Trump Sues PRH, The National Book Award Fiction Longlist, and More Book News

Summary

Podcast Summary: Book Riot – The Podcast

Episode: Trump Sues PRH, The National Book Award Fiction Longlist, and More Book News
Date: September 22, 2025
Hosts: Jeff O’Neill & Rebecca Schinsky

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Overview

This episode dives into the latest news from the world of books, including Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Penguin Random House, the National Book Award fiction longlist, the evolving landscape of book publishing and social media, new streaming services, and current reading recommendations. The hosts, Jeff and Rebecca, discuss industry trends, award contenders, and notable recent releases while also sharing personal anecdotes and listener feedback.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Zero to Well Read Podcast Updates (01:14)

• New Episodes & Syllabus:
  • "Zero to Well Read" is releasing additional episodes, recently shifting its reading list to include Vineland by Thomas Pynchon due to an upcoming film adaptation.
  • The show’s reading list evolves with book world events, and is not published in advance to retain flexibility (03:01).
  • Rebecca explains: “some of that is giving ourselves flexibility to move the schedule around. The lineup has changed multiple times.” (03:20)
• Listener Requests:
  • Many requests to see the reading list in advance; hosts emphasize benefits of flexibility and encourage listeners to engage when they’re ready.

2. Pynchon & Film Adaptations (02:08)

• Vineland vs. New Adaptation:
  • The upcoming film "One Battle After Another" is more a "spiritual" than faithful adaptation of Vineland.
  • Discussion on the challenges of adapting Pynchon’s language-rich work to film.
• Movie Awards Anticipation:
  • "Sinners", "Hamnet," and "One Battle After Another" pegged as Best Picture frontrunners (04:34).

3. New York Publishing Notes & Book Culture Observations (05:00)

• Literary Presence in NYC:
  • Jeff discusses recent high-profile book and theater experiences in New York, including Broadway shows based on classics and museum exhibits anchored in literary history.
• Desire for “Analog Mind”:
  • Rebecca notes: “it's a way into talking about what she calls the analog mind—a mind from the before times. And that's the best part for me of reading Deep Magic.” (06:33)
  • Pre-internet books and "deep reading" are increasingly valued by readers.

4. BookTok & the Parallel Publishing Universe (12:47)

• The “Snow Globe” Model:
  • Jeff proposes TikTok/BookTok creates a self-contained universe, mostly separate from the mainstream publishing world (13:23).
  • Rebecca adds: “mainstream... is kind of mainstream trying. They're trying to sell books to all kinds of readers... But the extremely online… is catering to them with a different goal.” (14:01)
• Publisher Strategy:
  • Online successes heavily influence publisher investment decisions, but platforms like TikTok are “not a transportable ecosystem” (16:11).
• Book Bans & Library Funding:
  • Continued impact of censorship/banning; cuts to library budgets are making books less accessible and affecting publisher sales, especially in children’s and middle grade segments.

5. National Book Award Fiction Longlist (18:41)

• 2025 Longlist Highlights:
  • Full list read out by Rebecca. Personal favorites and expected contenders discussed:
    • "The Wilderness" by Angela Flournoy praised: “Just read this last week. It's fantastic.” (18:54)
    • "A Guardian and a Thief" by Megha Majumdar: noted as a Kirkus finalist and highly anticipated (19:46).
    • "Flashlight" by Susan Choi: mixed reviews from hosts, big with indie stores (20:22).
  • Notable Theory: Rebecca floats the idea that Karen Russell’s "The Antidote" might receive recognition as a “make good” for a past Pulitzer omission (21:01).
• Short Story Collections:
  • Expressed rooting for collections like "The Pelican Child" by Joy Williams (22:47).

6. Trump’s Lawsuit Against Penguin Random House (29:10)

• Key Facts:
  • Trump sues PRH and the New York Times over "Lucky Loser," alleging $15 billion in damages for supposed “actual malice” and campaign interference.
  • “[Actual malice]—the bar is pretty high. I'll drop a link into the show notes for what those are. I haven't seen any material... to think this is real.” — Rebecca (29:51)
• Legal Perspective & Impact:
  • Lawsuit is widely considered meritless, intended mainly to intimidate publishers and journalists.
  • Past similar suits (e.g., against Michael Wolff, Mary Trump, Bob Woodward’s publisher) all failed.
  • Chilling effect on smaller publishers and local newspapers discussed: “What if Gray Wolf had a book, right? What if the Lawrence Journal World had a story?” — Jeff (32:38)
  • Both hope well-funded publishers will withstand chilling tactics.

7. Scholastic Launches Streaming Service (35:55)

• Surprise Move:
  • Scholastic introduces a standalone streaming platform for kids’ content, including “Clifford the Big Red Dog”, “Magic School Bus,” and more.
• Industry Analysis:
  • Rebecca questions why not license to existing streamers: “I’d be really curious… what the business case was for making this a separate thing, especially in a time... streaming [is] contracting.” (36:06)
  • Jeff speculates schools/library systems, not private homes, may be the true target audience.
  • Move could be linked to ongoing censorship pressures in schools/libraries.

