanding power, also, I was really fortunate to work in a few different professions where I had access to a lot of people that were successful and powerful. And I think that then it gave you like kind of an upfront seat to look at these dynamics. And I couldn't have done the kind of writing that I do now without having walked those particular paths. Right. And I think I really think, you know, there's, sometimes young people say to me, like, I really want to be a writer. I am like, go off and do something else for like five years. Right. Like, and then, no, really, like, like, really, like, it's like, cause I, I think, I don't know, like different books affect people in different ways, but like, I love being emotionally affected. And I think having some, um, like sort of breath of sort of weird things that happen to you to pull from will just enable you to just increase that little palette a lot more.

BP: No, it's so true that you're, you know, your own experience is, that's the right about what you know, that's, it's not only right what you know, but use what you've gone through to get yourself going. That's what I want to tell people when I hear them recite that. No, we're not saying you can only write about, I don't know, being a CPA in downtown, you know, Baltimore, right, that's right. You know, write about what you know, because it will help you get to the questions you're asking. 

XG: And I think it will help. I think, again, to go back to that pattern thing that age starts, it's like, you're like, oh, this is just this, like, you know, like it's like, we used to see that with like, brides actually, like we'd see like, oh my gosh, like this person should not be getting married because they would inevitably make, make the whole wedding about one thing and like, and they would obsess over this one thing. And if that one thing wasn't going to be perfect and the whole thing was going to be bad and like, and it didn't matter, the thing could change, right? Like the thing could change, but like, it was like a manifestation of doubt. Like I would like to say so what I learned from that is it was like, oh, well, that's a great tool for a character. Like when they are doubtful that they become fixated on something like that's not like, you know, like that's just a behavioral pattern that you can observe.

BP: That is like a master class moment with Xochitl Gonzalez. I mean, like, you know, people, if you're a writer and you didn't, that is great because I'll tell you, I am currently the, what do you call the mother of the bride before the wedding? So my, my daughter's wedding is in September and, you know, it's been really interesting to see what things get her upset? We are having the best time. Okay, we are first of all, way ahead of all kinds of things. We get along really well, and we communicate really well. This is not a bridezilla or a momzilla situation at all. But she had decided she was going to go with this one particular hair and makeup thing because another person was booked and she went with it and wasn't happy  and when it was done and she came back and I said, oh, you know, I know you don't like it, but hey, you look beautiful. That was for her, you know, the point of pain. Now fortunately the first person had a cancellation. We went in, we loved her. She's perfect. Aces. Everything's great. Sunshine again, but I thought, ooh, this is, I'm going to watch this. Like what it she's really what she's, and it's not because she has any issues about her own appearance. It's because she wants to be so beautiful and perfect for her wonderful fiance. And I thought this is really sweet. BUt if you get too focused on this, what happens if it rains? What happens if you have a rash that day? Like, you know, so I know exactly what you mean. And that is the stuff we can use in fiction.

XG: Yeah. I think it's much more when people say, write what you know, I think it's really much more like emotional flows, right? Like, because like most stories are universal stories. And it's like, and you're just pulling the thing, right? Like, it's like if you think about like, you know, The Devil Wears Prada is essentially like, right? Like, it's like about a bad boss, but really it's about a power dynamic and a desire to please. Like, it's all these little, you know, Stockholm syndrome, like a bunch of things. Like it could have happened in a fashion magazine. It could have happened, it could have happened anywhere. You know, like it could have happened in a publishing house. You could have happened anywhere, like in any office, like, you know, it's really about like this desire to be young and ambitious and like who gatekeeps and how you get past it and what you're willing to do. And like, how will you compromise yourself? And so like, you know, I think like it's that is much more. You know, and that was an author that really did write what they knew because they'd worked at a magazine, but you could have taken that and done it, you know, and adapted that story almost anywhere else, right? Like, it's like, so I think that really much, it's much more that, and I think the age just helps you see the patterns. You know, like, it's like, I and I'll say like, with Olga, I wrote a mom character that, you know, was very much based on a dynamic I had with my mother. But at the end of the day, like, and I chose to do these letters, right? Like, we're like this idea that like, the mom can write to them, but they have no way of getting letters to the mom. Okay. And this one way street and the way in which women all across the country and now like, you know, it's, it's out in a couple of other countries. So around the world, women will be like, this is how it is with me and my mother, she talks to me, but doesn't listen to me. Like I, she tells me what she thinks, but doesn't hear what's actually happening. And it was like, you know, I think that these like, really the writing, what you know, like that's, that was missing a very specific dynamic, but like it is had a lot of universality, you know what I mean? Like, and I think that like, but sometimes again, only at 42, I guess it was when I wrote that book 42, only at 42 could, did I have the healthy space from the relationship to also not make the mom a full villain? You know, like, she's like, she's got these other things, like, because you're like, Oh, that's just my, you know, my mom had some experiences, you know, like, and it was because of that. I ended up doing a profile on her in the Atlantic. Cause I was like, you know, I really want to understand that more, even more than I, I did  

BP: Talk about the empathy that comes from experience. Xochitl Gonzales. This is exciting. And you're definitely coming back on when this new book comes out. I'm telling you… 

XG: I love it. I love it. Thank you. 

BP: Thank you. 

Thank you. Xochitl for joining us this week. You can find all of Xochitl’s books, wherever books are sold. Now let's move on to Friday reads where we'll see what you've been reading this week.  

Welcome back to another edition of Friday Reads where we listen to what you're reading. As usual, my producer Jordan is here to help me get through these next few posts and I'm really, really excited about how different all three of these books are. So Jordan, what have we got up first? 

JA: Our first post we've got is from D still learning who says latest of the excellent three pine series best read in order Canadian author. Most settings in Canada, and the book is The Gray Wolf by Louise Penny. 

BP: So this, the image with this post is of The Gray Wolf's cover. And I love the fact that they're always willing with the Three Pines series to do something beautiful with the cover, you know, to sort of commission a painting or to think of a different kind of image. And so here we've got these two gorgeous paper art wolves, very light gray, and they are against a deep blue green background. So it's really striking. Anyone who knows Louise Penny's Three Pines series knows that she created Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sûreté, if I'm saying all of that correctly. She lives just over the border in Canada. And as a matter of fact, I think it was last week or so that Penny said she's not going to be coming back to the United States for anything soon. Don't blame her. If I were her, stay in Canada. But legions of mystery lovers  absolutely adore this series. There's also  an actual TV adaptation. And in this installment, The Grey Wolf, Gamache and his son in law must return to a very remote location that has traumatic associations for both of them and they have to do it because they're trying to not just discover what's behind a murder, but they need to avert a disaster for the entire province. And this will be for you if you love Ann Cleeves and her Shetland murder mysteries, Deborah Crombie's English murder mysteries, Attica Locke’s East Texas murder mysteries. And even I love Sujata Massey's books too. I think if you're a Louise Penny stan, you should look for one of these, but I need to move on to the next book. So Jordan, what is it? 

JA: The next one we've got is from Peter C. Link, who says for Hashtag Friday Reads, he's reading Drawn Testimony by Jane Rosenberg. 

BP: So this image is one of Jane Rosenberg's court sketches, courtroom sketches, and the subtitle of the book gives you a lot of info, which is ‘my four decades as a courtroom sketch artist’. Now, Jane C. Rosenberg isn't just any courtroom sketch artist. She has covered cases involving Mick Jagger, Martha Stewart, Tom Brady, and Deflategate, John Lennon's murder trial, Ghislaine Maxwell's awful doings, John Gotti, Harvey Weinstein, and the Boston Marathon Bomber. Let us not forget our current chief executive. I, that's all I, I can't even, yeah, so. But this is a really fascinating book because as we all know, courtrooms are one of the last places where cameras are not allowed, or at least not allowed all the time. And so sketch artists like Rosenberg are the people who give us a window into that world. And they're supposed to be, of course, as objective as possible in their sketches, but in portraying reality, there's no way it's not that they show their bias, but they do show biases that exist in the courtroom. So I think it's a really cool book. There are other books about courtroom artists, like The Art of Justice by Marilyn Church and William J. Hennessy Jr.’s All Rise. So you might be interested in that if you are someone who does follow courtroom sagas a great deal at the time. So one more post and what do we have for our last Friday Reads, Jordan?

JA: I love this one. This is from swagger and swagger says, currently reading The World According to Garp by John Irving, originally published in 1978, and it is Swagger's first time reading this one. 

BP: I love this too so much, Jordan, because I mean, this, this book, it's just a banger. It really is. And the image is a retro book jacket. It's really a classic Irving jacket. It's got a black background with red and gold lettering, sort of a, you know, an italic-esque font, really classic. And here's the thing, Irving, he's still writing and publishing and wrestling. We all know he wrestles. He's also still arguing for the rights of rich people. So I wish he would just release new novels and stay quiet, sir. But, you know, I don't rule the world. So Garp contains multitudes. One of the things I think that's most fascinating about it that has stood up for now four and a half decades is that there are some wildly feminist ideas. They're not necessarily correct or incorrect, but they are pretty, pretty, pretty, amazing. And so that's what helps it stand up to scrutiny. You may love John Irving's work. You may hate John Irving's work. You might love one of his novels and not like another, but The World According to Garp is really one of those sui generis books that everyone should pick up. I'm glad Swagger's reading it. If you like Irving, you might, believe it or not, like Fredrik Backman. You might think, oh, that sounds pretty soft, Fredrik Backman's books, but they're not. They're deceptively easy to read. Kevin Wilson's humor reminds me a lot of John Irving, and so does Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. I highly recommend, and Meg Wolitzer and Kristen Arnett, two extremely different novelists of different generations and different brands of humor, nonetheless, I think they stand up to Irving's work as well.

So that is it for another Friday Reads segment, and we're going to be back, of course, next week with more. I hope you enjoyed these, and as always, thank you, Jordan, for helping me out.  

We've got another canon or can it today and if you'll indulge, we're going to get a bit deep here. The whole idea of a canon comes from the Greek word kanon. I don't know if I'm saying that right, which among other things means rule. We use it today to identify literary works that serve as benchmarks for movements, genres, and time periods. Today, we'll be talking about Ethan Frome, how it exists within a context of similar works from the same era, and how maybe with a little experience, we can identify better novels to give canonical bona fides to. 

So canon or can it, Ethan Frome. Why do they call it a crush? Because when you and your lover sled straight into an elm tree, crushed is what you feel. Ethan Frome is a story of a man who resents his ailing wife, develops feelings for her young caretaker, and attempts a love packed suicide with the girl. When that fails, he must carry out the rest of his days in a strange, resentful throuple. Edith Wharton's 1911 novella begins with a frame story, a traveling narrator, who is unnamed, stays in Starksfield, Massachusetts and develops a curiosity for the disabled man he sees at the same time each day at the post office.

Striking, unfriendly, and quiet, Ethan Frome, that's the name of the man at the post office, has a mystery about him. He has a scar across his forehead and a foreshortened right side. Neighbors greet him solemnly and are reluctant to discuss what happened to him. Our way into the story of Ethan Frome comes by weathered chance.

A storm brings the narrator and Ethan together. This is when we learn about Zeena and Mattie. Decades prior, Ethan's wife Zeena was bedridden from an unknown sickness, something that ailed her body and occupied her mind. The story begins when they finally hire help in the form of Zeena's eager, but mostly useless, younger cousin Mattie.

Ethan begrudges his wife. He only married her because it was winter and he was lonely after the death of his mother, whom Zeena cared for until she died. Zeena thinks about herself too much. She spends all of Ethan's money, and she barely notices him. When we encounter Mattie for the first time, she's wearing a red scarf.

Swifties, if you know, you know. She's swirling around at a church dance. She's vibrant and youthful. Ethan is there to pick her up, as he always does. In the long journeys back and forth, of course, Mattie must be escorted, the two fall for each other, waiting for the perfect evening to go sledding at the hill. 

One fateful night, Zeena is out of town and Mattie and Ethan play house. Ethan's giddy. It looks like Mattie made this night special. She put a red ribbon in her hair and got out the nice red pickle dish for the table. Fantasy halts when the cat knocks the dish over, shattering the illusion. Maybe the metaphor, too.

They spend the rest of the evening in a will they or won't they battle of stares until they go their separate ways to bed. When Zeena returns, she discovers the broken dish. It's the last straw. Time for Mattie to leave. Ethan takes Mattie the long way to the station where they come across that same old hill.

Knowing they'll have no chance of happiness once separated, they aim straight for the elm tree. Ethan Frome is a story of voyeurs. The narrator watches Ethan, Ethan watches Mattie, Zeena watches them both, the cat watches them all. The first three quarters of the novella is held together by subtext, gesture, long journeys, and longing stares.

This breaks when Zeena puts her foot down and Ethan kicks into action, only to be halted again by injury and paralysis. When it comes to this segment of this dear podcast, I am reminded of the utility of the literary canon. What purpose do cultural touchstones serve? Should we all be able to make at least a few literary illusions at a dinner party?

Or is it more specific than that? That we should all learn elements of craft from these stories. Or is craft just for writers, critics, and total eggheads? Present company, very much included. I don't think everyone needs to read Ethan Frome. Its passion and pining is eclipsed by other horny star crossed tragedies like Romeo and Juliet and The Great Gatsby.

But! If you already read those, and The Rainbow, and Jane Eyre, and Giovanni's Room, and you don't have your own unrequited love story to distract you, pick up Ethan Frome and take a shot every time they almost touch. However, unlike really good single malt, Ethan Frome does not improve with age. While it may be considered a classic of American literature, I don't believe Wharton's slight novella to be worthy of the canon.

So for me, it's a CAN IT! 

Talking to Xochitl got me thinking about the benefits of experience, one of which is the idea of iteration leading to improvements in craft. It can be hard trusting ourselves to grow over time. And to that end, I wanted to share six books by authors who emerged very late and about how that can keep your morale high for your morning pages. 

BP: Welcome to this week's six recs where I attempt to give recommendations for six books in less than three minutes. As always, Jordan, my engineer and producer is here to time me. And if I don't make it, as you know, The big book case falls. So we'll see Jordan. Are you ready with the stopwatch? 

JA: We're rolling.

BP: Okay. So this week we interviewed Xochitl Gonzalez, who, even though she is relatively young, okay, thinks that she is a later emerging writer. I've got some much later emerging writers for you. And we're going to start with Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. In 1992, when he published his debut novel, Bradley was a youthful 54, but it didn't get its U.S. release until 2009, when he was over 70. The first of Bradley's Flavia de Luce mysteries, and I'm not sure if it's Flavia or Flavia, so please let me know if you do know. Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie introduces us to this sparky, intrepid, lonely, and neglected English 11 year old. And she's fascinated with her uncle's abandoned chemistry lab. And it leads her to involvement in a crime investigation. It's 1950s post war Britain. And, you know, Flavia's father is sort of also lonely and neglected nobleman and he doesn't know what to do with his three daughters or his crumbling estate. So the series has 11 books and Flavia and her family and community all progress. Lots of surprises for readers. Check them out. 

Next up, Joan Silber's Improvement. Silber was 72 when she won the National Book Critics Circle, Fiction, and Penn Faulkner Awards for this. Her fifth novel. Her books are usually told through interlinked stories. And I don't mean short stories. I mean, characters stories that overlap and intersect in ways. They provide sort of omniscience and it doesn't have to do with omniscient narration, which is sort of out of favor, but it's a kind of, I don't know, God's eye view of what's going on. It's really quite amazing. It feels like experiencing astral projection to me. And here's a really great thing. Silber's got a new novel, Mercy, out fall 2025 from Counterpoint.

Next up is Frank McCourt and his iconic Angela's Ashes. So he published this in 1996 when he was 66 years old.  He had been a beloved New York City high school English teacher for decades. But this book catapulted him to fame. It also won the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote ‘Tis, that was a follow up to Angela's Ashes. And then he wrote a memoir about his education career called Teacher Man. He died in 2009, but he lives on in the Upper West Sides, Frank McCourt High School of Writing, Journalism and Literature. 

