Min Jin Lee Wants Us to Rethink Education
9 October - 56 minsFor Min Jin Lee, the process of writing fiction usually begins with a deep dive into reality. She spends years researching, traveling and interviewing people.
That process underscored her belief that education was a common and central value for Koreans in diaspora. But it was also a complicated value, one that often resulted in extreme competitiveness and impossible expectations.
In her new novel, “American Hagwon,” she tells the story of the Kohs, a middle-class family of five. The parents are fixated on attaining the best possible education for their children, thinking it will guarantee success and upward mobility. But when the 1997 Asian financial crisis hits, they find themselves havin...
Series Episodes
A Book Review Critics’ Roundtable
explicitJennifer Szalai, Alexandra Jacobs and Dwight Garner discuss their approach to reading and offer stacks and stacks of book recommendations.
41 mins
16 October Finished
Decades Later, Stephen King Is Finishing What He and Peter Straub Started
The author speaks about his new book, “Other Worlds Than These,” which completes a trilogy he began with his friend and co-writer in 1984.
36 mins
2 October Finished
Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘Etna,’ by Paul Yoon
Yoon’s latest novel is about a bomb-sniffing dog trying to make it home after a war.
55 mins
26 September Finished
John Green Knows a True Hollywood Ending is Complicated
Critic Dwight Garner talks about his review of Marlon James's “The Disappearers,” and then John Green speaks about writing his first novel for adults, "Hollywood, Ending."
57 mins
18 September Finished
The Best Books of the 21st Century: Taffy Brodesser-Akner on ‘The Corrections’
If you were a reading adult in the early 2000s, you probably tackled, or at least heard about, “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s best-selling and much discussed book. The novel won the National Book Award, was a Pulitzer finalist, and an Oprah Book Club pick. The book arrives at its 25th anniversary this month, and in today’s episode of the “Book Review” podcast, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a writer for The New York Times magazine and novelist, about why this novel is so essential to modern American literature. And that’s not just her take: “The Corrections” ranks fifth on our list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, as voted on by hundreds of influential readers. “The Corrections” is a book about America at the turn of the century; it was published just before 9/11. Brodesser-Akner, who admits to having read the novel 20 times, says that Franzen’s work “became the defining book of America’s golden moment, which ended on Sept. 10.”
47 mins
11 September Finished