8. Vocabulary Corner: The “Jefftionary” (40:04)

• New Words:
  • “Eft” (41:13): “It is a small newt. They're very adorable.” — Rebecca.
  • “Labile” (41:33): “Means mercurial, changeable…” — Jeff.
  • “Soignèe”: “Describes someone who’s elegant.” — Jeff (42:11).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Reading Pre-Internet Canon:

  • “All of the books that we're talking about... were written before the Internet as we know it now. And it does feel like engaging with a different kind of writing and a different kind of thinker that's really refreshing and very welcome.” — Rebecca (06:33)

• On Spoilers for Classics:

  • “The Great Gatsby is 100 years old. Sit down.” — Rebecca (08:52)

• On BookTok’s Influence:

  • “Online book talk… is like a snow globe that's bigger than the real world in a lot of ways.” — Jeff (13:23)

• On Trump’s Lawsuits:

  • “The point… is not this specific book. It is to make it a pain in the ass and scary for people who want to publish books, articles, reporting that are unflattering to the Trump administration and to Donald Trump individually.” — Rebecca (31:34)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Patreon/“Zero to Well Read” Updates: 01:01 – 04:00
• Pynchon, Movies, & Adaptations: 02:08 – 04:55
• NYC Literary Culture Observations: 05:00 – 07:29
• TikTok & Parallel Publishing Universes: 12:47 – 16:11
• Book Censorship and Funding: 16:07 – 18:41
• National Book Award Fiction Longlist: 18:41 – 24:00
• Trump’s Lawsuit Against PRH: 29:10 – 34:42
• Scholastic Streaming Platform Launch: 35:55 – 38:34
• Vocabulary Corner (Jefftionary): 40:04 – 43:20
• Recent Reads and Recommendations: 44:26 – 53:52

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Recent Reading Recommendations

• "Mother Mary Comes to Me" by Arundhati Roy (44:26): Praised as an engrossing, complex memoir about Roy and her formidable mother. “I cannot recommend it enough.” — Rebecca (46:42)
• "Baldwin, A Love Story" by Nicholas Boggs (47:33): A thorough and newly-archived biography centered on four of Baldwin’s key relationships.
• "The Ten Year Affair" by Erin Summers (51:27): Anticipated to be one of Jeff’s top ten novels of the year; described as “a how we live now for a certain kind of thing” and reminiscent of the best traditions of novel-of-manners (52:47).

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Tone & Atmosphere

Warm, intellectually curious, and reader-focused, with the hosts’ usual blend of insight, humor, and candor. Industry analysis is balanced with fan-level enthusiasm for literature, sharp observations about culture, and some gentle poking at industry oddities and podcast listeners’ quirks.

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For further content, including newsletters and additional episodes, listeners are directed to the Book Riot website and related podcast feeds.

Transcript

[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

This is the Book Riot podcast. I'm Jeff O'.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Neill. And I'm Rebecca Schinsky.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And we're trying not to get sued out here. Rebecca, that's, I mean, is that, I mean, I'm kind of not kidding.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It feels, you know, maybe not inevitable, but not absolutely unlikely in this political.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Small fish in a big pond is our only, only defense here. So we'll get into the news of the week. Let's see a couple things to let you all know about Zero to well read. There are two episodes out now. Another one is coming that we're recording later today. So by the time this is out in the public, you Patreon folks will be a few days away. Episode three will be out in which we experiment with kind of we messed with our syllabus a little bit by crashing Vineland. Vineland by Thomas Pynchon ahead of anticipation of In Conversation with One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson, which is coming out next week, which is based on Vineland, I cannot tell. And we'll probably have a section of our conversation later today about what we think the movie is going to be. I was looking at casting and characters. I don't know if you've done that, Rebecca. It doesn't line up neatly.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It doesn't.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But that could be covered.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I do know that it's set in the 90s, which is later than the pension book. The characters have different names. So I'm guessing that we're getting more of a like spiritual adaptation than a faithful to the plot adaptation. I bought my ticket to One battle after another last night. I'll be ready to Talk about it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Next week and if ever there were, I'll preview this way. Pynchon is such a creature of language that Paul Thomas Anderson will have to deploy and his screenwriters and teams and actors and all the people that go into movie making as. As Vito Corleone says in the God, for all their skills and all their abilities to see what they, you know, see what they've done to my.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's gonna be very, very interesting to see. And since you mentioned that we had crashed this episode in, we've gotten a ton of emails and questions from folks who want the reading list for zero to, well, read in advance. We see you, we love you, we appreciate you. And one of the things that we're trying to do with the show is give ourselves flexibility when there's breaking news about an author, when something important happens, when a big adaptation starts to get a lot of heat, and we wanna turn to that. So we have shared a few versions of the with the Patreon members. They have gotten to see it as it has been updated several times. But we don't have any plans to publish the syllabus for this in advance. If that is gonna drive you nuts, I'm so, so sorry. But we really do wanna make the best show that is as relevant and relatable as possible. And some of that is giving ourselves flexibility to move the schedule around. The lineup has changed multiple times. And one of the beautiful things about these episodes is that the books are evergreen. And so if you haven't read it right before the episode drops, we would love for you to just download that episode and save it until you've had a chance to read the book and come back to us.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And in the spirit of Vineland, in one battle after another, there very much is a servicey part of this where Pynchon is a tough.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