I think that's so cool.  I've got a few more for you. I'm going to hurry right along. Helen Hooven Santmyer’s … And Ladies of the Club was a publishing sensation back in 1984 when Putnam picked it up from Ohio State University Press. It became a huge bestseller and a book of the month club selection, which is amazing because it is so long. I can't remember if it's 700 or 900 pages. It's a clunk doorstop that you cannot stop reading. It is wonderful. So she was in her 80s when this book came out. She published other novels. In fact, she published her first one in 1922. This is the one that gave her a place in writing history.  

Jane Juska's A Round Heeled Woman, published in 2003,  was the 67 year old writer's memoir about sexual Freedom and even licentiousness at an advanced age. And right now, we read all kinds of books about sexy sex. But at the time, Jessica's book was revelatory and groundbreaking. She died in 2017 at the age of 84, but she did publish two more nonfiction books, and she's remembered as a maverick for the rights of older women to enjoy their sensuality. 

Finally, Karen Outen's Dixon, Descending, and I'm so excited because Karen is perfect for this. I was on a panel with her a week or so ago. She's 64, and she published Dixon, Descending with a big 5 imprint. just a year or so ago, she's working on a second novel. And she told me that she got the idea for Dixon descending when one day into her consciousness, walked a Black man, she is a woman of color. And she realized he had just come back from summiting Everest. And he was the first Black man to summit Everest in her mind. And he'd come back with a lot of injury and trauma. And that's where this really, really lovely novel comes from. And it's not her first time at the fiction rodeo. She does have an MFA from Michigan, and she's published many short stories in excellent journals. Cannot wait to read Karen's second novel.  

There we go. Six Recs. How did I do? 

JA: All right, Bethanne. Well, I have to say close to, The And Ladies of the club, this is also on the longer side and came in at four minutes and 58 seconds. 

BP: Oh, but  you know what? I gave these authors their due, so I am not ashamed.

Thank you, Jordan. 

Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, a literary review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week.  The Book Maven, a literary review, is hosted and produced by me, Beth Ann Patrick. It's produced by Christina McBride,  with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

Should Revolutionary Road be kicked to the curb? Or should Richard Yates’ book be able to live in the canon? Bethanne believes it is ‘a perfect novel’, but can she convince you listeners as well?

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include Devil is Fine by John Vercher, Self Made by Tara Isabella Burton, The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Fairest by Meredith Talusan, and Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned: Tall Water by SJ Sindu,

Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone,

The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway,

Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes,

The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck,

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher,

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine,

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters,

The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels,

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo,

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates,

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy,

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald,

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,

Devil is Fine by John Vercher,

Self Made by Tara Isabella Burton,

The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen,

Orlando by Virginia Woolf,

Fairest by Meredith Talusan,

Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler,

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante.

Transcript:

Welcome to season two of The Book Maven, a literary review. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode. But first!

This week, I talked to SJ Sindu about their new book Tall Water. Join us as we talk about gender queerness and the importance of defining such a term.

BP: So, did you grow up in Massachusetts, correct?

SS: Partly. I partly grew up in Sri Lanka, then I moved to Massachusetts and moved around Massachusetts quite a bit. In high school, I ended up in South Dakota. Wow. Okay. So quite a range there.

BP: That is quite a range. Oh my goodness. And let's leave everything else out of the equation. That would have been a culture shock. What part of Massachusetts were you in when you left?

SS: When I left, I was in the suburbs of Boston.

BP: Oh my goodness. I can't imagine how jarring that must have been. And, and this is getting us to more of the main subject I wanted to talk with you about. So you're a teenager. You're coming into consciousness of yourself as a human adult, as a sexual being, and also as someone who, besides sexuality and all the other things that go along with adolescence, you're also figuring out your identity. At what point did you realize that you were in the category that we loosely use the term genderqueer for?

SS: It took a while. I think I started to kind of be exposed to alternative genders and sexualities in my high school in Waltham, Massachusetts and Winchester, Massachusetts. It was a very open, progressive leftist environment. I had classmates and friends who were in a throuple as freshmen in high school. And I had queer friends, so I was being exposed to it. That was around the time when I was a freshman when 9/11 happened. Everyone was in this environment of political growth. We were all being forced to become politically active in one way or another because it was our generation that was going to fight the Iraq war and the Afghani war. We were becoming really outward-facing to the world in a way that many teenagers don't do until they're older.

BP: I think this is such an important point that because of those stresses on our society and culture, you had to say, okay, we're going to be who we really are. We are not going to necessarily fit into any specific boxes that you make. There are bigger things to be faced.

SS: Yes. And I saw a lot of my friends become really politically active in the wake of 9/11. I wasn't. But then I moved to South Dakota.

BP: Well, that, and that is the next, thereby hangs a tale. So, you moved to South Dakota and what was that like? I don’t want to assume anything because I immediately think of South Dakota and I think of the TV series Yellowstone. I think of people conforming and having this idea and that idea, but I could be wrong. Maybe there was a thriving queer community where you were in South Dakota.

SS: I wouldn't say thriving. We definitely existed. This was Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 2002. It was very small, very conservative, very religious—religious as in very specifically, there were like three churches that people went to. There was a literal cornfield across the street from my high school. But it was still, sort of, a city. There was some diversity to be found. There were like five of us that were kind of questioning sexuality, questioning gender in our school. Gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts after I left, and I was like, okay. In South Dakota, though, it became a hot-button issue in our school. There were physical fistfights about the issue of queerness. There were teachers who would yell at students if they held hands in the hallway if they were queer. There was no support to be found, so we had to support each other. At that point, I wasn't really concerned about me. I was more trying to be an ally because I wasn't dating. I wasn't allowed to date. I'm from a South Asian family, so I wasn't allowed to date. So for me, queerness really started with trying to help the community as an ally. And then when I went to college, I found a thriving group of queer people, a thriving queer community in Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places. And that's where I was like, oh, I don't think I'm straight. I don't think I'm cisgender. And within two years, my sophomore year of college, I had come out first as bisexual, then I started to use the word queer and then specifically as genderqueer.

BP: As someone who's much older and doesn't feel I can take on the queer identification too easily or in a flippant way, I just want you to, do you alternate between the way you present? And I think that is important because that might also affect your fiction.

SS: That's a great question. When I was younger, I definitely tried to present more masculine because I felt like, and it's not just my feeling, this was the general culture in the queer community that "real" androgynous people or "real" non-binary people dressed in an androgynous way. And if you didn’t dress more masculine, my genderqueerness wouldn't be believed. So for me, it has always been an internal thing, never an external thing. I love fashion, I love style, I love makeup and jewelry, and things that bling. Externally, I love all of those things. I love femme presentation and femme fashion, as well as butch presentation and butch fashion. I just love the way fashion and style can communicate important details about us, including gender. I’m fascinated by that on a scholarly level. But when I was younger, I felt like I had to participate in it so that people would accept that I was genderqueer. Now, the culture has completely changed, and it is a free-for-all, and I love it. When I tell young people that I’m genderqueer, and I may have red lipstick and a skirt on, they’re just like, "Okay, great," and they move on, and it’s wonderful. We've achieved that sort of freedom now. The only thing they ask me is why genderqueer and why not non-binary or agender or other non-binary labels.

BP: Well, let's talk about that. That's exactly it because I think—and I'm going to say what I think just so we can see it's kind of like a game show—how close can Bethanne come to this? You know, I want to say, your thoughts about taking on what the community believed, taking on certain masculine kinds of hair, clothes, et cetera... You know, I went to Smith in the '80s and believe me, Birkenstocks were very political then. Now we all wear Birkenstocks, right? And it doesn't matter. But there was a sense of if you liked lipstick, if you liked earrings, you don't tell me you're a lesbian, being with that red lipstick on. I saw a lot of people go through that. I instead was given a pin that said “hopelessly heterosexual,” and yet, and this is why I'm so interested in what you're saying about the strides that have been made. I think of myself completely—my mind is so queer, right? And that it has nothing to do with my long-term cishet monogamous marriage. It has nothing to do with anything except how I feel about what you're saying: anything goes. And it's wonderful. One of my favorite celebrities in the world is Alan Cumming, and Alan Cumming can put on a full suit, put on a dress, put on a big brooch, do whatever he likes. So to me, that gives you this internal freedom that you can then put on the page. Am I getting closer to that?

SS: Yes, I think for me, the fiction is definitely a big part of the genderqueerness. I don't know what it's like to feel like a gender. I never have. Internally, I don't know what people mean when they say that. It's fun for me to inhabit my characters. As a fiction writer, I need to be able to sink into characters regardless of gender. I love being able to write from the masculine perspective, from men's perspectives. I find that malleability in gender really fun to do in a creative way. And that's how it really bleeds into my fiction—being able to get into the heads of characters regardless of their gender.

BP: One last thing about the term genderqueer. You were mentioning a little while ago about people saying, "Well, why not non-binary? Why not this? Why not that?" And I thought, well, what you were saying about never feeling one gender or the other for whatever reason, it seems to me that genderqueer is actually the most descriptive term for you from what you've said to me today. So I just wanted to get your perspective on that and then we can definitely let you get back to a very busy Thursday.

SS: I think it is the most accurate for me, mostly because, while I do use non-binary sometimes, and there is that non-binary umbrella under which I fall, genderqueer to me is an active term because of the word queer. Queer is a political term, it always has been, at least for the last 50 years. It's a term that's been successfully reclaimed, and it is connected to both artists and activists and also academics. And I'm all three. For me, genderqueer calls back that lineage of community care, community activism, and transformative justice, and that's the kind of lineage I always want to think of.

BP: And that's a lineage I know you are now passing on to students and to people all around, whether genderqueer or allies, who need to learn more about it.

SS: Yes, as some of my students have called me an elder gay, and I’m like, "I feel too young for that label!" But, I mean, it is important in a community to have that kind of intergenerational contact and communication, specifically for the queer community because of the AIDS crisis and because it was ignored for so long, we have lost so many of our elders. It is really my generation that has to step in and guide younger people because otherwise our heritage will be lost.

BP: Thank you Sindu for joining us this week. You can find all of Sindu’s books wherever books are sold. Now, let’s move on to Friday Reads, where we’ll see what you’ve been reading this week.

Welcome back to another set of Friday Reads posts that we're going to sort of deconstruct, if you will, as usual, I've got my producer Jordan here to look at them with me. And Jordan, what do we have up first this week?

Yeah, Melina, who's reading The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway, and she had an image of a book jacket with birds turning into alphabet letters, as a man thinks.

BP: You know, I really like this one because it's such a fresh release. This book is, I believe it may be out in the United States now, as well as in the UK, but Patrick Holloway is an award winning writer in Ireland. I love this book jacket because I'm not sure if the birds are turning into letters or the letters are turning into birds. There's a man on a park bench. There's a woman coming close to him. And so it's just a very, very cool looking book and like his protagonist, and I'm going to mangle this name. I believe you say Oisin, is the man's name, O I S I N. But like Oisin, the protagonist, Holloway, the author, spent quite a bit of time in Brazil. He, in fact, completed his doctorate there. And so in this book, there's a little bit of auto fiction. We've got Oisin returning to Ireland from Brazil. He's got a partner and a child. And when he gets back, he discovers that he has a completely new outlook on how language contributes to personality. And that includes the language that his grandmother with dementia now uses really. One of my favorite recent characters in contemporary fiction, this grandmother, so check her out. I would say if you love Colm Toibin and Enright and Topé Folarin, who has been a friend of the pod, I think you might really appreciate The combination of authorial experience along with a little bit of fiction added in. So what's next?

JA: Up next, we've got from Thomas, and I'm going to have a little bit of a pronunciation disclaimer myself. He's reading Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes. And he shared an image of a potboiler paperback cover priced at 50 cents, perhaps in the 1950s.

BP: Yeah, actually, this is funny, because I thought you were going to say Helen MacInnes. And I didn't know you were getting Brittany to Brittany. I've been there and I still don't know how to pronounce it. That is so great. Assignment in Brittany. And I love this cover that Thomas has put up. Because It's just seeing the 50 cents and, and it's the little C without the tiny lines at top and bottom that we usually see when we've had the cents symbol these days, it's, you know, a very distinct font.

And actually, this book was written in 1942 or published in 1942, I believe. And so I don't even know where the cover comes from, but McInnes wrote 21 thrillers. Okay. And for a woman in 1930s, 40s, 50s, uh, England and America, that was a pretty great literary career. She was inspired by her husband, Gilbert Hyatt.

I think that's how you say that name. He was an intelligence operative for MI6, and they traveled together quite a bit. And this particular book was inspired by their honeymoon in Bavaria in the late 30s. So McInnes herself took very careful notes about the growing power of Nazis in Germany. Hmm. I wonder what this is reminding me of.

But she used a lot of her observations to great effect in this tale of a British agent who disguises himself as a Breton farmer during World War II to help the French Resistance. And if you love World War II fiction, there's so much. There's Graham Greene. There's Alan Furst. There's Ariel Lawhon's Codename Hélène. There's so many. Um, The Invisible Woman by Erika Roebuck. McInnes is OG espionage royalty, so, uh, check her out. I don't think many of us read Helen McInnes anymore, so, Jordan, thank you so much for that one. What do we have for our third Friday Reads post?

JA: Yeah, last but not least today, we've got, um, from Matt, who's reading The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Seifer. And the image shared here is of the book jacket, which includes the Stonewall Honor decal.

BP: You know, and I'm not sure from the decal if the skin in its girl, you know, which place it won in the honors, but I think it's very cool that it did win one of the Stonewall honors. And Cypher lives in Austin. Her background is Lebanese, but I believe Betty, the main character in The Skin and its Girl, is Palestinian.

But the point about it is that Betty is queer and Betty has blue skin. There are a couple of reasons for this, okay? The blue skin sets her apart from most other people. That Absolutely evokes queerness, and for many readers, it will also denote Betty's, um, you know, ethnicity and background, and so one of the reasons I wanted to choose this one specifically is not only that Matt said it was an important book to him and he wanted others to read it, but the book isn't perfect, okay?

That is not a criticism. The book is a little overlong. It's got some problems with one subplot being too much. I don't care. Does that mean it doesn't have a lot of great things, important things to convey? No, it does not. Imperfect books can be some of the most memorable ones, and I just want to underscore that point.

If you're a fan of A Memory Called Empire by R. K. D. Martine, that's a space opera, or The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, That's historical. Any of the T. J. Klune novels, The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickles, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Melinda Lowe, all of these and more. There is fantastic queer fiction out there today and I think what's really cool is that The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher is an historical novel in that tradition and it is one that is eminently worth reading.

So that's it for this week's Friday Reads. Jordan, I appreciate your participation as always. Have a great week.

The communities we live in directly shape our own identities and the way we present ourselves to others. One book that critiques this dynamic is Revolutionary Road. On its purpose, author Richard Yates said, “I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.” Talking to Sindu about the ways we can push back against conformity made me think this would be a great time to reconsider Revolutionary Road as a canonical classic. So will we can-on the classic story of suburban rebellion, or can it forever?

Spoiler alert! I believe Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates is a perfect novel.

And that means I'll likely be judging it as canon. However, in this case, I want to prove mine to you. Let's discuss the term perfect novel. I'm hardly the first to use it, and it's been linked to more works of fiction than you might realize. And it doesn't have to do with length. Anna Karenina has 864 pages, The Great Gatsby has 208, 100 Years of Solitude has about 450, and they're all considered quote unquote perfect.

