Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Transcription,' by Ben Lerner
30 May - 47 minsBen Lerner’s slender new novel, “Transcription,” is just 130 pages long, yet it cracks open some of our most colossal and enduring philosophical questions.
The novel is told in three parts. We open with an unnamed narrator going to interview his mentor, Thomas — an acclaimed artist in his 90s who also happens to be the father of one of the narrator’s friends, Max — for a magazine. Before the interview, however, the narrator’s phone breaks and he has no way to record their conversation. Rather than reschedule, he proceeds with the interview and only pretends to record Thomas as they talk.
The second section flashes to the future. Thomas has died, and the article that our narrator wrote ha...
Series Episodes
Let’s Talk About the Best Books of the Year (So Far)
It’s time for our annual midyear check-in on the books that we can’t stop thinking about.
39 mins
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Sophie Elmhirst on the True Story of a Shipwrecked Couple
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31 mins
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This Author Says You Shouldn’t Be Intimidated by ‘The Odyssey’
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43 mins
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Jill Lepore on What to Read This Fourth of July
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, Jill Lepore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, offers a reading list for the occasion. Then we round up some of the summer’s most anticipated beach reads.
52 mins
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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Yesteryear,' by Caro Claire Burke
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58 mins
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Art, Outrage and How the Culture Wars Began
Isaac Butler, an author and cultural historian, joined the “Book Review” podcast to discuss his new book, “The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars.”
34 mins
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