As I learned this week.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean. Well, we'll talk about it and not. Well, no. I mean, Vineland is maybe his fourth most famous book after V, Gravity's Rainbow and the crying of Lot 49, I'd say. Now, I mean, Anderson already did one Pynchon adaptation in the form of Inherent Fights, which is quite good. But this is very much like what is the deal with this book to the point where you can Wikipedia and get some of it. But I think having some folks who have read and wrestled with the text might be interesting if you're gonna read the discourse. The reviews have been wonderful for the movie so far. I expect this to be a movie that gets talked about into awards season and it sort of seems like Sinners, Hamnet and One Battle After Another are feeling like front runners for best Picture, best movie.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Incredible reviews for Hamnet too, so far. Yeah, we're having a good attitude.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Can I do zero to well read Corner just for a second? Sure. I don't think I've been on the regular pod since I was in New York and I was doing publishing meetings and doing New York things. Michelle came out for a few days beforehand and we had some time in the city together. And I don't know if it's because we're in the middle of zero to well read. We're thinking about the sort of the valences of what it means to be well read, the rewards thereof. But as I was walking around the city, I just took some notes about works from the past or the near future, the near recent past that are in the ether. So here's a couple things I noticed. One, I went to go. We went to go see a Broadway show, last minute show called and Juliet, which is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, but using the songs of Max Martin, who's maybe the greatest pop songwriter of all time. I texted you to say that all I needed in life was to hear the words I want Anne Hathaway.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Amazing shit.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Will Shakespeare character to the to the tune of I Want it that Way. And it was a lot of fun. So there's Shakespeare right there. There's also on Broadway right now, the Great Gatsby musical is there. Shakespeare in the park was cooking. There were lines out the door we couldn't get. We didn't want to wait all lines all day. We couldn't get tickets there. I went to go see a exhibition at the Met called Superfine about black dandies. And it was organized around Zora Neale Hurston seminal essay, thirteen Ways, thirteen Ways of Negro Expression. So Zora is in the air, too. It's just all over the place, Rebecca. If you have ears and eyes to look and see and hear, it's there waiting to get more out of life. It is.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And we are hearing from folks, you know, both people that we're in regular conversation with and folks who are sort of coming in from the edges of our social circles, the edges of the book riot circles, to tell us that they too are wanting to put down the Internet a little bit more often and pick up a book that they can read deeply. One of my friends is a professor of literature at a private college up in the Northeast. And she was like, I'm talking about zero to, well, read in all of my classes because it's. I know, first of all, bless. But because it's a way into talking about what she calls the analog mind, a mind from the before times. And that's the best part for me of reading Deep Magic. Yeah. Reading. All of the books that we're talking about on this season of the show were written before the Internet as we know it now. And it does feel like engaging with a different kind of writing and a different kind of thinker that's really refreshing and very welcome.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And reading Pynchon is black belt reading, I would say. And there's a lot of martial arts metaphors in violence, actual ninjas. I hadn't read it in 20 years. Are you going to be getting a tattoo of Floozy with an Uzi? Just a girly with a gun. I wondered if you'd like that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I did enjoy that. It was funny. I really like. I did actually spend Internet time looking to see if someone had made fan shirts for a bar called the Lost Nugget. Because as an established fan of the chicken tender, like, I really need a T shirt for the Lost Nugget. That does not exist. My other favorite thing was the landscaping company called the Marquis de Sade. Unbelievable.

[Jeff O'Neill]

A BDSM landscaper called Marquis de Sade.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So funny. So there is one. There is one Marquis de Sade landscaping in the US Whether they read the pension or not, I don't know. But I would like those pieces of swag.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So anyway, we don't want to give away the whole show there, but there's a lot to be gleaned from that. Yeah. And it's just kind of. It's in the air. There is a pot. Please give us feedback. It's a little different than some of the other things that we've done where the show is changing even just a little bit incrementally as we do more. So, like, if you send us feedback, it's not going to be worked in right away, but we do want to hear what you say. There are spoilers. It's in the show notes. It's in the description. You know, we've gotten at least one Apple review that somebody, the Great Gatsby.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Is 100 years old. Sit down.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I don't, I mean, listen, if you don't want to get spoiled, that's fine, but it's a little, it's a little strange to be like, wait, I didn't know that this hour long podcast with a Great Gatsby would talk about anything that actually happens in the book. Also the Book Riot newsletter if you want more content from us. So what I did what I have in today's I had my the three notable Robert Redford adaptations a personal favorite and then one to skip that one to skip a also may be relevant to recent well read zero to well read subject matter. I also wrote about Kaplan's plot which I don't think I'm going to talk about in the pod today. You can see over there and then Rebecca, you've been really captaining the ship. What are the other nuggets from this week if people haven't signed up, they've missed out on?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We had a great set of reading recommendations from Sasha Bonet, whose memoir the Water Bearers is out. That's really lovely. I'm doing we're doing new releases every Tuesday with highlights of like the week's biggest new release and a a hit list of another couple to check out. Of course we're talking about the National Book Awards finalist or long lists that were announced this week. We'll talk about that some on the show. But it's a really nice mix of news of the day recommendations, connections to authors and new books and generally bookish stuff like High Fidelity by Nick Hornby turned 30 last week and I five of my favorite books about music and we're just looking for all kinds of interesting hooks. I it's I'm having a great time so far. I hope you're having fun with it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm. I'm enjoying it. It's I've been a little nutty this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Week, but there's been like what's going to happen on these podcast recordings. The next couple days is feeling really fun to me because there has been a kind of manic quality to you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All shields are down.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Shinsky, you're tired. That's already what there's just a tired and a big energy and when those things intersect, it's anybody's guess. So here we go.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The dilithium crystals are only powering the impulse engines. All other systems are offline.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

He is made of what Diet Coke with the good ice.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, that's right. Nugget ice and clif bars is what we're we're powering the good USS Enterprise on this week. Let's get into the show after this break. Race the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an Enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started today at LinkedIn.com Campaign terms and conditions apply.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