A perfect novel does what it sets out to do. And then overachieves. A perfect novel engages a reader's emotion, imagination, and intellect. It's every element showing the author's purpose, whether that's to illuminate injustice like Salvage the Bones, break down a community like The House of Mirth, or tackle the most complicated ideas of philosophy, like in The Handmaid's Tale. Richard Yates wrote Revolutionary Road as an indictment of 1950s American suburban conformity, represented by a couple named Frank and April Wheeler who live in a Connecticut suburban development named Revolutionary Hills. They are so privileged that they think they're better than all of their neighbors because they have Thots, and sometimes the hots, but we'll get to that in a bit.

We know immediately the author understands his characters aren't all that, because the story opens with April's attempt at a star turn in a drama society production of “The Petrified Forest” by Robert E. Sherwood, April playing the lead. Gabby is straight up wretched. Despite the heavy makeup, you could see the warmth of humiliation rising in her face and neck.

Of course, neither April nor Frank, nor any of their social circles, see that the petrified forest stands for their own fossilized lives. Taken as written, Frank is the very model of a modern mainstream gentleman. April, his trustee, helped meet. However, for Yates, the boredom is the starting point, not the end game.

The more dissatisfied the pair gets and the more they dream inchoately of giving it all up and moving to Paris, the faster Yates can hasten them to their doom. Because what makes this novel perfect is that its author makes almost no attempt to develop his characters and allows their attempts to develop a different life to fall flat.

He establishes their failure not through description, but through dialogue, letting them damn themselves with faint praise. At one point, when Frank attempts to repeat one of his old chestnuts to a captive audience, April says, You told them that story last year. And readers can almost picture a white man collapsing like a balloon losing helium.

Yet what actually makes this novel perfect for me isn't just its economy and its nearly allegorical cast of characters. Frank, the war stunted avatar of manhood. April, culture's conscript as housewife. The neighbor's on the spectrum son doomed to play the prophet. What makes Revolutionary Road complete is how Yates employs another old chestnut, the tragic flaw, to display Frank and April's destructive relationship.

As they push and shove, trying to be the star of their own little show, the couple's individual weaknesses make the marriage disintegrate. Another balloon.

But speaking of childish things, did you ever have one of those cloth dolls with a skirt that could first be Red Riding Hood, then the Big Bad Wolf, just by turning it upside down? While you're reading this novel, you see marriage as a trap, maybe even as the rusty kind with pointed teeth very useful for catching wolves.

But when you finish and put it down, you see that revolutionary road. looked at with its skirt flung back offers a blueprint for the things that work in a marriage. If you can be vulnerable with a partner while also maintaining your own measure of self esteem, a balance that, take it from me, a very long married person, requires real amounts of sweat and sprezzatura, then you, dear reader, will find conforming to a beloved quite different from conforming to society.

Pretty perfect persuasion. I'm canoning Revolutionary Road.

One of the major points of my conversation with Sindu was the idea of identity as a construct. Finding meaning within our own identities can be hard work, and lead to conflict with the systems around us. Today, I want to share six recommendations for books about constructing identity.

This week's Six Recs is on a theme of constructing identity. And as we talked to SJ Sindhu, we were talking a great deal about queer identity and non binary identity. But when I started looking for books, I realized that I was interested in those identities and others as well. But you'll, we'll see what you all think of my choices.

As usual, my producer Jordan is here to time me if I can give some six recommendations in three minutes or less. Then I escape the falling bookcase. Are we ready, Jordan? What do you think?

JA: We're rolling.

BP: Okay. Number one, John Vercher's Devil Is Fine. Here's the premise. Your identity is black and you inherit your white grandfather's plantation.

What do you do? Even as locals in the town where the plantation is, Call the unnamed novelist, narrator, Coulson, half whitehead. He's struggling with how to escape the socially relevant but not threatening rut he's written himself into. It's a smart, dark, wry look at how our culture copes with changing ideas about racial identity.

Next up is Self Made by Tara Isabella Burton. Now, she's a cultural critic and novelist. This is a non fiction slash book of criticism that explores personal branding from quote Da Vinci to the Kardashians unquote. How's that? The book itself is the message here. So many figures and symbols and ideas crammed between two covers that we see when anything is possible.

Some of us stay on the surface. It's instructive, though, to see how many self help trends originated centuries ago. Next, The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen, and a caveat here, Rosen is a fellow at the fairly conservative American Enterprise Institute, okay? Um, not necessarily the place where I go for progressive.

Of looks at social, um, media and technology. But I think that this is interesting because Rosen doesn't seem to believe that technology is a tool, okay? And as we seek to expand notions of identity, we have to look at how we move through the world. Does technology help us or hinder us? So. If you skim this book, you don't have to read the whole thing necessarily.

You can understand what parts of your identity technology enhances. And listen, uh, I'm going to say this as quickly as I can. Look at Becca Rothfeld's great Washington Post review of this book because as she points out, once upon a time, people thought that the dangerous new technology was reading. Next, Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

It's one of the best modern takes on gender as a social construct through time, since Orlando is a time traveler who takes on male, female clothes, habits, sexuality, privileges, and it derives so much from Virginia Woolf's relationship with Vita Sackville-West, her great love. It's, according to the latter's son, Sackville-West's son, “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

Next, Fairest by Meredith Talusan, and this is about growing up trans and albino in the Philippines. It is intersectionality in one person, okay? So Talusan switched sex assigned at birth, passed as one race instead of another, chose a gender category and a new life path on a new continent. There could have been three or four memoirs here, but the point is Talusan has a purpose in layering it all together because she wants to explore how complex identity is.

And it's a great book to read along with Lucy Sante's recent I Heard Her Call My Name. Finally, Judith Butler's Who's Afraid of Gender. I mentioned Virginia Woolf already, and this is kind of a little, um, I guess a little tease to the, um, play, “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” which doesn't have that much to do with Virginia Woolf, but who is afraid of gender?

I'm a cishet white woman in a decades-long monogamous traditional marriage, yet. I will never forget the first time I read Butler's work in 1988, my mind was blown. Feminism wasn't just about ladylike ladies. So, so many of Butler's books have been important to me and this one is their most personal.

It's a response to ad hominem attacks they've experienced and they know so, so many non binary and trans people have also experienced. Did I do well, Jordan?

JA: We came in at four minutes and 18 seconds, so quite over. I think the bookshelf is going to fall. We'll have to clean that big mess of books up.

BP: Next week, I'll do better.

But you know what? These books are great. So thank you again so much, Jordan. See you all next week. Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, a literary review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven, a literary review, is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick.

It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

This week we put Albert Camus’s The Stranger to the test. In this installment of Canon or Can It?, we’ll discuss the French author’s writing style and philosophy and decide if it should live on as a canonical text, or be kicked to the curb forever.

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include: Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America by Sarah Lewis, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah, You Will Be Safe Here by Damien Barr, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned:

Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis Sharma

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Doll Seed by Michele Tracy Berger

Consumed by Greg Buchanan

After Death by Dean Koontz

Real Tigers by Mick Herron

Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez

The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America by Sarah Lewis

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

You Will Be Safe Here by Damien Barr

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

The Stranger Albert Camus

Full Episode Transcript

Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first, this week, Lauren Francis-Sharma joins the show to talk about writing her third novel, Casualties of Truth.

Lauren explains the intense nature of covering hearings on apartheid practices in South Africa and the process of communicating those learnings through her novel. Join us now as we discuss the origins of her book.

BP: So Lauren, I am really delighted to be here with you and you have got Casualties of Truth, your new novel, your third novel, correct? Very exciting. It is coming out, and it is about a woman who lives in Washington D. C. with her family, well Bethesda, Maryland, with her family. And she in the past, in the 1990s, spent some time in South Africa. She's an attorney. And the novel, starts out in the present day in Washington, and someone her husband has hired for his company turns out to be someone who was very important to her in that past in South Africa. So, what I want to talk with you about today is your time in South Africa, since I know you had that, and the question of what it's like to write about a place that was very formative for you as a person and as a writer. So maybe we could start with what it was like to write Prue and to start hearing her memories. Do you remember when that came up?

LFS: Yeah, I think so. You know, I started thinking about this book in, while we were in quarantine during COVID. It's an interesting thing that happened to me while we were sort of stuck in our homes was this flooding of memories, reaching for places. And part of this was, I think I needed to do it for my own sort of mental health was just going back to the places that I felt were very, like you said, formative, but also really important to sort of who I'd become. So in my memory, I kept going back. to Johannesburg in 1996 when I was there and I couldn't figure out why I kept going back to like certain places and certain things, but it was just a repetitive memory. And before I knew it, I started to think, well, maybe this is the budding of a story. So in some respects, you know, Prue came up through that moment, or those moments where I was just stuck on that time in my life.

BP: Tell us about that time. Why did you go to South Africa in 1996? What were the circumstances? How long were you there?

LFS: Yeah, it was a semester. Well, a little longer than a semester, actually. But it was my third year of law school. I was at the University of Michigan, and one of the professors thought it would be an incredible opportunity, given that they just had, you know, two years earlier, their first democratic elections. He thought it'd be wonderful to sort of have a group of students go to South Africa and work on things. And there was just, it was a small group of us and we were all assigned to different. jobs. And my job was at a small law firm in Johannesburg, and they were supporting the ANC, particularly helping, you know, ANC members who wanted to apply for amnesty. As you well know, you know, there was a lot of activism, you know, in the decades before Mandela was released and before the elections. And so a lot of people committed what would be considered crimes and they wanted to, wanted to sort of have the government overlook those, those transgressions that they've made. And it was a very long application process. So I was helping people with the applications.

And, you know, it just so happened that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's amnesty hearings were being held in Johannesburg while I was there. It moved around the country quite a bit. I just got lucky that a couple of weeks happened to coincide at the same time that I was in Johannesburg, and so I attended those hearings.

BP: Specifically, what you felt you learned, and what you did learn that came to you as you started this writing process?

LFS: How much time do we have? So, you know, I think the first thing that I'd like to say about that question is that I believe and I believe I've always been this way. And I know that I write for people who are this way, which is the sense for those people who are, who feel connected, feel globally connected, who feel like the world is important to them. I'm someone who I read everything from everywhere in the world and I write for people to be able to see themselves in whether it's a small village in Trinidad, which was, you know, my first book, whether, you know, it's a, you know, a Black woman from America in South Africa bringing the pieces together who, by the way, is also of West Indian heritage. So there's, you know, there's this real sense that she's you know, bringing in all the pieces of her into this story. So I think that being in South Africa at that time made me realize just how close we are. But on a practical level, you know, the national party, they were looking to the Nazis. The national party, they were looking at Jim Crow laws in America. And as we see now, you know, here in our country, we have people who are looking at the Nazis. And what they did. We have people who are looking back at apartheid South Africa. It's all connected. If we do not understand what happened in South Africa, we cannot know what could happen here. If we don't understand what happened in Nazi Germany, we cannot understand what can happen here. If there's anything that I'd like for someone, and obviously I wrote a book. For entertainment. Yes. And I wrote about, you know, a woman who's, you know, sort of living a very contemporary 2018 life and kind of grappling with motherhood and, you know, and marriage and all those things. But ultimately, it's about community and remembering that, like, South Africa would not be free of apartheid if it were not for community centric, community action people. And I, you know, and I think we lose sight of that so much. We lose sight of how important it is, how serious it is to care, to experience and to be with other people in their pain, to act on behalf of other people. We can get really caught up. I mean, this is what they want. They want us to be individualistic. They want us to think only of ourselves. We cannot dismantle anything thinking only of ourselves. And my character does this, by the way, she is very self centered.

BP: What was the hardest thing for you to bring back, to make come alive?

LFS: Bethanne, when you're sitting in a place and you're hearing about the murder of eight children, I don't know how you convey that, you know, I, and I did my best and you know, the story that I heard, one of the stories that I heard was about eight boys who and when I say boys, I mean, literally, they were boys, and they like many Black young South Africans wanted to fight against the apartheid system and wanted to be part of the ANC activism and, they were tripped by a South African police operative told that he was going to take them to another country to do training, to be soldiers of, for the ANC. And their parents didn't know. And they snuck off with this man. And they were tortured and they were murdered and during those hearings is when their parents when I was listening to it is when their parents learned what happened to their children. The weeping in that room. How do you, how do you convey that? I did my best. You know, I did my best without sort of you know, numbing the reader. But just trying to convey sort of the everyday horribleness of living under that regime. So that was the most difficult part, was trying to do just enough and not to overwhelm the sensory, the sensory experience of, you know, of a reader,

BP: It reminds me of Hannah Arendt's ‘Banality of Evil,’ but it is very difficult because of the banality of evil to bring across what it does to the parents, as you said, to the people in this courtroom, who have to hear about these facts for the first time, these brutal, brutal facts. And so I imagine this book that you began during the pandemic has been really, really tough for you. It hasn't been an easy book to write.

LFS: I did not know how to tell this story, and when I figured it out during COVID, it felt like such joy, from right from one writer to another, it just felt like such joy to be able to figure out how I was going to do it so that you wouldn't put it down. I hope you don't put it down so that you feel like you can't put it down. So I'm not a suspense writer, but certainly there were suspenseful elements, and if there was any hard part of it, it was actually just trying to maintain the very sort of fast pace that I began with and ensuring that sort of you would get the, you would get the entertainment while also really learning about the history, learning about this moment. But, you know, if I can say anything, which I sort of alluded to before, which is that, you know, apartheid policies, the National Party won in 1948 and you know, they won on a platform of apartheid. Believe it or not, no one thought they were going to win. It was a huge shock to South Africans. Now, mind you, most South Africans couldn't vote, but even the white people in South Africa were surprised when this very far right party won. And you know, you kind of want to start the story of South Africa in 1948 in terms of apartheid policies, but in truth, there were regulations in place since the 1920s since the 1800s. There was a slow drip drip, a slow taking away of rights that began long before the National Party won that election. And I just like to sort of make people aware of how small and slow these things begin to happen.

BP: Thank you, Lauren, for joining us this week. You can find all of Lauren Francis-Sharma's books wherever books are sold. Now let's move on to Friday Reads where we'll see what you've been reading this week.

Welcome back to another week's Friday Reads from all around the socials. This season, as you've heard before, we're highlighting fewer posts and digging a little bit deeper into the titles that people are sharing. So, let us know if you like the new format. Who knows, you might show up in it. As always, my engineer Jordan is here to help.

So, what is our first book share this week?

JA: All right, first up, we've got from Rob Bedford, my hashtag Friday Reads, Dead Tree Edition is The Buffalo Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. And Bethanne, I think this is an early copy?

BP: It is, and actually, and I'm kind of glad that I get the chance to Correct you on the title because it is the Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. It's two hunters, two in one. And so it's a kind of an, it's an amazing title, but Jones is a member of the Blackfeet Indian tribe. I don't know if they're actually a nation and I did try to check that and wasn't able to find it. So please, if I am in error and it is the Blackfeet Indian Nation, I stand corrected, but Jones is one of the most interesting horror writers out there. If you've never read his work before, I highly recommend My Heart is a Chainsaw. Love that title. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, is his newest, actually he's Dr. Jones, he has a PhD in English. It's the newest of his nearly two dozen novels, and it's about a Lutheran minister, a vampire and an Indian reservation in 1912. Just fantastic horror. It is for fans of Paul Tremblay, Amakatsu, and Oyinkan Braithwaite. So, I think that was a really fun one, Rob Bedford. Glad you put it up. Thank you. Next.

JA: Next up, we've got from Lisa Eckstein, who just started the story collection, Doll Seed, by Michele Tracy Berger. What she bought after hearing the author on our opinions.

BP: I love this because Michele Tracy Berger is a highly credentialed and respected academic with a PhD in religious studies and all kinds of fabulous, you know, affiliations and publications, but she's now also a speculative fiction author. And this collection of short stories is, according to one blurb, black mirror with the emphasis on black. It's about stories focusing on women and often these stories do include dolls or other sort of, I don't know what you would call them fictional creatures or figures, but it came out in paperback last year and I haven't read it yet. I'm really looking forward to it. Love Lisa Eckstein, The Psychedelic Book Jacket, that is on Doll Seed, and this is a great read if you like Alyssa Cole, Zakiya Dalila Harris, or N.K. Jameson. So, I have a feeling it's going to pick up a lot of readers. How about our third and last today, Jordan?

