The Book Maven: A Literary Revue podcast

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A tartalmat a Bethanne Patrick biztosítja. Az összes podcast-tartalmat, beleértve az epizódokat, grafikákat és podcast-leírásokat, közvetlenül a Bethanne Patrick vagy a podcast platform partnere tölti fel és biztosítja. Ha úgy gondolja, hogy valaki az Ön engedélye nélkül használja fel a szerzői joggal védett művét, kövesse az itt leírt folyamatot https://hu.player.fm/legal.

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Tag Team Talent Bonus Show #1 "Mack & Jamie" 5:37

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Great short Bonus Show for all our loyal podcast fans. This week a tremendous comedy team shares comedy and music...it's "Mack & Jamie" , stars of TV's "Comedy Break"; sharing loads of musical humor. Enjoy!

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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A weekly podcast hosted by award-winning host and producer Bethanne Patrick, including themed book recommendations, interviews with great authors, and literary sizzle.
thebookmavenrevue.substack.com

14 epizódok

#Arts #Podcasting Education #Bethanne Patrick

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Megosztás

Sorozat kép•Feed

A weekly podcast hosted by award-winning host and producer Bethanne Patrick, including themed book recommendations, interviews with great authors, and literary sizzle.
thebookmavenrevue.substack.com

14 epizódok

#Arts #Podcasting Education #Bethanne Patrick

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The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Christopher Bollen's Last Resort 32:44

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32:44

Season two is in full throttle now and we cannot wait to keep spoiling you listeners! In this episode of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue , Bethanne Patrick sits down with Christopher Bollen to talk about writing characters of all ages and grounding them with location and setting. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Finding Truth in Memories with Jay Baron Nicorvo 34:44

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Welcome back to season two! In this episode of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue , Bethanne Patrick sits down with Jay Baron Nicorvo to discuss accessing trauma while writing, differing points of view of traumatic events, and how our brain sorts through traumatic experiences. 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 bullshit. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Everyday Ethics in Stories with Alexander McCall Smith 31:16

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Season two starts now! In this premiere episode of the second season of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue , Bethanne Patrick sits down with Alexander McCall Smith to discuss his philosophical female protagonists and writing multiple series at once. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Family tragedy, invisible groups, and naked wiccans with Luis Alberto Urrea 28:22

12 weeks28:22

28:22

Literary critic and memoirist Bethanne Patrick sits down with author Luis Alberto Urrea to discuss writing family in fiction. Luis is a multi-genre talent, having published pieces in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. “The magic of words” is something he fully believes in, and what it means for him to have a platform is discussed. 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 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Subverting the Marriage Plot with Louis Bayard 25:31

13 weeks25:31

25:31

Literary critic and memoirist Bethanne Patrick sits down with author Louis Bayard to discuss “the marriage plot” and his eleven novels. They talk about writing from an unfamiliar point of view and pushing yourself as a writer. His newest book, The Wilds, released September of this year by Algonquin Books. 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 is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Always Learning with Dolen Perkins-Valdez 27:29

14 weeks27:29

27:29

Book critic and memoirist Bethanne Patrick sits down with author Dolen Perkins-Valdez to discuss teaching the writing process. Chair of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors, Valdez’s latest novel, Happy Land, comes out this April with Penguin Random House. 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 is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Location Inspiration with Angie Kim 29:50

15 weeks29:50

29:50

I sat down with Angie Kim this week to discuss getting inspiration from your location, isolation, and community. Happiness Falls, a Good Morning America Book Club pick, was published in August 2023 by Random House. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Names Have Power: Tope Folarin on Autofiction 24:01

16 weeks24:01

24:01

Tope Folarin joins me to talk about the importance of a name, double-consciousness, and different kinds of privilege. Tope’s book A Particular Kind of Black Man was published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. 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 is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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Setting as a Character with Kay Chronister 29:49

17 weeks29:49

29:49

Kay Chronister joins me to talk about bogs and how environments influence a novel, Gothic vs horror elements, and physically experiencing a setting as part of the writing process. Kay’s novel, The Bog Wife , was published earlier this month by Counterpoint LLC. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

1
Writing as Therapy with Jessica Hendry Nelson 26:54

18 weeks26:54

26:54

Jessica Hendry Nelson joins me to talk about memoir vs. creative nonfiction, ownership over a story, and therapeutic outlets in writing. Jessica’s novel, Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief, came out in September of 2023 with The University of Georgia Press. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

1
Mother Is a Form of Magic with Johanna Copeland 29:52

19 weeks29:52

29:52

Johanna Copeland joins Bethanne Patrick to talk about finding community post pandemic and creation in the time of motherhood. Johanna’s novel, Our Kind of Game , came out this summer with HarperCollins. She is a former corporate attorney and fellow northern Virginia resident. 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 , D ucks: 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

1
Claire Messud on Writing Family 25:02

20 weeks25:02

25:02

In this episode of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue, Bethanne Patrick sits down with Claire Messud to discuss her book, This Strange Eventful History , and the challenges that arise when writing about your kin, good and bad. 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 . This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

1
A.J. Jacobs on Living Constitutionally 33:36

20 weeks33:36

33:36

In this premiere episode of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue, Bethanne Patrick sits down with AJ Jacobs to discuss his book, The Year of Living Constitutionally, and the dangers of living by potentially outdated texts. If there's a literary work that has been adapted into more forms than Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, well it must be Winnie the Pooh. Bethanne explores the many versions of one of literature’s most scandalous titles. Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include Family Meal by Brian Washington, The World Doesn't Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott, The Gathering by Anne Enright, The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Real Americans by Rachel Kong, and Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

1
Introducing The Book Maven: A Literary Revue 1:46

21 weeks1:46

1:46

Introducing The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. Hosted by Bethanne Patrick, who You may know online as @thebookmaven or as the author of a memoir called Life B and a book critic who’s been published in the LA Times, the Washington Post, and Oprah Daily, among others, the Book Maven: A Literary Revue is a variety show where we'll cover the canon and new books alike. Each week, we’ll do a deep dive on a classic book, talk to other writers about how books come together, p lay some games, and see what you all have been reading. Listen to The Book Maven: A Literary Revue wherever you get your podcasts starting October 11th. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenrevue.substack.com…

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The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

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