When did making plans get this complicated?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn [e-mail] I had a couple of.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Notes from my talks with publishers and publicists in New York. I talked to you some about the business side, Rebecca, but I saved a couple of more general interest things here.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Love to you, of course I would. I love it when you've got a surprise ready for me.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Couple conversations about book talk versus the not the real book world, but we have talked here about how it feels like these online book talk Instagram to a lesser degree phenomenons are on a pair. They're in a parallel publishing system and I floated that to a few people and I don't know if it's confirmation bias. It certainly could have been. But that metaphor of a snow globe universe inside of it's like a snow globe that's bigger than the real world in a lot of ways. I don't know how that would work.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's hard to find a good metaphor for it. I think parallel is the best one we've found so far.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And that there they don't seem to be bleeding that much into each other. Right? They don't, you know, people who are doing a lot of their reading in Romantasy or now I guess Dramion fan fiction is the new Romantasy or a sub genre or dark academia or horror fantasy, which seems to be the portmanteaus du jour. They don't really bleed into nor I won't say normal, regular median average. I don't know.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I keep wanting to call it like mainstream. Like it feels to me that the Rest of publishing is kind of mainstream trying. They're trying to sell books to all kinds of readers that they find in all kinds of places. And then the extremely online, especially extremely TikTok focused like largely romantasy, some of the other romance genres, very trope heavy readers driven by specific tropes and they're looking for very certain kinds of stories. It feels to me like that publishing is catering to them with a different goal. Kathleen Schmidt wrote a great piece for her substack a couple weeks ago, sort of identifying the divide between publishers who are catering to book consumers and publishers who are catering to like book critics or to the kinds of readers who are interested in those basically everything else. But it does I think Even maybe like TikTok books and non TikTok books is.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It may be that simple. And the. I don't want to. I'm not belittling, besmirching, minimizing them. They're just not what I tend to read. But it makes for an interesting dynamic where a couple people said that their imprint, you know, as part of a group at one of these houses that works in those areas like are kind of carrying the P and L for the rest of the companies. I would say on the whole that publishers are feeling okay. Ish. Some of the specialty publishers have had a devil of a time navigating tariffs, especially for more complicated, you know, cookbooks, picture books. Sideline kinds of items that aren't.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So many books get printed in China. So many.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And it's depending on what they are and what they're doing. It can be quite difficult there. A lot of people are doing stuff on social as you might imagine. But it does seem like a lot of it is. If it works on social organically, then it's worth investing publicity and marketing efforts into it. But you don't want to try to cross the streams. Doesn't seem to be a generative or fruitful mode. And then there is the, you know, is the Trump administration going to ever enforce that TikTok is operating essentially illegally right now?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Not as long as it's functioning as a right wing propaganda machine.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And apparently we're. We're concocting cockamamie deals to skirt it, like whatever. But still, I think there's also the sense is that is not a transportable ecosystem that if that were to go away or shift away from it, it's hard to know the pillars upon which that can be built. I have heard from folks that publish young adult and younger that the book censorship and banning mode is affecting not necessarily what they're acquiring, but the drawdown from that is actually there's less money going to these library systems as well. Because not only do we not want the Brooks to be there at all, like you can also chalk choke off access to books by just not giving people dollars. You can just circumvent the whole let's review if this book is appropriate so that people just can't even buy the damn.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, there's that happening and then just so many public libraries are losing funding. If they're not being completely defunded, they're losing significant chunks of funding. They just have less money to spend on books. And public libraries are a very important segment of the customer base. Publishers.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And then also, you know, I still continue to hear now and again some echo booms of Barnes and Noble not caring as much. Front list debut non already selling elsewhere. Middle grade especially because that is the mode of discovery for parents. Because you go in and browse and you go in with your kids and you and you browse that way. And notably, you know, middle graders aren't on TikTok. You know, legally they can't be. And also the kinds of people buying for their kids aren't wanting to be. You know, I would guess the kinds of people who want to buy books for their middle graders are of my sort of spiritual cohort, which is I don't want to traffic in that even defined recommendations. I don't think it's where I want to live. So that doesn't seem to be going particularly well. And you know, it could be that it's an ebb tide and you know, time and tide will roll back in again. But that did seem a place where morale was more abund, to say the least. Yeah, that was kind of. Those are my top line notes there. All right, we've got, we've got some National Book Awards fiction. Long list. I guess it's September, which still technically summer, but it's time to start talking about long list for fiction. Boy, have we we've encountered wrestled with several of these so far, singularly and together we have.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So I'll read all 10. The true true Story of Raj the Gullible and His Mother by Robbie Alamudine Flashlight by Susan Choi, which you and Sharifah book clubbed here on the pod. Neither of y' all was a big fan of it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

B B B plus.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

All right. The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy. I just read this last week. It's fantastic. The Sisters by Nice and Short too. Yeah, the Sisters by Jonas Hasan Kamiri. A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, which is also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction this year. That one's kind of. That's comes out in October. Really Having a Run. Only Son by Kevin Moffatt. The Antidote by Karen Russell, which we book clubbed together earlier in the year here. I think we gave that one a B. Like it's long and most of it is very good. And then she says the thing too overtly at the end for. For my taste. North sun or the Voyage of the Whale Ship Esther by Ethan Rutherford, Palaver by Brian Washington and the Pelican Child by Joy Williams. Very interesting list.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Very interesting list. One of these will win the National Book Award for fiction. I mean that's the nature of the long list. So I'm kind of trying to stare at it and see again. I've read three I guess of these Palaver's on my list. The Guardian of the Thief was not before the Kirkus. But then I started seeing some previews and other things. I'm interested.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I've got that one on my list now. I would love to see it go to Angela Flournoy. But I've not read the rest of them, so it's hard. It's hard to know. Like I'll. I'm gonna choose my fighter. Once the finalists are announced, it's usually the direction I'll go.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I do want to know what I'm looking at. I'm. I've seen some indie bookstores and McNally Jackson had like a Just Trust us thing which I thought was cool around flashlight. I know some other people liked it quite a bit better than Sharifa and I did I. The. The thumbnail version of that. It was quite long.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

She won it. She won the National Book Award for Trust exercise, right?

[Jeff O'Neill]