JA: All right, we've got, to close things out, from Matthew Craig, who's cross posting from the other place, his Friday reads this week are Consumed by Greg Buchanan, After Death by Dean Koontz, and Real Tigers by Mick Herron.

BP: Now, I chose this one, Matthew Craig, because I love the fact that number one, you chose three different books in three different formats. But number two, there's no image. You're kicking it old school with Friday reads. So you're reading Buchanan in the paper format, the Koontz as an electronic book, a digital book, and Real Tigers you're listening to in audio. And all three of these authors are really different, but really terrific. And I just want to put a little shout out in here for Mick Herron. I am a huge Slow Horses fan, the series that Mick Herron writes. And I have not read all of them. I really need to read more of them and I want to recommend them to other people because from what I understand from friends who have read the books, it's so rare, Jordan, that I'm the one who has seen the adaptation but not read the books. So anyway, I want to give Mick Herron a big shout out here. So that's our Friday Reads Roundup. Jordan, thank you so much. What's your Friday Reads?

JA: My Friday Reads is David Byrne's book, Bicycle Diaries, about his stories from biking. in different cities.

BP: I love it. I love it. That is a great one. Stop making sense, Jordan. We'll see you next week.

Lauren Francis-Sharma's novel, Casualties of Truth, looks to motivate readers to take action for justice. It's a galvanizing call, one much different than some philosophical approaches of eras gone by. Today, we're going to take a look at Albert Camus’ classic work of philosophical fiction, The Stranger.

Let's decide if we should adhere to his protagonist Monsieur Meursault's passivity to society that Camus depicts, or can this novel forever?

An indifferent, evasive yes man, this literary f boy is every woman's nightmare. Not even the death of his mother elicits emotion from him. His M. O.? Say yes, because why not? This gets him engaged and into trouble. After agreeing to write a letter that catalyzes a friend's domestic dispute, Monsieur Meursault's life spirals into murder, trial, capital punishment.

Oh, spare me from male callousness. Must everything be an apathy battle? Why must caring be so uncool? This constant individual versus society. Life has no real meaning. Every man for himself BS. Please, let's just can it. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't go. I know I upset a few of you with my catcher can it. And here we go again with another unreliable male lead.

I promise it's not just personal preference. I actually love problematic men. Wait, you know what I mean. Just hear me out. Originally written in French and published in 1942, Albert Camus’ The Stranger is a novella in two halves. Equally as valuable as the protagonist's final monologue is Camus' careful language.

The first half is written in first person. Staccato, masculine sentences, in the American tradition trendy at the time. Think Hemingway. Think Faulkner. When Marceau meets the director of Maman's Old Folks Home, he describes him thusly.

He was a little old man with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his lapel. He looked at me with his clear eyes. Then he shook my hand and held it so long, I didn't know how to get it loose.

A tonal shift occurs in the second half. Now closed from society, Meursault opens his eyes. When he meets the magistrate, Meursault observes,

After our conversation, though, I looked at him and saw a tall, fine featured man with deep set blue eyes, a long gray mustache, and lots of thick, almost white hair. He struck me as being very reasonable, and overall quite pleasant, despite a nervous tick which made his mouth twitch now and then. On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but just in time, I remembered that I had killed a man.

In the moments before Meursault kills the Arab, he calls the action stupid. Some readers will call it random. But in these moments, Meursault also recalls the death of his mother by comparing the present, unrelenting son to the son on the day of her burial. Camus doesn't list Meursault's emotions. He gestures to them through the physical.

The sun burns and blinds him. He has a gun and a target. Camus' prose requires sustained, attentive reading and critical thinking skills. My copy is only 123 pages long, but to breeze through this novel is to miss the point. For that, I will canon Camus.

In his 1955 afterword, Camus writes that Meursault is condemned from the start because he refuses to play life's games. He says The Stranger could be seen as a story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth. Merceau's truth, he does not mourn the way he's supposed to mourn. He does not repent the way he's supposed to repent.

For Camus, Merceau is a man in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Merceau's internal moral compass leaves no room for gray area. It's not that he's careless, it's that he's plagued by that stubborn kind of idealism. His execution frees him from decisions like end of life care, funerals, how to mourn, engagement and marriage, affairs and revenge, and hope that he will ever return to this world that he never fully opted into to begin with.

Here is the hard truth. We live in a world with administrative fees, PTO that expires. University bureaucracies, and the seven circles of email hell. Our sun does cast shadows. I am not anti idealism, but maybe I am pro acceptance. Maybe we have to brighten our own spaces. Maybe, if you want, find your own small room with a sky view and endeavor to keep the lights on.

Whether it was South Africa in the 80s, France in the 40s, or America right now, literature has long reflected shifts in thought and society. While Lauren Francis-Sharma and Albert Camus have differing ideas on how individuals should approach their roles in a world that seems beyond their control, I believe fiction helps guide readers through tumultuous times.

Here are six recs for books that deal with seismic change.

Welcome to this week's six recs, and I'm really excited about this one. I'm calling it Six Recommendations for Seismic Change because Lauren Francis-Sharma's Casualties of Truth is about apartheid in South Africa. and its repercussions, you know, all the way to the present day. So I wanted to find some titles that would give different kinds of perspectives on apartheid, and not just South African ones, but also some books that help us understand what's been going on in the Western world with people of color for a long, too long a time.

So as usual, I have my producer Jordan here with me, and he's going to time me to give you six recs in three minutes or less. Otherwise, You know what happens, the bookcase falls. Jordan, how are you this evening?

JA: I'm doing well.

BP: Great. So are we ready to start the stopwatch?

JA: We are rolling.

BP: All right. First up, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild. He is the founder of Mother Jones Magazine, and that's all about social justice, right? But he himself as an author and a journalist is also all about social justice narratives, historical and contemporary. And his book focuses on British enslavement, that trade in Jamaica and the Caribbean, but it's relevant to South African racial injustice as well. One thing I found really interesting about this book is that climate change activists are inspired by it because the people he is talking about who actually affected change were a very small group. So check that one out.

Isabel Wilkerson's Caste. Well, if you haven't read this one already, you're in arrears and you're in error. It's one of the most important recent books about the origins of cruelty ever written. And is it any wonder Ava DuVernay called her adaptation, Origin? So, Wilkerson shows how three groups, Jews in Nazi Germany, Blacks in Jim Crow America, and Dalits in modern India are systematically dehumanized by political, cultural, and societal means, and the epilogue itself is worth the trip.

So, next up, we've got Wake: the Hidden History of Women Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez. This is a graphic memoir, or graphic history as well by Dr. Hall and it's riveting. Don't take my word for it, take Angela Davis's. She blurbed it, okay. This one is about Rebecca Hall's enslaved grandparents and how her research into women led slave revolts led her to make a book that's historical and personal. She actually created two characters for the middle passage so that she could, you know, sit, you know, show you what it really must have been like. And I am going to say about the illustrations, cause I love a graphic memoir, one of my favorite words, chiaroscuro, which is the interplay of light and dark, Martinez and Hall together have really made a compelling book.

The Unseen Truth by Dr. Sarah Lewis, who is a Harvard art historian. lays bare how, why, and when U. S. popular culture embraced the idea of whiteness as a marker of status. Hint, it comes much later than you might think and it involves the Caucasus. So the white gaze was really effective in an era where still photography and moving pictures were starting to take over. But it's an historian's book. It's not polemic, it's not invective, it's very carefully researched and documented evidence that white supremacy was nurtured in the U. S. long before any of us went online.

Born a Crime, Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. We all know he was the Daily Show host. For many years on Comedy Central, he was born in 1984 in South Africa to a white father and a black mother. And since those relationships were not decriminalized until 1985, he really was technically born a crime. Unfortunately, his family was not a happily ever after kind. He details a lot of his mother's trauma and he really talks about how he had to come to the United States to be safe from a very dangerous man. I hope his next memoir will tell of happier times.

Finally, Damian Barr's You'll Be Safe Here is my novel on this week's list. Damian Barr is the host of the Big Scottish Book Club. He based this haunting novel on a real life incident in which a young boy sent to an Afrikaans paramilitary camp in South Africa died. It is an illuminating look at the historical trauma of the Boers, the Dutch Boers, who were forced by the English at one point in the 19th century to live in concentration camps for resettling, but it also shows that their descendants went on to torment black fellow citizens and their own kind. It is a really chilling book. One of the lines that I'll never forget is we're all sons and daughters of the same soil. It's a great read. That's it for this week. I have a feeling Jordan. I went way over.

JA: We did go quite a bit over at four minutes and 37 seconds. But I think we could leave the bookshelf up this week. I think you know, these, these titles were due their time.

BP: Thank you. Thank you. Look, there we go. Friday Reads, always agile. Thank you, Jordan.

Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, A Literary Revue. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven, A Literary Revue is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

King Lear is discussed in this week’s Pop! Goes the Culture, and all of its various adaptations. From queens to musicals, John Lennon to fictional rewrites, there is a version of King Lear for everyone to love.

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include The Book of Love by Kelly Link, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Garden by Claire Beams, Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, and Wild Houses by Colin Barrett.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned: Havoc by Christopher Bollen, Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie,

Shattered and My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Lucy Greeley's Autobiography of a Face, Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones, In the Forest and A Pagan Place and The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien, Dublin Murder Squad (series) by Tana French, Small Things Like These and Foster by Claire Keegan, Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, King Lear by William Shakespeare, “The Yiddish King Lear” and “Mirele Efros” by Jacob Gordin, “Vision of Lear” by Tadashi Suzuki and Toshio Hosokawa, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, “Succession” by Jesse Armstrong et. al, The Book of Love by Kelly Link, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleischman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Garden by Claire Beams, Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, and Wild Houses by Colin Barrett

Episode Transcript:

BP: Welcome to season two of The Book Maven, a literary review. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dive into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first…

CB: At first, I was thinking, "Let's talk to Chris about writing a character who is not at all like you. Okay, you know, an elderly woman." But then I thought, maybe it's more interesting to talk about writing a character who seems not to be like you at all, but really is like you.

Yes. I mean, I think those are almost the same question.

BP: Thank you. Please elaborate.

CB: Um, well, you know, you always hear that old chestnut, "Write what you know." And I feel like, without meaning to, I sort of did in all of my previous books—uh, all five of them. Without really realizing it, they all kind of involve young people, semi-good-looking urbanites moving through the world. You know, that—

BP: That can't be you, Chris, because you are totally good-looking. Okay, go ahead.

CB: I did not mean to turn that into a compliment for myself. No, but just like my own age, and, um, it's sort of like these travelers, and, uh, I was actually, you know, so inspired to do Maggie that, once I got outside of myself—once I kind of stepped into the shoes of this 81-year-old, maybe homicidal widow—I felt like it was finally freeing.

I finally felt like I could reach for high branches and do wild turns. It somehow opened me up and liberated me in a way that I think I was so hemmed in by writing my own experience that it had the opposite effect. I felt like I could do so much more getting outside of myself, and that's probably because, at heart, I'm an 81-year-old homicidal widow.

No, it's… it's at heart because, uh, one, I do love... I've, you know, I think that what Calgary says, you—uh, I think when you're writing about someone who's 81, they've earned their wisdom. They're at an age where you can actually give them intelligence, wit, and a life of experiences. Whereas, when you're writing, say, like a 23-year-old, you always feel like you're making them— even though they're an adult—too precocious, or too well-lived, or too wise for their years.

And so you're kind of always holding back a little bit. Um, and yet, for some reason, it was just so freeing to write someone who was 81 because she's earned it all, you know? She can say whatever she wants. And so it was me, but in this like, free way where you kind of can speak your mind, and, uh, you give her the benefit of the doubt.

BP: This is such a turnabout to Patricia Highsmith writing Tom Ripley, uh, which is, I mean, you might be an 81-year-old woman at heart.

CB: Thank you. She might have been a 20-something gay man at heart.

BP: Uh, yes, but on… but on the other hand, as you say, in writing younger characters—I'm working on a character who is going to be aging throughout the course of a book right now.

CB: Mm. And I have been. That's—

BP: Interesting.

CB: Yes. You know, because I've been thinking about that very thing. How do I take her from age 9 or 10 all the way to 60 or 65? And how do I make sure that she is not sounding the same all the way through? So that's a real concern. However, the joy, as you point out, about Maggie Burkhart is that you can give her the wisdom and the wit and the perspicacity of someone who is an octogenarian.

BP: And of course, that also—and this is what is so delicious about Havoc—is it gives her the perspective of seeing that this child is not as sweet and innocent as everyone would like him to be. So, talk about that. Talk about how Maggie actually is able to see through this little boy's, um, you know, the easy appeal that children of his age have for other adults.

CB: Well, I think in a way, I mean, even though they're sort of at opposite bookends of the life shelf, you know, um, at the very ends of life on each side, uh, they're almost treated similarly—the elderly and the very young—because in children, because they're the person in the room whose opinions you don't listen to, or the person who's overlooked, who's just sort of blends in.

An old person or a child, you know? And they're also, uh, it's because, you know, they're not self-reliant, or they're not perceived as self-reliant. So, uh, they're these sort of characters that sort of fall into the background of rooms. And so, in a way, they're both suffering the same condition. They both kind of are lonely creatures that want to be seen and want to have agency in the world, but have none.

And so that really interests me—writing about age. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to tackle it. Obviously, it came out of the pandemic. And in that period, there was this whole conversation: do you sacrifice the old for the young, or the young for the old?

So, in a way, I wanted to sort of literalize that war between generations. I mean, this should have been a story about a sweet old lady who kind of takes on the grandmotherly role of a cute little boy. But, um, instead, it's, you know, the inverse in this crazy world that we live in.

Because I think they’re both manipulative and learn how to exploit that perception of them as sort of these half-formed beings. And so, uh, that was really fun to play with. I mean, that was really exciting to work with, on both ends of the spectrum, with, uh, Otto as much as with Maggie. And actually, I found it much more challenging to write about an 8-year-old boy than I found to write about an 81-year-old woman.

Especially an 8-year-old boy with an agenda.

BP: How do you write that character and yet keep him true to his life experience, his measure of wisdom, which is—it can't be the same as Maggie's, and yet they are, um, if you will, playing on the same field. They're trying, it's like this, this incredible, it's not even a chessboard. It's a game of Go, right? You know, they’re on different levels, and they’re crossing each other. And, you know, so he can't be the same as an adult, but he is working against an adult and with adults as his various pawns too.

CB: Right. Right. I mean, in a way, I kind of thought of it as, in the first drafts, it’s like Maggie was sort of—Even though they were enemies, nemeses—like she was sort of mentoring him in this role of just destroying lives.

And so, I, you know, it's so hard to write children for me. I don’t have any children. I’m not really around children that often. Um, I, you know, I have friends who have 8-year-olds. And so, I was paying a little bit of attention when I would come and visit to their, you know, way of speaking and their knowledge base.

But I didn’t want, I wanted Otto to be brilliant without being a 31-year-old trapped in an 8-year-old’s body. We have that child so much in literature and in films, like the precocious child that knows it all and is way too smart for their age. And it’s so irritating. It’s kind of grating. And so I wanted Otto to be really, you know, quick-witted and shrewd, but also a child.

Like, I wanted him to have these moments where he kind of breaks down like children do, or doesn’t understand the gravity of situations like children do, in the same way. And I think, you know, I kind of went back to when I was a kid when I was thinking of him. And I remember, oh my god, my class in, what, 4th grade, they were like wolves. They were like the most malicious children. We were all so horrid. So, I don’t think it’s a stretch, honestly. I think, you know, we like to think of children as so sweet and kind, but they are such cunning creatures, and they’re so observant.

