The Book Review

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, bestowing one of America’s most prestigious awards in journalism and the arts on writers across a range of categories. Among the winners were three authors who had also appeared on the Book Review’s list of the 10 Best Books of 2022: the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, for his memoir “Stay True,” and two novelists who (in a first for the Pulitzers) shared the prize in fiction, Barbara Kingsolver for “Demon Copperhead” and Hernan Diaz for “Trust.”

On this week’s episode, Hsu and Diaz chat with the host Gilbert Cruz about their books and what it’s like to win a Pulitzer.

“I wish I had a more articulate thing to say, but it was just truly weird,” Hsu tells Cruz about learning he was the inaugural winner in the memoir category. (Before this year, memoirs were judged alongside biographies.) “It was a thrill, but it was also just truly a weird out-of-body experience.”

For Diaz, the Pulitzer announcement came while he was at a fried chicken and waffle restaurant in South Carolina, where he was on tour to promote his book’s paperback release. “I totally lost it,” he says. “I had to go out and, I’m a little bit embarrassed to confess it but I was weeping sitting on the curb. And these three lovely older ladies come by and they ask me, Oh sweetheart, honey, are you OK? I’m not exactly sure what I said, but I shared the good news with them and suddenly all four of us were hugging in the middle of the street. So it was a good moment.”

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Book-banning efforts remain one of the biggest stories in the publishing industry, and on this week’s episode of the podcast, our publishing reporters Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris chat with the host Gilbert Cruz about the current state of such attempted bans and how they differ from similar efforts in the past.

“It is amazing to see both the upward trend in book bans but also the ways that the process of getting bans has evolved,” Alter says. “This has happened really quickly. … We’ve seen a lot of the book bans that have taken place in the last couple of years coming from either organized groups or from new legislation, which is a big shift from what librarians had tracked in the past, where they would see usually just a couple hundred attempts to ban books each year. And most of those were from concerned parents who had seen what their kid was reading in class or what their kid brought home from the public library. And usually those disputes were resolved quietly. Now you have people standing up in school board meetings reading explicit passages aloud.”

Also on this week’s episode, Joumana Khatib takes a look at some of the biggest new books to watch for this month.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

“King: A Life,” by Jonathan Eig

“Quietly Hostile,” by Samantha Irby

“Yellowface,” by R.F. Kuang

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Eleanor Catton’s new novel, “Birnam Wood,” is a rollicking eco-thriller that juggles a lot of heady themes with a big plot and a heedless sense of play — no surprise, really, from a writer who won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for her previous novel, “The Luminaries,” and promptly established herself as a leading light in New Zealand’s literary community.

On this week’s podcast, Catton tells the host Gilbert Cruz how that early success affected her writing life (not much) as well as her life outside of writing (her marriage made local headlines, for one thing). She also discusses her aims for the new book and grapples with the slippery nature of New Zealand’s national identity.

“You very often hear New Zealanders defining their country in the negative rather than in the positive,” she says. “If you ask somebody about New Zealand culture, they’ll begin by describing something overseas and then they’ll just say, Oh, well, we’re just not like that. … I think that that’s solidified over time into this kind of very odd sense of supremacy, actually. It’s born out of an inferiority complex, but like many inferiority complexes, it manifests as a superiority complex.”

A word of warning, for listeners who care about plot spoilers: Toward the end of their conversation, Catton and Cruz talk about the novel’s climactic scene and some of the questions it raises. So if you’re a reader who prefers to be taken by surprise, you may want to finish “Birnam Wood” before you finish this episode.

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David Grann is one of the top narrative nonfiction writers at work today; a staff writer at The New Yorker, he has previously combined a flair for adventure writing with deep historical research in acclaimed books including “The Lost City of Z” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” His latest, “The Wager,” applies those talents to a seafaring tale of mutiny and murder, reconstructing the fate of a lost British man-of-war that foundered on an island off the coast of Patagonia in the 18th century. On this week’s podcast, Grann tells the host Gilbert Cruz that one of the things that most drew him to the subject was the role that storytelling itself played in the tragedy’s aftermath.