She did. She did. Or was that the Pullit? One of the two big ones. I can't remember which one it was now. You're probably right, but just sort of staring at it. I want to get Palaver under my belt.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Me too.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Before I. Before I say more.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I can see a case for the wilderness. It's so timely. Like really speaks to the current political moment. But I'm sure several of these do. I want to float a theory by you. I did not expect to see the Antidote by Karen Russell make this list. And my theory now is that we might see it show up at the Pulitzers as a make good for the 2012. No Pulitzer. When Swamplandio was listed, the judges Are.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean, I love that conspiracy theory. Kudos to you. My tinfoil cap off to you every now and then.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Or maybe it's just Thomas Pynchon getting to me.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But I just had a moment of like, oh, are we gonna see? You know, like sometimes the actor gets the Oscar for the wrong movie because everybody realized that they should have gotten the Oscar two movies back and they lost. And it's. I don't. I don't know. The Pulitzers are mysterious. It could happen.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Two thoughts on that. I love the theory. Karen Russell is not Scorsese. I will say that I agree. And B, the judges are different.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The small. The. The Strike Team that does the actual.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I know this but don't you think, like somebody might be thinking about the fact that there really should have been a Pulitzer awarded in 2012? I'm just saying it's possible.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I. I like. I like the theory.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's not.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's why it's conspiracy theory and not an actual.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's not what I want to have happen. I liked the antidote. I do not think it should win one of the major awards of the year.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. I also. So the Pelican Child by Joy Williams is short stories.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I want that book cover as a tattoo somewhere that is so striking.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Two birds. North sun has a puffin or penguin look, you know, looking straight at you. And then a. A pelican in profile holding a candle or just next to a candle. Looks very awkward there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It just looks wonderful. I will and I will also always root for the short story collection that makes the National Book Award.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's. That's fine. The other one I wanted to look at is just real quickly north sun, which is kind of a throwback because it follows. It's like a seafaring story in 1878. A whaler that feels like a throwback. And that could work for or against it. It feels different enough to some degree. It's an interesting list. I guess we don't. Well, any. Any glaring omission or things were not. We're in the world of taste generally speaking, sans James. We're not going to be too open arms about anything. Of course I would have liked audition.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Of course.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I certainly think that it's worthy of it. But I also can see that a group of three people if one of them it just completely missed you. I can totally see that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I also would have liked to see audition on here. But since we haven't had a big literary novel of the year and we weren't expecting the other big book of the year, Katabasis to be a National Book Award long listed title. I don't feel myself. There wasn't anything that I was like waiting to see it on here. It felt like all 10 were. It was wide open and you could make some guesses. It seems likely that you're going to see Flournoy just based on the reception of the book so far. Likely that you're going to see Susan Choi because as divisive as she can be, the awards crowd tends to really love her books. But everything else really felt like anybody's guess to me. There's nothing that I'm missing here. I think it's going to be very interesting to see which one about the.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Lockwood which I haven't read yet but I wondered about that one for this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah that's my. I'm. I don't know if it's ill advised or a great plan but I'm going to veer out of Pynchon and write into Patricia Lockwood. So like next time if I really sound like I've been on drugs, you'll know it's Lockwood's fault.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We've covered even more of the finalists for the Discover Prize as a percentage because here we have Tilt by Emma Petit which both of us has read. And then I talked to Emma on First Edition. The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Steeds which I do not know anything about though it is set in Provence which immediately goes to the top of my.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You have a whole little collection of Provence books. You can add that too.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I do. The great excuse me, just great. Black Hope by Rob Franklin, which both of us really liked. Maggie. Or A Man and Woman Walk into a Bar by Katie Lee, which you read.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I did.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I really liked that one Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu which I am going to be reading because between Mother Mary comes to me. Lonely Crowds and then Post Traumatic by Chantelle Johnson. Cool women smoking cigs in black and white on on literary titles. I really something I'm interested love this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Micro genre that's emerging for you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's terrific.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And then Kaplan's Plot by Jason diamond which again you featured in the newsletter. You've talked to him for First Edition.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't know if that's coming out tomorrow or later today. My conversation it's a two parter one with Sasha Bonet for the Water Bearers and one for Jason Diamond's cap. I'm really looking forward really interesting list here Rebecca. Any. Any. Any man I would honest I'D be.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Thrilled to see any of the ones that we've read and any friends of the podcast get it. Of the ones that I've read so far, Maggie Katie Yee felt the most fully formed to me, the closest to not being someone's debut novel. I really liked Great Black Hope, but I felt some debut novel problems. Tilt, I thought was wonderful, but also like, it's a little lighter in its big the big ideas. It's lighter on big ideas than a lot of award winners tend to be, but it is a debut that promises an interesting and fun career.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's pretty.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's on rails.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's on rails. It really is.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's a great reading experience. But I have pretty high hopes about Kaplan's plot and the reviews have been great for Jason diamond, so this one also feels wide open. I'll be happy for whoever the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize is one of those awards. You're just happy kind of no matter what. Because it's hard out there to be a debut novelist, and for any of these folks to get the kind of attention on their books that it brings is always really exciting.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I might just linger on Kaplan's plot for a moment just because I didn't include In Frontline's Fury, because I couldn't actually remember if I talked about it before.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think you mentioned it a little bit.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I really liked it. So it's a dual timeline, really, where there's a character in the present. I believe his name is Elijah. It's been several weeks since I remembered everyone's name who is said in the modern, modern ish day. It could be a little a few years ahead of us right now, a few years behind. Doesn't. Doesn't really matter who comes back. His mom is is terminally ill and they have a fraught relationship and a lot of their family's past has not been discussed forthrightly. And because of this sort of end of life thing that can happen to people, it offers this, you know, Achilles tent where you can say the things that sometimes you haven't said before. And he starts to unwind and hear new stories. And there's a literal plot that he is in that he inherits and he learns the story of his family's immigration to Chicago and what, you know, the costs of that immigration, everything else. I thought it was. It was good. I think it is. It's a debut novel and I think it's a very good one. But it has some debut novel things, which is okay. Which is okay. But I really liked it. It's a great Chicago book. It's a great food book. It's a great mob book. Not to give too much away, but I really like that there as well, so I can get my recommendation there. I'd be happy for any of these. I want to get to lonely crowds before the year is up. I've picked it up like six times at Powell's and read the first page. Like, yeah, I want that. Just. I've got something else to do right now. I don't know, Thanksgiving week. I'm not sure what's going to happen.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But I'm very excited we'll be done reading for this semester of zero to well read right before the holidays. And then.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, there you go. I can sprint and clean up. You know, I guess the other one I was surprised not to see. I'm going back to the. The NBA list. Sorry, Rebecca. The. The new Kieran decide.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That was. Yeah, that is a surprise. I mean, it's on the Kirkus list and the Booker finalist. I won't be surprised to see it show up on some other big awards this year.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm not sure how much to say or what to say about Trump's defamation lawsuit that was brought against Penguin Random House specifically for the publication of Lucky Loser. The early indications are that this is bogus, sort of as a legal matter, which is. Shouldn't be surprising to anyone. On the other hand, it's an awfully big cudgel to chill, prevent, extort in the. In the. In the. Through the use of settlements, and otherwise abrogate dissent or frankly, just coverage. It's not even dissent at this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it's. It's. That's right. This is a bogus claim, by any indication that I can find. It's filed against the New York Times and four New York Times reporters, two of whom then went on to write Lucky Loser, which PRH published. So PRH is also named in the suit, and Trump is suing them for $15 billion with a B, claiming that it was published with actual malice, which is a legally important term, and that it was that the coverage in the paper and then the material that went on to become the book were intended to disrupt, interfere with the 2024 campaign and prevent him from becoming president. He claims that they have resulted in significant professional and personal cost to him. Now, he is still the president. So how much it affected the campaign is anybody's question, anybody's guess. But this actual malice thing, there are four standards that a claim has to meet to be considered actual Malice. The bar is pretty high. I'll drop a link into the show notes for what those are. I haven't seen any material that leads me, a person who is not a lawyer, to think this is real. But the point again, is not this specific book. It is to make it a pain in the ass and scary for people who want to publish books, articles reporting that are unflattering to the Trump administration and to Donald Trump individually. It's worth noting that while some publications have settled with Trump and with the administration, none of his suits against publishers in the past have been successful. He sued in 2018 over Michael Wolf's book Fire and Fury. He sued to try to stop the publication of his niece Mary Trump's tell all memoir. And then he later sued Simon and Schuster claiming copyright infringement. When Bob Woodward published an audiobook of the tapes of their interviews that went into one of Woodward's books about Trump, all of those were either dismissed by the judge or ultimately dropped by the Trump administration. The point is not necessarily to publish the people or to punish the people who have already published this work, though that is part of it. It's really to have a chilling effect on anyone else, to make it scary, to make it seem costly, because it is costly to go to court and to deal with all of this and to make people pause before they issue a professionally critical opinion.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Listen PRH in the New York Times of the sort of fourth estate establishments that could weather something like this. This is number one and number two in their respective businesses. They're deep pocketed and lawyered up, and they've been doing this a long time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Not new to the game of publishing difficult books about political figures, but.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And so these particular individual instances are loathsome and meritless and bad. It's not these that I find the most damaging. It's what if Gray Wolf had a book, right? What if the Lawrence Journal World had a story? That's my hometown newspaper. That to my knowledge is not part of a giant. Even the giant conglomerate of newspapers aren't doing as well as the New York Times. And they're. These folks are lawyered up. I spoke to CEO of Hachette, David Shelley for an episode of First Edition. I might repost in this feed too, because I think people will find it interesting.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, that's good because I have it on the schedule for this feed.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, good, I'm glad we were thinking across the digital ether about the same thing. But they're lawyered up and I asked them specifically. He's like, well, to be Honest. I'm paraphrasing now. We have a lot of great lawyers and they keep us briefed and they sort of pick and choose, but they have a good sense of what we should do here. But just the intellectual, internal energy and resources it takes to successfully defend these is not in concern.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