BP: And that’s what he is. You need to be observant to be a great manipulator. Like both of them, you have to be observant. And so they have this advantage in a way that they’re sort of watching from the outside in rooms. And so they’re paying close attention, and they’re using that information against the people, you know? They’re studying.

When you talk about going back, and I haven't spoken to him about this, but maybe someday I'll get to speak with Amor Towles about A Gentleman in Moscow, because that is one of my favorite books set in a hotel, you know, being restricted to the walled garden kind of thing, the way you deal with Maggie.

CB: Yeah.

BP: Let’s talk about the hotel. Did you read other books before, during, or after that were set in hotels? Because I think that's really fascinating.

CB: Well, I’ve always loved hotels. I mean, just as a traveler and as a person, I crave them. I adore them. I, you know, I really, I love—

I love the fact that you can be a complete stranger, and you're in close contact with all of these other people, and somehow it's this sort of beneficent place, but you don't know anything about the other person. But you're behaving sort of on a semi-civil level.

Um, and you kind of—it’s sort of like, it’s sort of this idealistic world where the class distinctions kind of break down. Everyone's on the same playing field. Of course, everyone has different sized rooms, but it's just an amazing and very rare moment of communality between, you know, or communion between strangers that’s, of course, prime for fiction and, uh, for great writing.

Did I read any hotel novels? Um, there are, I mean, there's... you know, Agatha Christie obviously did like ultimate hotel novels. Um, you know, she was the queen of that. Because she understood that—I think she understood, like, how do you get a bunch of people into a limited space hotel?

So, you know, that must have always been an inspiration for me for this book. And also, the hotel that I based Havoc on was where she wrote much of Death on the Nile. So isn't that amazing? Like, that was a very—that’s a little factoid about the Winter Palace, which is in Luxor.

But you know, I tried—it’s so funny when—When I write about a place or an aspect or feature of something, I always try to run from it in terms of reading about it because I'm so scared of, uh, being inspired or, you know, being influenced by it. And I’m so easily influenced by things. I think that’s what makes me love writing about foreign places so much because I really just fall under the spell of them.

But I also don’t feel like I have to be careful about that because, uh, it’s just so easy to enter someone else’s world.

It is easy to enter that world and think you're writing something meaningful when all you're doing is throwing a bunch of details onto the page. You know, that's really, really tough.

BP: One more question for you. What are you working on now — the previous novel, or something completely new?

CB: Well, I want to tell you that another thing that was amazing about Havoc — unlike this book I'm working on now — is that I had the idea in one flash. I was staying at the Winter Palace, sitting in the back garden, right after the pandemic, and I saw this old American woman at a table next to me, berating a waiter about her lunch order in a way that was clear she'd had lunch there every day.

And it just came to me — the whole story came to me in one moment. That has never happened to me before. You know, famously, Patricia Highsmith said she got the idea for Tom Ripley from watching a young man walking across the beach in Positano at dawn, and I always thought that was such a lie. I thought she was just being a showwoman about it. But this is very similar. The whole story came at once, and that made it really fun to play with all the elements of it because I knew what it was. This novel I went back to... it’s about a young man in Paris, also a murder.

It's very hard to drop a novel and then try to pick it up two years later. It's like giving mouth-to-mouth CPR. You're trying to resuscitate the thing, trying to remember the initial spark that brought you to want to write about it. And so I'm kind of having trouble finding the spark again.

I hope to. I always find the first paragraphs, the first sentences... I don't know about you, but they're so important to me because that's where all my enthusiasm lies.

BP: Welcome back, readers, to another one of our Friday Read segments, where we take a few of your posts from mostly Blue Sky but other places online as well, and talk about what's mentioned. And I do this, of course, with my trusted and excellently well-read producer, Jordan Aaron. Jordan, how are you today?

JA: I'm doing well. Ready to get through some Friday reads.

BP: Excellent. So what do we have first?

JA: Up first this week is a post from Nancy Brock, who’s reading Hanif Qureshi's Shattered from Echo Books. A fall at home, a life changed, a memoir celebrating the resilience of spirit and the triumph of the mind.

BP: What a subtitle. I mean, that is a story in and of itself, just in a subtitle.

And so, this is a true old school Friday Reads post Nancy Brock put up here. Just the hashtag and the title and the information, you know, about the author and the publisher. So you might remember we mentioned Qureshi in a recent episode because I was talking about memoirs and novels and all kinds of stuff.

And we were talking about his 1980s hit, My Beautiful Laundrette, that was made into a film with Daniel Day Lewis back in the day. Qureshi is also very well known for other books, including The Buddha of Suburbia. In 2022, sadly, a sudden stroke left the writer without the use of his arms or legs. When he says a bomb went off in his life, he really means it.

It was completely unexpected. I believe he was just watching, you know, the footie on TV, as one does in England. And next he was on the floor, and I believe He can wiggle his toes, but not much else. And this memoir isn't, it doesn't reach the, I was about to say the heights, but really I should say the depths of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique Boby, which is an incredible, incredible memoir about what it's like to be locked into your body.

But It is a memoir that's really lively. It shows that Qureshi's mind is still as dynamic and incredibly filled with culture and ideas as ever. I think fans also of Chloe Cooper Jones's Easy Beauty, which is one of my favorite philosophical memoirs of the past few years, as well as Lucy Greeley's Autobiography of a Face.

Those are books that, if you appreciate, you will really love Shattered, and I am sorry to say that we have to love Shattered, but I would rather still have Qureshi's voice out there than not. So, what's next, Jordan?

JA: Up next, we've got a post from Peter Landau who says, “The most beautifully written book about a murderer I've read. In the Forest, by Edna O'Brien, from Picador USA. And he's shared a lovely piece of art depicting the author as well.”

BP: It is a beautiful piece of art. I'm like, oh, is that a painting? Is that a sketch? I don't know, but it's, it's black and white. Um, it's a line drawing kind of thing. And Edna O'Brien. Who we lost last year was definitely the grand dom of Irish literature.

The Country Girls, one of her novels, is a modern classic. I say read A Pagan Place first. I love A Pagan Place. If you know, you know that, uh, in the forest, as it's called in the UK, is based on a terrible real life triple homicide involving a mother, a son, a priest, another, it's really complicated, but it is, in fact, The perfect book if you love Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad Mysteries, and you haven't read O'Brien, this is a great way into O'Brien's work.

And if you're not a Tana French fan, maybe you loved Anne Enright's The Gathering, Louise Kennedy's Trespasses, Maggie O'Farrell's Instructions for a Heat Wave. And of course, this year's really popular Claire Keegan books, Small Things Like These and Foster. These are all Irish women writers who illuminate the experience of girls and women in that country in its decades of Roman Catholicism and how they've affected those lives.

And I think we have one more.

JA: Yeah, last but not least, we've got from Jennifer Pooley, um, who says her Friday and her Friday reads is as this quote. She'd been editing all day. It was nice to sink into the sea of words and story to get away from reality for a while, which is a quote from Death of the Author by Ineti Okorafor.

BP: I love this. I happen to know Jennifer Pooley, a longtime publishing colleague and friend, and Jennifer lives in California now and surfs almost every day of the week. So when she is talking about something to do with water or the ocean or any kind of body of water, I know that that's a happy place for her. And like Jennifer Pooley, this book, Death of the Author, is a happy place for me.

It's really, really different and it is not for everyone. The image is an eye popping book jacket. It has this Nigerian block printed fabric in the background and then a really striking silhouette of a Nigerian woman's head. And Okorafor is Nigerian. Um, she was born to Nigerian parents in the United States, but has dual citizenship.

And she's coined two terms, African Futurism and African Jujuism. And that's meant to distinguish the speculative work of African writers from that of their African American counterparts, because Afrofuturism is often used by African American writers to look into and interrogate enslavement culture and racism.

Okorafor writes speculative fiction, and like her novel's protagonist, Zeilu, the author is also paralyzed from the waist down. And what she does with this is to make a novel that really has three parts. The first part is about A paralyzed academic who is also a novelist who is really disenchanted with her life.

The second level is a speculative novel that Zalew is writing about robot beings on another planet. And then the third part of the novel is about an entrepreneur, sort of a venture capital kind of guy, who has learned how to make these very strange, hyper, realistic and hyper capable legs and arms and other kinds of prostheses for people with challenges.

This is a wild ride. It's for fans of Niecy Shawl, N. K. Jameson, Octavia Butler, Nana Kwame Adjei Brenya readers will love it, and Victor LaValle readers too. So, that's Friday Reads for this week. Thank you so much, and we'll see you soon.

BP: If you put it on loud and listen closely, you can faintly hear Edgar mourn the death of his father, the Earl of Gloucester, as I Am the Walrus fades to silence. Amidst the cacophony of John Lennon’s strange song, Edgar’s words, taken from a BBC Radio program, are immortalized in the Beatles’ discography. Of course, the Bard doesn’t need help from the Fab Four, because although experts believe King Lear was performed just once during William Shakespeare’s lifetime, since then, the play has been adapted by many important artists.

The eponymous monarch divides his kingdom in three, for each of his daughters. While his daughters Goneril and Regan accept the land, third daughter Cordelia declines, offering him her respect and affection instead. Angered by her disinterest in his power move, Lear banishes Cordelia. When he is ultimately betrayed by Goneril and Regan, King Lear seals his fate in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Doesn’t it make sense that the Yiddish community in New York would adapt Lear several times to fit their own experiences. In 1892, Jacob Gordin wrote The Yiddish King Lear, which is believed to have ushered in the “great era of Yiddish theater” in New York City. The Yiddish Theater District was known for operetta, but with the Lear adaptation, drama became the most popular form for Jewish immigrants. Gordin came back with Mirele Efros, colloquially known as “the Jewish Queen Lear,” a version that swaps King Lear out for a powerful matriarch. It was adapted into a Polish silent film in 1912, and an American film in 1939, unfortunately neither has been dubbed for English speakers.

Since then, King Lear has been adapted musically as well: Kuningas Lear in Finnish, Lear in German, Re Lear in Italian, and Vision of Lear in English. Re Lear was written for the esteemed Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, though Verdi never actually composed any music for the opera and it went unproduced. Vision of Lear was much more successful, a Japanese-German production adapted by Tadashi Suzuki and Toshio Hosokawa, and was performed at the Munich Biennale in 1998.

King Lear made its film debut in 1910 in an Italian production directed by Gerolamo Lo Savio. It’s been adapted as a movie countless times. Akira Kurosawa’s Ran was made in 1985 and Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear in 1987. It’s no coincidence that these maestros would take interest in Shakespeare’s story at a point when both would have been contemplating personal and professional legacies. The two films do take long detours from the original source material, to be expected from such singular minds. Kurosawa’s is a must-watch for its stunning use of color and editing techniques, while Godard’s is a bit more aloof, preferring viewers to enter its world on its own terms.

It wasn’t until recently that popular fiction released its own major adaptations of the seminal piece of literature. In this millennium, Lear has twice been written as fiction, once in 2009 by Christopher Moore, whose Fool was narrated by, well, the king’s fool. In 2017, Edward St Aubyn’s Dunbar, part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Series, retold the tragedy from the perspective of Logan Roy from “Succession” or, if you will, Rupert Murdoch from IRL, a businessman named Henry Dunbar.

But the most successful literary adaptation of King Lear must be Jane Smiley’s 1991 A Thousand Acres, which places the story on an Iowa farm. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1992 and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. In 1997 it was turned into a movie starring Michelle Pheiffer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Jessica Lange in 2022, the Des Moines Metro Opera premiered a version of Smiley’s novel as an opera.

King Lear’s incisive angles on betrayal, transitions of power, and control of land–the very ideas that made it relevant to early Jewish immigrants to New York–remain prescient and devastating today.

Transcript:

BP: One more set of six recs. Recommendations that I try to give six of within three minutes and otherwise a bookcase falls, supposedly on me, but I'm still, I'm still injury free. Thank you very much Jordan for that kindness. Uh, so Jordan, my producer is back and we're going to see if I can beat the clock today.

JA: All right, we're rolling.

BP: So first up, these are books about unexpected villains. The first one is The Book of Love by Kelly Link. Link's first novel. I love Link's short stories and it is so huge and heaving with plot, but it won't disappoint. It's a fantasy epic about three teens who returned from the dead.

And in this case, I can tell you who the unexpected villain is. They're still living high school music teacher who for us band nerds. That's, that's a pretty great one.

Second is the God of the Woods by Liz Moore. And this is set at an Adirondack summer camp for teenagers. You can smell the bug juice sun in an ax body spray from here, but the creepy part is that the camp is part of the Von Lahr family's hereditary Adirondacks land and the entire tribe feels like the villain. I'm not telling you who the villain is in this story, but it is one of those books where past and present intermingle in a really meaningful way.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser Ackner is better than her first novel, Fleischman is in Trouble, and this one is based on a real life businessman's kidnapping that Brodesser Ner found endlessly fascinating. She's got a huge question in this book. Do any of us come by any of our privileges? Honestly, again, no spoilers, but it's a gut punch ending that's tough to accept and tougher to reject.

 The Garden by Claire Beams is a creepy, atmospheric take on mid 20th century fertility problems and clinics that attended to them. The main character, Irene, isn't sure if the villain is male, female, or botanical. The real shocker though is the historical truth that Beams has embedded within this gothic tale. I really enjoyed it.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is a beautiful literary novel, and you would think, Bethanne, what unexpected villain could be in this book? Well, hang on a second. So the narrator is Dave Wynn, who's East Asian, and he's a London actor whose career pivots on roles playing East Asians.

His nemesis, Giles, is an all too real avatar of Tori Smarm. And as you're settling in with Dave's gentle voice and story you will find out this is another one with a shocker of an ending, and I do think that there's a villain at the end. We'll see if you agree with me if you read it.

Finally, Wild Houses by Colin Barrett is set in Ireland. It's Barrett's first novel. Nicky and Dahl are a couple who are separated by his kidnapping, and you don't really know why at first. If you think Appalachia has problems. Tour this version of Ireland instead of the one that you usually get with the Blarney Castle. The unexpected villain, in my opinion, doesn't even appear in the plot.

So there you go, Six Recs. Jordan, how did I do?

JA: Well, I heard you talking earlier about the bookshelf being a little too soft and no, so the shelf's gonna have to fall a little harder this time. We'll turn up the, we'll turn the volume up this time, uh, 3 minutes and 34 seconds. But I do have to say, I will be picking up The Garden by Claire Beams. That sounded awesome.

BP: Oh, you're gonna, you're gonna love it, Jordan. Everyone else, thank you. Look forward to hearing what you think. Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, A Literary Review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more.

Talk to you next week. The Book Maven, A Literary Review is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

Bethanne touches on the highly anticipated Catcher in the Rye in this week’s Canon or Can it. Does she kick Holden Caulfield to the curb? Or let him stay with all of his teenage angst?

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, Memory Piece by Lisa Ko, Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson, Memorial by Brian Washington, Someone by Alice McDermott, and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned: Life B by Bethanne Patrick, Best Copy Available by Jay Baron Nicorvo, My Life by Bill Clinton, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, Running with Scissors by Augustine Burroughs, Terror Westover's Educated, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, Samantha Irby's Quietly Hostile, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter's The Magic Toy Shop, The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan, Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant, Nevada by Imogen Binney, Jordi Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox, Lucy Santé's I Heard Her Call My Name, Before We Were Trans by Kit Hayum, In Tongues by Thomas Groton, Faltas by Cecilia Gentile, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, Memory Piece by Lisa Ko, Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson, Memorial by Brian Washington, Someone by Alice McDermott, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode. But first, Jay Baron Nicorvo joined the show to talk about accessing trauma while writing.