“The thing that really fascinated me, that really caused me to do the book,” Grann says, “was not only what happened on the island, but what happened after several of these survivors make it back to England. They have just waged a war against virtually every element, from scurvy to typhoons, to tidal waves, to shipwreck, to starvation, to the violence of their own shipmates. Now they get back to England after everything they’ve been through, and they are summoned to face a court marshal for their alleged crimes on the island. And if they don’t tell a convincing tale, they’re going to get hanged. I always think of that lovely line from Joan Didion, where she said we all tell ourselves stories in order to live — but in their case, it was quite literally true.”

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It’s been more than 50 years since the publication of Judy Blume’s middle-grade novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” a coming-of-age tale that has become a classic for its frank discussion of everything from puberty to religious identity to life in the New Jersey suburbs. Despite its grip on generations of readers, though, the book has never been adapted for film — until now, in a screenplay written by the director Kelly Fremon Craig and opening for wide release on April 28. To mark the occasion, our editor Elisabeth Egan appears on this week’s podcast and talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about the novel’s importance to her own 1980s New Jersey girlhood.

“For me, Judy Blume was one of those writers — and I know that all readers have them — who just explained the world and talked about things that we did not talk about in my family,” Egan says. “I loved her constant theme of moving to New Jersey, as my family did when I was 6 years old. Most of all, I really loved her books for young adolescents, especially ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.’ It’s one of those books that I remember where I was sitting when I read it, and it kind of had a profound effect on my life.”

Also on this week’s episode, Miguel Salazar talks about the Nobel-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, and offers his list of essential books for readers who are eager to approach García Márquez’s work but unsure where to start.

“He is a mammoth figure, not just across Colombia but across Latin America. He was the face of the boom in literature in Latin America in the mid- and late 20th century,” Salazar says. “García Márquez still today remains today kind of the point of reference for American readers, and a lot of readers across Latin America, to understand their region. I think he’s most people’s first author when they turn to the region to understand it through literature.”

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As you might guess, the folks who work at the Book Review are always reading — and many of them like to juggle three or four books at once. In this episode, Gilbert Cruz talks to the editors Tina Jordan and Greg Cowles about what they’ve been reading and enjoying, and then, in honor of National Poetry Month, interviews Cowles — who, in addition to about a million other things, edits the Book Review's poetry coverage — about how he came to love it.

“I’ve always loved good sentences and surprising language,” Cowles says. “A novel has room — and is even required — to have some slack language in it. If every sentence was perfectly chiseled and honed and used surprising metaphors, you wouldn’t have the patience to stick with it. But poetry, because it’s so distilled, requires that; any slack language stands out and would ruin a poem.”

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After a spate of more or less contemporary horror novels set in and around New York, Victor LaValle’s latest book, “Lone Women,” opens in 1915 as its heroine, Adelaide Henry, is burning down her family’s Southern California farmhouse with her dead parents inside, then follows her to Montana, where she moves to become a homesteader with a mysteriously locked steamer trunk in tow.

“Nothing in this genre-melding book is as it seems,” Chanelle Benz writes in her review. “The combination of LaValle’s agile prose, the velocity of the narrative and the pleasure of upended expectations makes this book almost impossible to put down.”

LaValle visits the podcast this week to discuss “Lone Women,” and tells the host Gilbert Cruz that writing the novel required putting himself into a Western state of mind.

“There was the Cormac McCarthy kind of writing, which is more Southern," he says, “but certainly has that feeling of the mythic and the grand. But I also got into writers like Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner, even though that’s California: the feeling of the grand but also spare nature of the prose. So it was less about reading, say, the old Western writers — well, they were Western writers but not writing westerns, if that makes sense. And then, if I’m honest, I also was very steeped in, my uncle used to make me watch John Wayne films with him when I was a kid. And so I felt like that was another kind of well that I was dipping into, in part for what I might do but also what I might not do.”

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It should come as no surprise that writers and editors at the Book Review do a lot of outside reading — and, even among ourselves, we like to discuss the books that are on our minds. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks to the critic Jennifer Szalai and the editors Sadie Stein and Joumana Khatib about what they’ve been reading (and in some cases listening to) recently.