No, not at all.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And it does. It's. It's just a. It's just a damn shame. It's just a deal.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think we're only going to see more of this. Like, in the last week, so much cover has been extended to the Trump administration to go after anyone who is critical of them now that they believe that they've seen an act of public violence committed by a left, the movement on the left, and that, that, you know, these folks ran on free speech. They ran on, you should be able to say whatever you want, but we are really seeing. And not a surprise if you've been paying attention, but if you've got folks in your life who are like, he's for free speech. He's for, you know, letting everybody do their own thing, that is not what we're seeing here. Cancel culture is when individuals like gather, when the people gather together to call out someone in power. What we're seeing from this is actual censorship that's happening now when the government is coming after folks.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, at least he's not making a lot of money through other ventures to fund his frivolous and chilling lawsuits. No. No good things to say there. May your efforts, may the lawyers, the white shoe lawyers at New York Times and PRH be well compensated and successful for that. You know, I didn't see this next one coming because between, well, I guess PBS is being defunded, but between Netflix's moves, YouTube's moves, Amazon's move into children at Disney plus, there are a lot of places to go for children's streaming programming. But Scholastic has decided to throw their hat into the ring here. On the one hand, Rebecca, it seems to me that this is a. A quixotic attempt to, you know, rather than tilt at windmills, to knock windmills and hope money falls out of them. On the other hand, I do wonder if there is a. There is a appetite among some parents for a trusted source of children's programming because we have had conversations with our children about just surf and YouTube leads you to some nightmare that leads you in some rip times. You don't want to get sucked out.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Into wondering where young men are being radicalized today. It's largely unusual. YouTube.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes. Yeah. So I wonder that. But, boy, it's hard, it's hard for me to see this. This is really taking.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's interesting here to see Scholastic launching their own streaming platform. They've partnered with Story Media Group and Future today and there's 400 hours of content in it, like Clifford the Big Red Dog, Magic School Bus, Goosebumps, the Babysitters Club, like Animorphs and Garfield and Barney and Friends, stuff that even like we would have watched as kids. So really a nostalgia play as well. Maybe it's the trusted source angle that made them go for their own standalone app instead of like. My biggest question about this was why not license all of the Scholastic content out to one of the streamers where like Netflix has the kids setting? I don't know how good it is. I don't have kids in my house, but you can, you know, like, why isn't this part of a Netflix situation? Was it more lucrative for them to do it on their own or. I'd be really curious to hear about what the business case was for making this a separate thing, especially in a time where we're seeing streaming start to contract rather than licensing it out to an existing platform.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Here's another thought. Maybe I'm thinking about this incorrectly, where the primary customer is not individual parents, but a school system or library system where you can make it a part of your library's offerings. That's smart and you could do a lot of things that way. And I wonder, as Scholastic has had some difficulty with its book fairs and other things in Florida and other places, I wonder if it's. There's less scrutiny given to 8 minute Clifford the Big Red Dog short form video that people can pay for, right? Rather than. This is the chilling effect we were just talking about two stories ago, right? The money and effort is going to be poured into more lucrative only because of right now. People don't have the appetite for or like, you know, some of them honestly don't want this politically, which I think is backwards. But you know, it's not. It's not necessarily the same thing as people would like to have it in their system, but because of all of the mishigash that comes along with it, they're like, okay, let's, let's do this thing instead. So it could be a couple different reasons I'll be curious to see. I can only imagine the development must have been expensive in the ongoing marketing, everything. There's a lot of money that goes into it. But boy, given the consolidation that's happened in streaming, a surprising counter narrative to see Scholastic launch something. Right now. Disney's Lilo and Stitch has finally landed on Disney. Now you can watch the global phenomenon at home with your ohana.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Be good for one second.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You're the devil. Lilo and Stitch is verified hot on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score of 93%. Wow.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Stitch also cute and fluffy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Disney's Lilo and Stitch, rated PG now streaming on Disney. And right now you can get Disney, Hulu and all of ESPN with an incredible limited time offer. Terms apply. This episode is brought to you by FXX and Hulu. An all new season of Futurama is back. Blending heartfelt moments with razor sharp humor while accidentally saving the day. The Planet Express crew is back, defying gravity and common sense. From the creator of The Simpsons comes 10 new episodes where the romance is hotter, the threats are bigger, and the action hits harder. Don't miss the all new season of Futurama. Watch it Mondays on FXX or streaming on Hulu. I'm Scott Hanson, host of NFL Red Zone. Lowe's knows Sundays hit different when you earn them. We've got you covered with outdoor power equipment from Cobalt and everything you need to weatherproof your deck with Trex Deck 8 plus with lawn care from Scotts and of course pit boss grills and accessories, you can get a home field advantage all season long. So get to Lowe's, get it done and earn your Sunday Lowe's official partner of the NFL. All right, shall we do frontless foyer? Do we. Anything else we want to map? Oh, how do we do this now? Do we do vocabulary first or frontless foyer? I guess vocabulary first.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Sure, let's. I mean, let's do vocabulary corner. And I like the new phrase we have now, the Jefftionary.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, I didn't know you had one. I didn't mean. I didn't mean to take it over, but I. But then I came in, I saw you had added some.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, well, I can have this shins canary. We don't need to make fetch happen. Let's just talk about nou vocab.