Specifically, Jay talks about differing points of view of traumatic memories, the lack of ubiquity in cultural standards, and how it is that our brains sort through traumatic experiences. We get into some intense topics, so listener discretion is advised. Join us now as we talk about the final episode of MASH and how each of Jay's brothers remembers that event differently.

BP: One of the things that's fairly early in your book, I think it's in chapter one, you talk about being with your two brothers and your aunt and uncle and you're, this is the quote ‘on the couch, we are five Americans and we are doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time as 106 million other Americans. We're all tuned in together to CBS to watch the final episode of MASH’. And the reason I wanted to start out with this Jay is because it is something that I have this very specific personal memory of. And you and I know that our memories are different, but one of the things you deal with right up front in Best Copy Available is the fact that even if you and your two brothers sat and talked about this, they would have different versions, wouldn't they, of that memory?

JN: The divergence is kind of astounding. And I've talked with my brothers about what they remember of the different scenes that I'd narrate. And their point of views are wholly divergent from mine. To almost to a shocking degree. But that moment that you, that you narrate that MASH, that MASH moment, which so many Americans shared is kind of a cultural artifact. It doesn't really exist anymore. There is not this sort of unifying cultural endeavor that we all do at the same time. Those likes the scheduling has been democratized thanks to streaming and the internet and everything else. And so we're all doing those things, but we're doing them at different times. And so there was something, I think, just really. It was like a moment of an American universal and I think it felt important to capture it, but it also to work to convey some of the different themes that I was working with. Well, I mean, just your, your mention of memory. And I think all memoirs are basically about the same thing. They're all about memory and yet the narrative, the story that each individual tells in recalling those different memories is infinitely diverse and so I think I was definitely aware of that. And I was trying to keep in mind this idea of memory as being a very personal thing. But at the same time, wanting to maintain some sense that there is an objective reality that we all share, or call it whatever you will, I mean, there's a thousand different names for it, but our memories derive from a shared experience that is vast and all encompassing and like this capstone of of the MASH final episode the finale was I think something that we all shared a vast number of us shared at the same time and it was just a very vivid memory that I that and I wanted to kind of bring it into the story in part because it also gets at and foreshadows the sexual abuse that comes later on in the scene it's my uncle my beloved uncle and aunt who are babysitting us, but the reader at that point doesn't know who molested me as a child. All they know is that it was a babysitter. So I'm sort of setting up this universal American moment. And at the same time, I'm darkening it. I'm shadowing it with the potential for abuse. So I was very much aware of those things. And, and that was like one of those scenes, you know, and I'm sure you encountered this when you were working on Life B, memoirs that we write and publish, they're almost exercises in excision. I mean, the really difficult thing for me is what to leave out and to try to tell the story and to be as true to myself and my voice, but also to my family members and other people who have their own memories, to be as true as possible and not include everything, you know, it's not, you know, Life B and Best Copy Available are not My Life by Bill Clinton. Like we're not presidents. People don't want to know every single instant of our day, right? So because we're not these historical figures with, you know, cadres of historians and biographers. Pouring over every scrap of paper or every thought that we might have had, we have to really be selective in order to tell a story. And so one of the things that I do when I write is a scene or a character or a moment, it can't just be one thing. It needs to be multiple things. It needs to do a number of things at once. And so this MASH scene got at a number of things for me, and that was one of the reasons why I included it.

BP: Well, you mentioned when we were talking beforehand about my chapter called ‘Little Women’, when my younger daughter and I go to see the Greta Gerwig’s Little Women a few years back. I can't even remember exactly how many years back. And we sit down and talk afterward about her experience of growing up with me during the worst years of my double depression. And that's, you know, part of what I was doing there as well, taking a cultural moment, a moment with me and a family member and, um, turning it into something that makes that moment in my life meaningful for other people, as you said, because we're not writing autobiographies. You know, we're writing memoir, and the good part of that, even though people don't know, want to know about every time, you know, we've had a meal or written a diary entry or whatever, is that we also have creative freedom. And your book, I think, you know, I feel like such a writing baby, like such a neophyte. I wish I'd gotten closer to what we now call creative nonfiction in Life B, uh, but Best Copy Available, I think is so strongly creative nonfiction or CNF. And that is because you use not just scenes and memories, but you also use senses so well. And so, there are a couple of other chapter one moments that I want to get to, and I want to connect them a couple of pages before the MASH memory. You talk about the way that writing is memory and a book becomes a mind. And so I thought, that is so beautiful. And I wanted to hear you explain it to, you know, bring that out a little bit more, Jay.

JN: Well, you know, it's not, it's not my idea. Although, maybe those words are mine. One of the formative texts that I encountered as, I think as probably a sophomore at community college, and I don't know if it was assigned, we had to read a segment of Areopagitica that John Milton I think it was it was a delivery that he gave to to parliament and he talks about that speech in that speech, he's advocating for freedom of the press, basically, even, you know, hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, and he talks about the essence of books and that books are the essence of an individual that they do contain, you know, the purity of extraction and efficacy. And he goes on, and I can't remember the text exactly. But there was this idea that I encountered early on, and I think it was one that made me want to be a writer. Not just a reader, which is that a book sort of contained an individual, and even after that individual was gone, John Milton, you know, was hundreds of years buried, we can still glimpse inside his head. You know, and kind of rummage around in his thoughts. And so that was something that I was think that I was playing with and in memoir in that genre, you know, whether it's creative nonfiction or more like Bill Clinton's autobiography or, or the books that fall, you know, in the middle, they do, they try to, to capture a self, and for, I think, the creative nonfiction writer, for someone like me, who is schooled both in poetry and in fiction writing, published a novel, I was definitely pulling both of those elements. For poetry, it's an attention to language at the sentence level, and even smaller, right, the word and the syllable. For the novelist, it's, it's more large scale. It's the assemblage of scenes of characters moving through a setting and speaking dialogue. And so I was trying to borrow from both of those traditions to use in the memoir. And the thing that brings both of those together is fact. And I think this is a little bit different from truth. You know, we talk a little bit about our having our own truths. And I think another thing has gotten a little bit democratized in the current times is truth. We feel like we all have our own truth that we all have, you know, an entitlement to it, our experience of it. But I encountered this, this quote recently. It was like a JFK quote, and I'm going to paraphrase, but it was some, it was a speech he gave and he called the truth a tyrant. The truth is a tyrant, the only, like the only tyrant we should adhere to. And I think there's something about that that we've lost. I think we've really gotten attached to our very own personal identifiable experience and I think we've lost a little bit of touch with a kind of larger truth of reality or an experience that we all share a kind of history as it's going. And so I wanted to try to, you know, stay close to that. But at the same time, you're working in a genre memoir that demands intimacy of the utmost kind. I mean, you just have to be so focused on your individual story that sometimes I think we lose contact with the larger reality that's happening around us.

BP: You're playing right into my hands, Jay. I love this because I'm going backwards in chapter one in a way and I love one of, in one section where you're considering all of this and you're considering the case of the writer versus the reader of memoir, and you say you're at my mercy, or am I at yours?

JN: Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a give and take, you know, and I was aware that the subject that I'm dealing with, right, the book is about partly it's about my molestation as a kid, the hands of an older male babysitter, a teenager, and also my mom's violent rape. And so I'm aware as a writer that I need to make scenes and there needs to be drama and tension, and of course there's conflict in these subject matters. But also too, it's exhausting. I mean, it was exhausting for me as a writer. Devastating at times. And it's exhausting for a reader to have to sit through that. And so what you're, what you're expressing here is in part the breathing room that I tried to bring into the narrative to separate those what are really emotional and a powerful scenes with more reflective more, I don't want to say philosophical so much but more like kind of context cultural context or historical context or literary context,

BP: But you're you put in here ‘Here are scraps of John Berger I cling to. The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.’ I'm not speaking very well while I'm reading, but ‘The past is not for living in, it goes on. It is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.’ I thought, that is amazing. Because that's what we're doing. You said a few minutes ago, you know, we're digging around in this stuff. It's this well of conclusions. And we're all trying when we're writing memoir to figure out which conclusion or conclusions in the well we should pick up and turn around. And so no memoir can be the truth, no memoir is fully the truth.

JN: No, it's just a, to extend that metaphor, it's just a bucketful. It's like, if the past is the, is the well that you're drawing from, like all we have is a bucket. And so we're leaving all of this water, not just in the well, but underground, the aquifer that feeds the water, like all of that is the past. And our tool, our vessel is just, it's so minuscule. It's one book.

BP: My bucket has holes in it. I don't know about yours. But what I do know is that that is why you and all of the memoir writers I know that I truly respect and draw upon again and again, do adhere to fact as much as we can, because we can't get out the truth. We can use facts to show our own experience of the truth.

JN: Yeah, and that was really important for me, and that was one of the most difficult things for me. You know, I have a really hard time writing scene, and you'd think, like, after publishing a novel and having written three other unpublished novels, or four, I've lost track of how many novels I've finished and failed to publish, but, scene is sort of like the building block for a novel and I thought coming to a memoir It would be easier for me to write scenes and it just never is and even when I'm drafting a novel I do the same thing it comes out an exposition first and then part of what I'm doing in revising is I'm going back and then I'm sort of like teasing out the dialogue and teasing out the action and I'm putting the the characters in space And so I had to do all that for this for this memoir too, and I'm just amazed each time at how difficult that is to do just to make scenes and get readers invested in a time and a space that's really specific and, and comes back to this point that you keep making. It's those sensory details. And that's when I think they're most moving for the reader. It's not when they're just like a list of senses. But you have the characters moving in space and experiencing those senses. And that is, I think, what moves the reader most.

BP: Thank you, Jay, for joining us this week. You can find all of Jay's books wherever books are sold. Now, let's move on to Friday Reads, where we'll see what you've been reading this week.

Welcome back to another Friday Reads segment, where Sharing Friday Reads from around the socials and this season we're highlighting fewer posts, but giving you more info about the titles people are sharing. So please let us know if you like this new format. As always, my producer and engineer Jordan is here to help me through the posts that we highlight. So Jordan, what do we have this week?

JA: Up first, we've got from John who loves starting off the year with a best American collection, and they've shared a photo of the cover of the best American science fiction and fantasy of 2024.

BP: First of all, the editor of 2024's Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection is Hugh Howey. And you might know Howey as the self published author behind the phenomenally successful trilogy that started in 2011 with Wool. It's now known as the Silo Trilogy, and it's phenomenally successful. successful Apple TV series starring Rebecca Ferguson. The best of books, that's what this is, how he edited the collection, include best of short fiction, best of poetry, essays, travel, writing, more. And they're really sought after by readers because of the careful editorial curation. It allows people to discover new writers and new kinds of writing at a very high level in a very good package, I guess you could say. So I think this is terrific for any sci-fi or fantasy stan because so many of you first discovered these genres in their short forms, sometimes in magazines, sometimes in books, book collections. If you love the short stories of Arthur C. Clarke, Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Bear, Harlan Ellison, Judith Merrill, get in between the covers of this compendium. What's up next, Jordan?

JA: All right. Up next, we've got from Rob Paulk, who is reading Jeanette Winterson's The Passion on an e-reader.

BP: I really love this cover, an older one of The Passion. You've got this person wearing a fantastical tricorn hat, and that's because it's a historical novel that's set during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. Jeanette Winterson made a huge splash in the British literary scene in 1985 with her memoir Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and that was all about her growing up as an adopted child of strict Pentecostal Christians. She came out as a lesbian and left home at 16. Her subsequent novels, short story collections, and other writings have received critical acclaim now on both sides of the Atlantic. This memoir won Britain's Whitbread Prize and it was adapted for television in 1990. It is a great read if you like Running with Scissors by Augustine Burroughs, Terror Westover's Educated, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, even Samantha Irby's Quietly Hostile, which I love. The list could get really long. I just want to say that since this is an historical novel, but it's also somewhat absurdist, if you like it, you might also enjoy Angela Carter's The Magic Toy Shop, The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan, or Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant. There we go. Jordan, one more.

JA: And then finally, we've got from David Lawson, Lawson on stage. The host of the Astoria Bookshop Storytelling Show. He's holding his phone with a Friday Reads post along with a paper book of Faltas by Cecilia Gentile. And I think there's a lot going on here. Maybe, Bethanne, you can explain what's happening.

BP: Yeah, let me see if I can try to explain. So, I love this. It turns out Lawson, who often posts Friday Reads, was having an interaction with another person online and said he was looking for a funny yet dark memoir about a trans person. And the other person, Nino Cipri, said, I recommend Cecilia Gentile's, Faltas, which means flaws in Spanish. And Gentile died last year, but was a well known activist for the rights of transgender people and sex workers and just had so, so many amazing things to her credit. Faltas is subtitled ‘letters to everyone in my hometown, who isn't my rapist’. And it won the 2023 Stonewall book award. It's painful yet funny and lively. All about how community and resilience can lead to healing. Now, if you loved Nevada by Imogen Binney, Jordi Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox, Lucy Santé's I Heard Her Call My Name, Before We Were Trans by Kit Hayum, and In Tongues by Thomas Groton, you will be really interested in Faltus. There are so many other great novels and memoirs about the trans experience. I really encourage everyone to look into them and to discover more. So my thanks to David Lawson for that great. post. And that's the end of our Friday Reads posts for the week. Jordan and I will be back next time. Thank you so much for listening.

Talking to Jay, I was thinking about the way we all process traumas from our adolescent years and how we may all remember cultural experiences, like reading books in different ways. That brought up the novel we all have had to sit through, The Catcher in the Rye. Does its cultural significance earn it a place in the literary canon, or do we have to can it forever?

Did you know J. D. Salinger had only one testicle? Did you need to know J. D. Salinger had only one testicle? Some people believe that, due to his incomplete genitalia, Salinger, author of this week's title up for debate, The Catcher in the Rye, wrote the way he did because he felt incomplete.

Such literary reductionism is akin to saying Frida Kahlo painted the way she did because she had a unibrow or Beethoven's composing style was all about his hearing challenges. We humans are complex and complicated. Few of us do anything because of a single factor, and none of us knows the true origins of great artistic talent.

However, many of us, far, far too many of us, apply reductive reasoning to The Catcher in the Rye and its well known protagonist, 17 year old expelled prep school student Holden Caulfield. Wearing his red hunting hat as a sign of his radical honesty, which already places him firmly in the shallow adolescent box for me.

Holden takes a bus from Pennsylvania to Manhattan where his family lives, but checks into a hotel because he hates phonies and believes his parents are such. Allow me to gloss over young Holden's adventures for a moment because the elephant in the room, who might also be wearing a red hunting hat, is the decades long readerly over identification with this protagonist.

It points to Salinger's brilliance as a fiction writer. He's created a character who is simultaneously unlikable, an unreliable narrator, more on that shortly, and a kind of every person. The kind who, in former centuries, might have existed as an allegorical figure. I'd say he personifies callowness. But with respect for Salinger, like most of us, this author's greatest strength is also his greatest weakness.

He created such a fully realized protagonist that readers identify with Holden and miss the novel's deeper points. Holden is angry. Holden is disappointed. Holden loathes the system. Holden wants something else.

Okay, boomer! Or really, okay, greatest generation. Think about it today, Holden Caulfield would be 91 years old while other generations have been busy feeling all alienated with Holden, a few outliers among us. have been busy looking more closely at two other characters in the novel. I won't deem them minor.

The first is Holden's one time teacher, Mr. Antolini, who correctly predicts that his pupil is heading for a, quote, terrible, terrible fall, end quote. The second is Holden's younger sister, Phoebe, who, despite her tender age of 10, sees through her brother's interminable b******t. She even corrects his misquoting of Robert Burns.

It's not, if a body catch a body coming through the rye, it's if a body meet a body coming through the rye. Phoebe, like Mr. Antolini, like, Salinger understands Holden's brittle facade will shatter eventually. Do we really need to find out Holden is bereft over his younger brother Ali's death for this to ring true?