For Szalai, that includes a novel she’s revisiting some two decades after she first read it: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” which she’s listening to this time around as an audiobook. “It has been wonderful,” she says. “The narration is great and it’s told in the first person, which I think is actually an ideal feature — at least for me, when I’m listening to an audiobook. It feels a bit like a conversation or a story, a personal story, that’s being related to me. And it’s been so long since I read the book that there are certain details that I hadn’t remembered that keep coming up. And so it’s been a nice experience. I’m going through it slowly. I sort of listen to it in little snatches here and there.”

Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode:

“The Remains of the Day,” by Kazuo Ishiguro

“Look at Me,” by Anita Brookner

“The Pigeon Tunnel,” by John le Carré

“Run Towards the Danger,” by Sarah Polley

“The Color of Water,” by James McBride

“The Dirty Tricks Department,” by John Lisle

“Spare,” by Prince Harry

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The 95th Academy Awards will be presented on Sunday evening in Hollywood, with top contenders including “Tár,” “Women Talking” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” For readers, it’s a perfect excuse to revisit two recent books about the Oscars.

On this week’s episode, the host Gilbert Cruz talks to our critic Alexandra Jacobs about “The Academy and the Award,” by Bruce Davis, a former executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and “Oscar Wars,” by the journalist Michael Schulman, which she recently wrote about for the paper.

“We like to think that this is a ceremony, a process about merit. But I think that has been proven wrong time and time again,” Cruz says.

“It’s like a political election,” Jacobs says, “or a sports contest that turns on a single play or call. These books really reveal that. It’s just interesting how many times Oscar — as one of these books puts it — gets it wrong. Like, the movie that won isn’t the one that you remember, or isn’t the one that time judges as the best one. That’s fascinating to see. … You might ask, What does this ceremony matter if it’s not even adjudicating properly? But I think it matters because — look, it’s the electronic hearth around which we gather. I think it matters because people crave communal entertainment experiences.”

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It's been 50 years since Michael Lesy's influential cult classic "Wisconsin Death Trip" was published. A documentary text of found material, the book gathered prosaic historical photos of Wisconsin residents from the turn of the 20th century and paired them to haunting effect with fragmentary newspaper archives from the same time period reporting on often garish deaths — what our critic Dwight Garner, evaluating the book for its anniversary, called "horrific local news items that point, page by page, toward spiritual catastrophe. Nearly every person in it looks as if they are about to be struck by lightning."

Garner appears on the podcast this week to talk with the host Gilbert Cruz about "Wisconsin Death Trip" and the resonance it still holds in the culture.

"It evokes what long nights felt like in America," he says, "before there was electricity and radio, and before — if your child was very sick, there were no antibiotics. And maybe your child was dying. And anxiety of course could not be treated then by antidepressants or other kinds of pills. And people quote-unquote went mad more often than we'd like to think. And there were bankruptcies, people threw themselves in front of trains. There are all kinds of suicides in this book. And it just makes you wonder what was happening, what kind of spiritual crisis was going on in Wisconsin in the 1890s."

Garner is a fan of unusual documentary literature, he tells Cruz, and in "Wisconsin Death Trip" he sees not only a portrait of a vanished small-town America but also a portrait of vanished journalism. "Newspapers in America have been gutted out," he says. "You don't have small-town papers like this in many places anymore that have real staffs who report on this stuff. There's a kind of reporting in this book that is sort of the 'crazy death' that we don't read about anymore: the person at the sawmill who gets tangled up. Maybe you'll read about it somewhere. But it was more of a staple of small-town news reporting then. Even papers like The New York Times did a lot of that ... But in general what Lesy is after is stuff that almost suggests, as I said before, a kind of spiritual crisis. So many people having breakdowns. And it just makes you realize that our nostalgia for the good old American heartland, there's a real dark shadow there. And in many ways it's false nostalgia. And this book is one of those correctives that puts you in touch with the night side of life in this way that few books of documentary that I've read actually do."

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