[Jeff O'Neill]

New vocab. You go first. Since you. I actually knew this one because I've got a marine biologist budding in my house. Unless this is what I think it is.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, that is what it is. This is from a couple of weeks ago, but I don't think you had been on the show since I read Ruth by Kate Reilly and there is a scene in it that discusses a character carrying an f eft and I was like, what is this?

[Jeff O'Neill]

S and P500V O, O was Bob listing in exchange. Exchange.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I know what a capital E, capital F, capital T is, but I don't know what a lowercase eft is. And I could tell from context it was some kind of creature. But I, I didn't know so I had to Google. And when you Google what is an F you get all. At least when you live in my household, all of your Google returns are financial. So then I was down to like what is an F'd animal? It is a small newt. They're very adorable.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's a good one. And I think if I remember correctly it's like specifically the newt when it's on land and it's primarily a aquatic newt. So it's like a different kind of.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I love that, you know, wrong about that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I. I may be Internet jackassing myself, which is knowing just enough to get it really wrong up in that. But there you go. I've got two.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I like yours. I know both of these. This is fun.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Great. Good for you. First one is labile, which apparently is more commonly used in like mental health discourse. My sister in law. I was reading from the New Yorker. This was actually a review. I was reading out loud to my family from a review of the James Baldwin book in the New Yorker. I don't know what to tell. That's who you are. There's no hiding that. I just have to. Just have to wrap my arms around that. And she said that she knew labile because it's used in mental health. It basically means mercurial, changeable, you know. And this is describing that Baldwin was more. Has more of a labile personality than even in his interpersonal.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So that one I had, that's the context.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You knew that from Swan Yi was from the aforementioned super fine exhibition that I saw. And it just describes someone who's. It's just elegant, you know. Elegant.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. I'm going to be in New York a couple of times over the next several months and I cannot wait to see that exhibition. It's.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's not going to be there too much longer. I hope it's still there. It's. It really is dynamite. I also made a pilgrimage to meet to see Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein, which I did some reading about. And there's an interesting history about that one.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

My pilgrimage is going to be an attempt at the Keanu Reeves performance of Waiting for Godot.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, is that right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It opened on Broadway last week.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, if you strike out and you have, you know, and you want to get on today Tix, the app highly recommend. You can go check out Ann Juliet if you can get a matinee or something.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So I can also want it. Hathaway.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, you wanted that. Hathaway. Okay, then from there, can we get Miriam Webster to sponsor the Jeff Chanery? I don't know what we can do with this particular one above. Thrift Books. Oh, million. So they've got 19 million. At what point are you like, you know, that's a lot of books. Because if they said 9 million, that's still.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