No, we don't. Perhaps Salinger worried that Holden's crack up wasn't obvious enough from his ramblings about cliffs, timetables, suitcases, and girls. Don't worry, we figured it out from the frame device of Holden's hospitalization for a nervous breakdown. Go ahead, young people, read The Catcher in the Rye and get all ate about Holden's rizz.

But let's stop using this book in classrooms and allowing students to focus on Holden as Sigma. He's no GOAT. Holden Caulfield is confused, irrational, and unstable. He's giving basic. He's giving cringe. We have many more and better books about adolescent angst these days. I salute J. D. Salinger's prescience in recognizing that teens have feelings. But let's quickly list a few of the newer novels that might replace his, like Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, and even Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero. I say, can it, to The Catcher in the Rye and the phony focus it gives, however accidental that might be on its author's part.

I hope that's not too reductionist.

We've spent a lot of time today talking about unreliable memories. We all have memories of cultural moments, traumatic experiences, and even reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. Today, I wanted to take a look at six other books that touch on the unreliable nature of memories because it's a topic that is quite important given the segmentation of perceptions in our current media landscape.

BP: It's time for yet another Six Recs, our themed book lists. And as usual, we're going to see if I can give six recommendations within three minutes. Jordan, my engineer, is going to time me. And if I can't do it, you know, the big bookshelf falls over on me. This week's theme is about unreliable memories. And I think you'll enjoy these titles. Jordan, are you ready with the stopwatch?

JA: We're rolling.

BP: Thanks. The first title is The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's a 2015 fantasy novel set in an early version of medieval England. Axel and Beatrice, a married couple, like all of their neighbors, are unable to retain long term memories. So they have this dim, dim recall that they have a son and they go off on a quest to find out about him. But will they wind up separated? It's really, really special.

Next Memory Piece by Lisa Ko starts with a section about an artist named Giselle Cho in 1990s Manhattan, who spends a year documenting her memories and then burns it all.

She's kind of a performance artist. But then we go to the dystopian Manhattan of the 2040s and a young woman named Ellen has to flee from Manhattan to the Bronx. And this book is all about which memories we are allowed to have and whose memories get recorded. It's very deep stuff.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson is that author's 1995 debut and it's all about Ruby Lennox, her family, and the York Castle Museum. It deals with how unknown events, unknown to us, affect our lives and how we don't really get it even when we learn about them. Ultimately, I think Behind the Scenes at the Museum is about the importance of a good, strong family narrative.

Memorial by Bryan Washington was one of my favorite books a couple of years back because Washington beautifully delineates the story of a gay couple named Benson and Mike who live in Houston. Mike goes to Osaka to care for his dying father while his mother, Mitsuko, goes to Houston and she's living in the apartment with Benson. How do we remember those who are absent? How do we choose? to remember them. This is what Washington is asking. And finally, what is a fitting tribute to someone who's gone?

That's another thing that Alice McDermott is writing about in Someone, her 2013 seventh novel. It deals with a woman named Marie, starting in her childhood, all the way to her old age. But it's also about her absent brother, Gabe. Who is the someone of the title? If you do read it, consider that carefully. Let me know what you think.

Finally, I have one of my favorite books from 2024, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. It's a remarkable debut novel about time travelers. and their handlers in London, in a slightly near future London. It's a sci fi rom com, but also an incisive critique of colonialism. And who do we fight for? What should we fight for? Something to think about maybe right now.

That is my six recs for today, Jordan. How did I do this time?

JA: Well, it was a squeaker this week, but unfortunately, the bookshelf falls once again. First time in season two, three minutes and six seconds. So close.

BP: Oh, thanks. We'll see you again next time.

Well that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, a literary review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue, is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

Here's a fun fact: Bethanne watched the 1981 TV production of Brideshead Revisited on three different continents. In today's episode, she discusses the many adaptations of Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs lovey for our To Be Read lists. Titles include My Beautiful Laundrette by Hanif Kureishi, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

All titles mentioned: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series, 44 Scotland Street Series, Isabel Dalousie Series, The Perfect Passion Company Series by Alexander McCall Smith, The Obelisk Gate, Broken Earth Trilogy,and Great Cities Series by N. K. Jemisin, James by Percival Everett, American Fiction,Colored Television by Danzy Senna, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, B*****d Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, Arcadia by Lauren Groff, Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, My Beautiful Laundrette by Hanif Kureishi, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters.

As always, all of the titles mentioned are up on our Bookshop account: https://bookshop.org/lists/the-book-maven-podcast-book-list-season-2 Use this link to support these authors!

Episode Transcript:

Bethanne: Welcome to season two of the Book Maven, a literary revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first, Alexander McCall Smith, author of the worldwide bestselling Number One Ladies Detective Club series, the 66 Scotland Street books, and the Isabel Dalhousie novels joined me to talk about his expertise, both as a writer, but also in ethics because you might not know this, but Alexander McCall Smith is a doctor of medical ethics and taught for many decades at the University of Edinburgh. Specifically, Smith talks about the important role ethics plays in the development of stories, as well as responsibilities writers have when publishing their stories.

Join us now in conversation as we talk about ethics, when they pertain to Smith's career, and if he applies them differently when he's writing fiction.

Bethanne: You are a more prolific writer than most I know, or many at least, and yet before you were a writer, you had another career as a legal expert on ethics, medical ethics to be precise. I often try to explain to young people that ethics is very important when we're in community. And so, in talking about the ethics of creative writing, do you feel that there are different ethics that you apply to your life as a creative, as someone who writes, and then as someone who publishes.

Alexander McCall Smith: In relation to publishing, there are very specific ethical questions, moral questions, which arise in the process of publishing, or which are about publishing, because of what publishing does. Writing has particular issues that it raises. They're all very similar to the, this is very similar to one another, but there's a different emphasis in the particular field. There are different responsibilities, you could say, which rest on the shoulders of publishers and of writers. Some of the responsibilities are the same, but there will be very particular ones according to the, to which role you're talking about.

Bethanne: So let's talk about the responsibilities of writers. This is something that I find surprises my undergraduates at times because they've never thought of writing as being something that does bear responsibility toward other people. They think of, this is part of our society, they think of books as products on a shelf and some of them love to read, some of them don't, some of them love to write, some of them don't, but they've never considered the fact that the person who tells the stories, who puts them down, actually has some things that they should read. Or shouldn't do.

Alexander McCall Smith: Yes, I think that's right. I think that some people may think of writing as being a very private activity that you sit there and you write, and that's it, and that there's no real effect that is going to be felt elsewhere. But in fact, writing is a form of talking in public. So when you write, you're putting out ideas, you're putting out statements into the world. You, if you write them and you don't publish them, if you just put them in the drawer after you've written them, that's another matter. That's not going to have any impact on anybody. But the moment you publish anything, you are potentially having quite an effect. On the real world having an effect on other people

Bethanne: So the Isabel Dalhousie series as with others but Isabel in particular because she is a philosopher there's so many questions being brought up during the course of a regular life the quotidian for Isabel always triggers thoughts about how we should live and how we should treat other people now of course, as I've said before, you have a lot of professional experience with this.

But I am wondering, when you're writing one of the books about Isabel, do you have particular ideas about this time along she's going to be dealing with love, this time along she's going to be dealing with office politics? Or does it come up for you while you're writing?

Alexander McCall Smith: Sometimes it comes up for me while I'm writing.

But in other cases, before I write the book, for example, one of the Isabel Dalhousie books, I think of issues that she probably is going to address in the books. Something will have caught my attention as raising rather interesting ethical issues, moral problems, and I will deal with it. For example, how we relate to the past is an issue that she often thinks about.

I was having a conversation with somebody recently about the issue of the return of cultural treasures from museums, the issue of whether museums should hand over treasures which have a particular meaning to the country from which they come, that's, of course, a very vexed question in certain contexts.

So that sort of thing, I'll get Isabel talking about that, because I find there's a lot of moral meat in those matters. And on other occasions. An issue will just arise in the course of the writing of the book. She'll be talking to a friend and she may reflect on the problems that particular friend has.

And, uh, we may then find ourselves in a discussion of the, the implications of friendship because friendship is something which plays a very important part in our day to day life. And friendship, of course, raises all sorts of fairly profound, philosophical issues. And if you look at a philosophical discussion of friendship going back to the time of Aristotle, there's a great scene of interesting discussion on the morality of friendship.

So these issues are all around us in our daily lives. And I think people are very responsive to a discussion of those because many people feel these moral problems in their daily life. In the way they treat others in what is expected of them. They're walking down the street, for example, and they find somebody begging, wanting help.

What is, what should one do in those circumstances? Should you walk past? Do you help? That sort of issue? It's all about us all the time.

Bethanne: It is around us all the time, and it's not just in fairly moneyed, privileged Edinburgh with Isabel, it's in Botswana with Mma Ramotswe way of course, and she, if there were ever a philosopher in this world, it is her, it is she, and she is able, and this is what I'm thinking about when you mention the everyday questions of friendship, of how we treat each other, which is why we have columns like the ethicist in the New York Times advice columns. People need all different kinds of levels of ways to think about this. You might, some people might want to read something that's fairly simple. Others want to chew on these topics a bit more, but still others, like your incredible creation, Mma Ramotswe, have very firm, firmly held, ideas about morals and ethics. Can you talk to me a bit about her and how she and Isabel differ or are alike?

Alexander McCall Smith: That raises very interesting questions, Bethanne, because I think that Mma Ramotswe is a bit of a philosopher. She's not a woman who's had a tertiary education. She left school aged about 16 or whatever. But she's a woman of immense wisdom.

She's a very wise woman. She's also a person who very much understands good. And, uh, at various points in talking about her, I describe some of the moral influences in her life, and one in particular is her late father. Who was somebody, obviously, to whom she was very close, and she talks about how he was a good kind man, that he understood the traditional morality of Botswana, and she often refers to that.

She talks about the old Botswana ways. So she turns to, um, the past of her people, and to the accumulated wisdom of that particular nation, in matters of how you should behave. And she says at one or two points, If you look at the old Botswana morality, it provides all the answers to us. So that's one, one approach.

And of course, she's, she's right. Because in those old codes of behavior are some very deep and important principles of morality that I think we'd all sign up for. So that's where she does it. She's a woman of great sympathy. And of course, many people hold the view that sympathy for others or empathy with others is a very important component in how we, how we relate morally to them and how we behave.

She has those sources available to her. Now, Isabel Dalhousie, who is the heroine of a series that I write, set in Edinburgh, she is a professional philosopher. She approaches problems in a rather different way, in that she will have a theoretical approach to them. She will understand very well the basis on which somebody like Kant, for example, would approach a moral issue.

She's familiar with the writings of all these known philosophers. So she does a rather more theoretically based morality. I think that she doesn't always get it right. Whereas Mma Ramotswe would get it right.

Bethanne: I love that!

Alexander McCall Smith: And Isabel, I think can end up, and she might end up, actually finally opting for the very common sense, intuitive morality that Mma Ramotswe embodies.

So they're both, both those women are philosophers. They're doing different sorts of philosophy, but it fits the circumstances of both of them.

Bethanne: It does. And I'm just realizing too, that these different books, including the other, one of the other series that I just adore is 44 Scotland Street and talk about quotidian day to day ethics and different ages interacting. This must be so much fun for you to be able to take these things and in one place, as you say, have a very wise and good woman, another place have a very, very academic and privileged woman, in another place to have parents and children, and it's no wonder you're able to write four or five books a year, because I'm not saying that this is pure play–it is a lot of work, but it must be work that at times feels like play for you.

Alexander McCall Smith: Yes. It's tremendous fun. I love writing. I suspect that most people who write get great pleasure from it. I love the conversations that I have with my characters, and I love getting my characters to wrestle with moral problems. Even the dogs. I've got a dog. In the Scotland Street series called Cyril, and he belongs to Angus Lordie. And Cyril is the only dog in Scotland with a gold tooth. And Cyril has moral problems. His big moral problem is that his big temptation, I suppose, is that he wants to bite. The ankles of one of the other characters, and he sits there. So we see Cyril wrestling with this very canine temptation to nip the ankles of one of the other characters who's got particularly nippable ankles. And Cyril thinks, Cyril thinks I better not do it because if I do it, I'll be walloped by my owner with a rolled up newspaper and he rises to the challenge. He manages. In his rather strange canine way, he manages to deal with that temptation. I get great pleasure from that. And also, I think, when I write about the young characters in the Scotland Street series, there's a character called Bertie–

Bethanne: Bertie is one of my favorites.

Alexander McCall Smith:He's a lovely, lovely little boy who's seven years old. He's got a terribly pushy mother, very pushy mother. And Bertie has all sorts of moral issues that his little life has to deal with, there's a very bossy girl at school called Olive, who says that Bertie's going to have to marry her when they're 20. And how does he deal with that? So these issues are all about us.

Bethanne: I do not want to take up too much more of your day in Edinburgh, but I do want to ask, since the great Hippopotamus Hotel, another Mma Ramotswe came out last October. And what is the next Alexander McCall Smith book we have to look forward to?

Alexander McCall Smith: Uh, I think the next one will be volume two of my new series, the Perfect Passion Company was the first volume in that series, the second one Looking For You is about a marriage bureau in Edinburgh, an introductions bureau in Edinburgh. As I say, the first book was published last year, second one coming out shortly in, in New York. And I'm having great fun with that because once again, one can bring in all sorts of aspects of people's lives when they go to this marriage bureau introductions agency and say, I want you to help me to find a partner. Then we can see various aspects of their lives. We can see where they've been going wrong, where they might have something to offer and so on. It's good territory from that point of view.

Bethanne: It is. And what do we, are you calling it the Perfect Passion Series or

Alexander McCall Smith: Probably the Perfect Passion Company series. It's something which I'm enjoying greatly.

Bethanne: Thank you, Sandy, for joining us this week. You can find all of Alexander McCall Smith's books wherever books are sold. Now let's move on to Friday Reads where we'll see what you've been reading this week.

Welcome back to our regular segment on Friday Reads posts from around the socials. This season we decided to highlight fewer posts and dig a little deeper for you into the titles that are shared. Please let us know if you like this new format, as always, my engineer and producer, Jordan is here to help. Jordan, what's our first book?

Jordan: At first, we've got a post from Nicole. It's a picture of what she's reading. It's the Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin, and she is reading it on an e reader.

Bethanne: You know, a great fact about N. K. Jemisin is she is one of the most acclaimed sci fi fantasy writers in the U. S. And it's her perspective as a black woman that informs the world building in her works, including the Broken Earth trilogy, which is very well known.

And her newest trilogy, Great Cities and The Obelisk Gate is book two in the broken earth trilogy, and it focuses on a supercontinent known as the stillness that every few years has disastrous fifth seasons that cause all kinds of climate, you know, uh, chaos. So. I think it's fantastic. I recommend the entire trilogy.

And it's for fans of anyone from the great Ursula K. Le Guin, to Anne Leckie, to Nisi Shawl, who writes incredible Afrofuturism, and dare I say, novelist Erika Swyler, whose newly released We Lived on the Horizon approaches worldbuilding in a Jamesonian manner that combines high concept places with big questions about how to live.

So what do we have next, Jordan?

Jordan: Up next, we've got from Suzanne MC. It's an image of a book jacket that is everywhere right now. We're talking about James by Percival Everett.

Bethanne: So this book jacket is so striking. And 2024, was it? Big year for Everett, okay? So we have the film American Fiction, based on his novel, and he also released this novel, James, and his wife, Danzy Senna, released Colored Television.

Those both are on all kinds of prize lists. It's pretty crazy. James, in case you've been under a rock, is winning accolades as a fierce retelling of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Only this time, the narrator isn't Huck. It's the fully named Jim of the original. He's called James because he is a person who is able to say, this is my preference.

Everett not only gives James his full name and a full existence, but the writing is so original and dynamic. You might forget about Twain altogether. It is for fans of Percival Everett himself, I highly recommend The Trees, and people who love literary retellings like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea or Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead.

Let's not forget incredible African American writers like Toni Morrison. Colson Whitehead and Paul Beattie. One more, Jordan, do we have time?

Jordan: Definitely time for one more. Um, this one is from M. H. Faith Brown. It's an article from the New York Times. It's about Dorothy Allison, the author of B*****d Out of Carolina, who passed away at 75.

Bethanne: Unfortunately, we lost the great Dorothy Allison last November. But she will not soon be forgotten. Her work has inspired more than one generation of readers and writers, especially those who identify as LGBTQ, because she addressed issues of sexual orientation, child abuse, and class struggle with honesty and compassion.

B*****d Out of Carolina is a semi autobiographical novel narrated by Ruth Ann Bone Boatwright, who is sexually abused by her stepfather, Glenn Waddell. It was named as one of the 136 Best American Novels by The Atlantic in 2024. This is a book, if you haven't read it yet, and many of you already have, that I think is great for fans of Lauren Groff's Arcadia, Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here, Stone Feinberg, Jeanette Winterson, Rita Mae Brown, so many more. It is an absolute masterpiece, masterwork. I hate using the word master when we're talking about women. It is a superb novel.

It may have taken us half an episode to address it, but it does happen to be the week of Valentine's Day. And that got me thinking of a classic work that deals in romance above and below the surface. In today's Pop Goes the Culture, we'll discuss the romantic lives in Brideshead Revisited and the zig zagging love life of its author as well.

Here’s a weird humblebrag: I’ve watched the 1981 TV production of “Bridehead Revisited” on three different continents. Back in the day, I swooned over Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons in the roles of Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, the protagonists of Evelyn Waugh’s iconic family saga, when it ran on Masterpiece Theater–like all good bookish girls. In 1982, I watched the entire series again while I visited family in Australia. Finally, in 1988 London, a friend and I watched this fairy tale of the British aristocracy on VHS tape.

“Brideshead” had a real cultural moment in the 1980s, which was the right time for it, too. Allow me to explain, and just imagine I’m holding a teddy bear named Aloysius, like Sebastian did, the entire time.

Evelyn Waugh, born 1903, was educated in relative privilege at a prep school and then Oxford University. He was gay and had many affairs with men, but perhaps in modern terms he was bi–he fell in love with and married Evelyn Gardner (they were known as “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn” to friends) in 1927; the marriage was over in 1929 and annulled in 1933. After converting to Catholicism, he married Laura Herbert in 1937, and had seven children. The 20th-century British criminalization of homosexuality affected his peers like W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, but Waugh got to have his cake and eat it, too.

At first Waugh considered the 1945 “Brideshead Revisited” his finest work. Nota Bene: the book’s entire title is “Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder,” just in case a reader isn’t clear about who’s narrating the mischegoss. Yes, I said mischegoss; it’s a messy plot. Waugh tosses Catholicism, aristocracy, casual crushes and serious love affairs, bitter rivalry, the road to global conflict, late-stage alcoholism, and more into the air. A few of those ideas land with distinct thuds, today.

First, given Waugh’s conversion, we can expect his sympathies to lie with the Flytes and their grand estate complete with a grand chapel for the sacraments. Lord Marchmain (keep up, those aristos have surnames and hereditary names) may have abandoned the faith and his family, but Lady Marchmain, son Bridey, and daughter Cordelia maintain lugubrious enthusiasm for masses and confessions. Yes, Evelyn, we know: Since the Protestant Reformation, England’s Catholic uppercrust has had to contend with second-class status. The poor Flytes, consigned to their nearly 9,000 acres.

Second–I do enjoy using Yiddish terms while discussing this book–Waugh keeps schtum about the relationship between Sebastian and Charles. Yet, in the adaptations, actors like Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons or Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw or Andrew Garfield and Joe Alwyn lean in to their evident heat and lust (hey, it’s the lost Merchant-Ivory masterpiece!).

The soundtrack to the post-sexual-revolution, AIDS-epidemic 1980s was filled with sexual ambiguity and confusion, except for Morrissey, who was only morally ambiguous. Queer culture was less culturally accepted than today, and Waugh’s faith still bans love outside of cishet, deity-sanctioned marriage. The repressed desire, as well as the era’s Anglophilic tendencies, made the on-screen “Brideshead” crackle with electricity, although that might just have been my family’s aging television set.

Third, Sebastian turns into the shadow self of Waugh, the classic self-hating gay man, as well as the classic self-hating aesthete. His drinking spirals further and further out of control and he eventually winds up in Tunisia, eking out a life by doing small errands for a Catholic monastery. His death doesn’t even get announced; it’s simply assumed, after Cordelia visits and sees the state of him. How. . . convenient. Charles can turn his romantic attentions to Lady Julia, then a bloodless marriage to a woman named Celia, then Julia again, and so on and so on and Scooby-Dooby-Doo. Different strokes for different folks!

We’ve seen Julian Jarrold’s and Luca Guadagnino’s versions of “Brideshead.” I’d love to see Emerald Fennell’s or Greta Gerwig’s or Anna Paquin’s versions, not so that they might skew Waugh’s heaving ocean liner of a novel feminist in ways the author himself would disdain, but so they at least might show us how the author’s forms of disdain, as well as forms of compassion, affect the female characters.

As the characters in Brideshead Revisited deal with love burning under the surface, and author Evelyn Waugh explored his own sexuality within England's societal confines of the time, we wanted to take a look at some novels that talk about love under the radar.

 We are back with another Six Recs. a themed book list and this time the theme is love under the radar. So I am going to give you six recs and some info about those. But we do have a little gamification aspect. I'm going to see if I can give six recommendations in three minutes or less. As usual, my faithful engineer Jordan is here with a stopwatch to see if I can make it.

And of course, if I don't, You know, we know the bookshelf will come tumbling down. So, Jordan, are you set?

We are rolling.

Thank you. My Beautiful Laundrette by Hanif Kureishi is set in 1980s staturite London with all of its class and money issues. And race and class come between two male lovers, one of whom runs this small laundrette, a family place.And it, the adaptation with Daniel Day Lewis was excellent. I recommend seeing that film.

Next up is Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell and this time we're in England but it's the 1500s and we're with Will Shakespeare and his wife and their children. One of those children, Hamnet, is going to have some problems and ultimately this one is about the real love that stays in a long marriage despite tragedy. So check it out.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer is one of the finest. comic novels of the 21st century. And the protagonist, Mr. Less, seems hapless, but at the same time is a very smart and very sophisticated man. It's poignant, it's winsome, it's hilarious and honest, and it's about a gay man seeking both love and professional ambitions.

Next up is one of my favorite novels from 1986. We're back in England again, sorry, Rachel Ingalls wrote a novel about a lonely English housewife falling in love with a sea monster named Larry. It got enormous critical acclaim when it came out but not huge readership and I think everyone should give it a try, it's wildly strange and terrifically wise. (Mrs. Caliban)

Next we have The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. This is an alternate history. the United States, but with very few white people involved. It's technically the story of one family, foregrounded by a young woman named Ailey Pearl Garfield's research, um, in the here and now. And the love songs are interstitials that illuminate the family's journey through time. It is one of my all time favorite novels to recommend.

Finally, Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters is an amazing and very contemporary novel. about pregnancy and parenting between people with complicated gender identities. What does a modern family look like? And even more important, how does it work? So this book is about romantic love, platonic love, parental love, and community love.

Highly recommended. There we go. Jordan, how did I do?

You came in at two minutes and 45 seconds. So a good start to the season.

It is! I'm Just thrilled, so look forward to hearing what you all think about those books if you read them, and thanks as ever, Jordan

Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven, a literary revue, is produced and hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's also produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.

Our #FridayReads are plentiful this week, with Persuasion by Jane Austen, Fantastic Pacific Crucible by Ian W. Toll,  Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs, The Bone Orchard Mythos Tenement by Jeff Lemire, Young Goodman Brown and other short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mother Tongue by Jenni Nuttall, Brushback by Sara Paretsky, Dogland by Tommy Tomlinson, Dragged Up Proppa by Pip Fallow, and The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett.  

John Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath may be a classic no more- listen to this weeks’ Canon or Can It. 

Bethanne’s Six Recs this week are about regional truth and are: The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urea, A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel, Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink, The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bettyville by George Hodgman, and The Late Homecomer by Kao Kalia Yang.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. 

All titles mentioned: Across the Wire and Into the Beautiful North and The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urea, Persuasion by Jane Austen, Fantastic Pacific Crucible by Ian W. Toll,  Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, Winter Lost by Patricia Briggs, The Bone Orchard Mythos Tenement by Jeff Lemire, Young Goodman Brown and other short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mother Tongue by Jenni Nuttall, Brushback by Sara Paretsky, Dogland by Tommy Tomlinson, Dragged Up Proppa by Pip Fallow, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett, The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urea, A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel, Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink, The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bettyville by George Hodgman, and The Late Homecomer by Kao Kalia Yang

The Friday readers tweeted about Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Free Thinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell, The Once and Future King by T.H. White, 1979 by Val McDermid, Willful Behavior by Donna Leon, and State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg. 

Little Women and its various adaptations are discussed in this week’s Pop! Goes the Culture. 

Bethanne Patrick’s Six Recs for the week are all memoirs: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner, Dirtbag Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald, The Yellow House by Sarah Broom, Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James, and finally Country Girl by Edna O'Brien. 

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. 

All titles mentioned: Courting Mr. Lincoln and The Wilds by Louis Bayard, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Free Thinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell, The Once and Future King by T.H. White, 1979 by Val McDermid, Willful Behavior by Donna Leon, State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg, The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Little Women II directed by Kōzō Kusuba, Little Men directed by Ira Sachs, Younger created by Darren Star, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins,  March by Geraldine Brooks, This Wide Night by Sarvat Hasin, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner, Dirtbag Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald, The Yellow House by Sarah Broom, Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James, and finally Country Girl by Edna O'Brien.

This week’s Canon or Can It subject is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Before we ruffle some feathers—just, hear us out.

Bethanne recommends Jim Shepard's The Book of Aaron, Percival Everett's James, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Rosa Liksom's Compartment Number Six, Marie NDiaye's Vengeance is Mine, and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

Jim Shepard's The Book of Aaron, Percival Everett's James, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Rosa Liksom's Compartment Number Six, Marie NDiaye's Vengeance is Mine, Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Tommy Orange's latest book, Wandering Stars, Patric Gagne's Sociopath, and Ludwig Bemelmans's Hotel Splendide.

This week, our Friday readers are buzzing about Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt,  Autopsy of a Boring Wife by Marie-Renée Lavoie, Theatre Kids by John DeVore, Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky, and The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei. 

The resurrection of Shogun is explained during this week's Pop! Goes the Culture 

This week, my Six Recs are: Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, March by Geraldine Brooks, James by Percival Everett, and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. 

Find me on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. Follow us on Substack for daily posts about new book releases, commentary, and more. 

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. 

All titles mentioned: Happiness Falls and Miracle Creek by Angie Kim, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, Autopsy of a Boring Wife by Marie-Renée Lavoie, Theatre Kids by John DeVore, Hot Air, Bad Marie, Very Nice, and The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky, The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei, Avengers directed by Joss Whedon, Shogun directed by Jonathan van Tulleken (and others), Orange is the New Black directed by Andrew McCarthy, Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, March by Geraldine Brooks, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, James by Percival Everett, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley and King Lear by William Shakespeare.

Our Friday readers are devouring Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell, Like Mother Like Daughter by Kimberly McCreight, By the Lake of Sleeping Children by Luis Urrea, and Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles. 

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is debated in this week’s Canon or Can It. Does this novel about love, friendship, quarrels, and class live up to canon expectations, or should it be canned forever? 

This week, my Six Recs are: The Bridgerton Cookbook by Regula Yeswijn, Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen by Rory Muir, The Time Traveler's Guide to Regency Britain by Ian Mortimer, Georgette Heyer's Regency World by Jennifer Kloester, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman, and The Secret History of Georgian London by Dan Cruickshank.  

Find me on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. Follow us on Substack for daily posts about new book releases, commentary, and more. 

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. 

All titles mentioned: A Particular Kind of Black Man, by Tope Folarin, Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell, Like Mother Like Daughter by Kimberly McCreight, By the Lake of Sleeping Children by Luis Urrea, Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles, Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, The Devil's Highway by Luis Urrea, The Wedding Singer directed by Frank Coraci, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, All the Year Round by Charles Dickens, Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, Bridgerton by Julia Quinn, The Bridgerton Cookbook by Regula Yeswijn, Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen by Rory Muir, The Time Traveler's Guide to Regency Britain by Ian Mortimer, Georgette Heyer's Regency World by Jennifer Kloester, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman, and The Secret History of Georgian London by Dan Cruickshank. 

This week our Friday Readers are glowing about Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo, The Long Call by Ann Cleeves, Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs and Drawings by Joni Mitchell, and American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures, edited by America Ferrera.

Animal Farm by George Orwell is debated on this week’s Canon or Can It. Does this novel about animals rebelling against their human masters in an attempt to improve their lives deserve its place in the literary canon? Or should it be canned forever? 

This week, my Six Recs are: Outlawed by Anna North, Gun Love by Jennifer Clement, Into the Beautiful North by Luis Urrea, Harrow by Joy Williams, American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson, and The Power by Naomi Alderman. 

Find me on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. 

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. 

All titles mentioned: The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister, Dearest by Jacquie Walters, Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo, The Long Call by Ann Cleeves, Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs and Drawings by Joni Mitchell, American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures by America Ferrera, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Outlawed by Anna North, Gun Love by Jennifer Clement, Into the Beautiful North by Luis Urrea, Harrow by Joy Williams, American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson,  and The Power by Naomi Alderman. 

In Pop! Goes the Culture, I discuss manmade monsters in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos, and docuseries Chimp Crazy on HBO Max. These stories call to question what makes a human: communication, community, or creation? 

This week, my Six Recs are: Dead in Long Beach California by Venita Blackburn, Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera, The Princess of Las Vegas by Chris Bohjalian, The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden, Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and Shanghai by Joseph Kanon. 

Find me on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. 

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. 

All titles mentioned: Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief by Jessica Hendry Nelson, The Stone Home by Crystal Hana Kim, Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Thickness of Ice by Gerard Beirne, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Beowulf (unknown), Nosferatu by Bram Stoker and F.W. Murnau, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos, Dead in Long Beach California by Venita Blackburn, Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera, The Princess of Las Vegas by Chris Bohjalian, The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden, Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and Shanghai by Joseph Kanon.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a story about guilt, shame, and female sexuality. Bethanne discusses Hawthorne’s famous denouncement of America’s “scribbling women,” and where he falls in early American literary canon. 

This week, Bethanne’s Six Recs are: Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands and Hark! A Vagrant, both by Kate Beaton, The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, Berlin by Jason Lutes, Patience by Daniel Clowes, and The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. 

All titles mentioned: Our Kind of Game by Johanna Copeland, The Vibrant Years by Sonali Dev, Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Will Gluck’s Easy A,  Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton, The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, Berlin by Jason Lutes, Patience by Daniel Clowes, and The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way.

So many readers love Jane Austen as an author unreservedly, and the same goes for Emma as a novel. But in today’s “Canon or Can It?” Bethanne deliberates on whether or not the book belongs in the canon.

Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honoré Fanonne Jeffers, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich, and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.

Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

Titles mentioned: This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, Coming to My Senses by Alyssa Harad, Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky, The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky, Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, The Lost Dumpling by Kirstin Hepburn, Be You, Mandu! by Kirstin Hepburn, Star Trek: Strangers from the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno, Emma by Jane Austen, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honoré Fanonne Jeffers, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film Clueless.

Listen to The Book Maven: A Literary Revue wherever you get your podcasts starting October 11th.