9 million is still plenty.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, that's still, still plenty books. More than you're ever going to need to read if you were to go and pick up some classics, some books that have been out for a while as part of Zero to well Read their sponsorship of that. So thank you for them to sponsoring Zero to well read for the year or for the first season. I did some live scrolling of editions of Great Gatsby I would recommend. So you could do that. You could see all the different editions. Maybe you want an annotated one. Maybe you want the sort of. Maybe you want a really cheap one you can throw in your bag and not work. Or maybe you want a fancy, you know, edition. There was a really nice one done. Immortals wrote an introduction. Nice big hardcover you want to put on the shelf that's gonna be part of your family or your personal library forever and ever. You can find them all at Thriftbooks. And if you spend $15 or more, you get free shipping in the US and every purchase gets you closer to a free book reward as part of their reading rewards program. Thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring Frontless foyer Rebecca. Speaking of cool women smoking cigs in black and white on their book covers.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I read Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy. Have you gotten to this one yet?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I have not. It's on audio and I just haven't been doing much audio.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's so good. It is so good. So it's pitched as a memoir about her mother. Arundhati Roy, of course, is the author of the God of Small Things and has been a very active activist in India. One of her, like, the primary focus of her career has been really nonfiction writing and activism. And she's written, you know, novels and now this memoir sort of around it. Her mother was formidable, very beloved by the people who worked with her at a school that she established, but also very feared by those people and very feared by her children and her family. Pretty abusive in a way that Roy puts right on the page. And just a large presence, but also inspired her daughter to be the kind of woman in like 70s, 80s, 90s India who would go out and put, literally put her body on the line for political issues that she believed in. Also to pursue a career as a writer, to do sort of unconventional things that are significantly unconventional and were significantly unconventional at the time that they were living. So it's a complex relationship that she has with her mom to like, to put it mildly. Her mother sort of of hangs over a lot of the book. But it's really, it's more of a straightforward memoir about Roy's life and career than I expected it to be based on the packaging. And for me that it was all the better for it. Like, I would have read an entire book about her and her mother. But there are like large chunks of life where they're not really in touch and we're just with Roy moving through things that happened in her life, her relationships, her career. And she'll sort of then like come back around to and this happened and it was informed by my mother or then my mother came to visit and here's what it was like when we saw each other. At this moment in my life, she's present for her mother's death and that plays a role in the story as well. But I didn't know really anything about Arundhati Roy other than having read the God of Small Things years ago. Shout out to the Barnes and Noble paperback favorites table.

[Jeff O'Neill]

God, no kidding, man.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And like what happens in your life when you write a debut novel and then by surprise you win the Booker Prize? Like it's just a line in the book that's like. And then I had won the Booker Prize for fiction is. It's just unbelievable. And I've been having like, personally I've been having trouble sleeping. So I was waking up really early in the morning and like sitting in the dark and reading this and it's just quiet and so compelling to the place where I was like, I'm not even mad that I'm awake at 5am because it's just going to be.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's always a good feeling. I mean a bad good feeling.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But me and Arundhati Roy and just to learn about her life, I cannot recommend it enough. I'm sure it's going to be terrific. On audio.

[Jeff O'Neill]

My two have contributed mightily to Jeff largely being in maintenance mode and getting through the day mode because I'm doing some first edition interviews and I do the homework. So I read the book.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is not small homework.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And Baldwin, A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs, which is out now, is a considerable book. I think it is easily atone. It's presented as a wonderful cover of Baldwin and a great spine. And it's presented as. As, yeah, a totem in a lot of ways. It's quite good. Baldwin, of course, a fascinating figure. Boggs has organized his biography of Baldwin around four major relationships in Baldwin's life and has done a lot of original. I guess it's not even reporting of research. I guess a lot of this stuff that he found. Boggs. I'm actually interviewing him later today, so I'm gonna ask him some of these questions I don't know the answer to. Who, when he was an undergraduate, I believe at Yale, did some. Got into the Baldwin archives, which are there, and, you know, got sort of up to his elbows in Baldwin stuff and found a. Either unpublished or out of print children's book that Baldwin had written, you know, didn't exist. And I think my understanding is that became sort of the breadcrumbs that led him into the witch's forest of spending all of his time really since then in the Baldwin archive. And this is how he's chosen to present it. And then, of course, Baldwin of the. Certainly the late 20th century. This is maybe a Patreon episode. Rebecca. So I'm going to hold sir it there. Who. In terms of literary icons, it's like after World War II, it's like Baldwin, Didion Morrison, Stephen King, author who Shall Not Be Named, I think unfortunately is up there. But Baldwin. Baldwin is one where you see a black and white image and you know, and it gives you a sense he's come to represent something. And I think Boggs does a really good job of unpacking a lot of the calcified, solidified. You know, insofar as Baldwin is a popular representation, those of us knew about Baldwin, like, it's not that simple, man.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like nothing ever is very memed in ways that remove him from context.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Speaking of someone who looks good smoking a dart, James Baldwin does himself. I thought that was cool. And there's a. There's a lot more reading of the texts too, which I appreciated as a literary person or a sometime literary person. A real achievement. And if you have any interest in Baldwin, it is something you're probably going to want to work your way through. I'm glad exists. It's been 30 years as the marketing makes plain, that since there's been a big Baldwin book. A real. A real fascinating guy and makes me want to Jump up some Baldwin into zero to well read though. Though interestingly Baldwin like some of those iconic people. If you were to say which one to do on zero to well right. It's not easy. There's not. This is a go tell on the mountain. Is it Giovanni's room or is it the like just that what I just did right there is sort of indicative of Baldwin exists sort of in excess of people's understanding of the work.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. And probably if we pick one for zero to well read it'll be on the hook of like a major anniversary of it. Whichever one hits one of those or a current event that it connect that one of them connects to.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So that. That. That was really fascinating to see again. It took me a while to get through just because it was so long but I'm certainly glad I did.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well done. That's a huge book.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The other this. This doesn't come out till late October but I'll flag it for people here. I will be surprised if the ten Year Fair is not one of my ten favorite novels of the year. I read it in one sitting over the weekend. I wasn't planning on. I needed to get it over a couple days because I interviewed Aaron a couple days ago. But it is a story of an affair. The. The twist is. And this isn't a spoiler because I believe it's in. It is in the copy. I don't know why I'm equivocating there. Where the narrative splits a little bit into the what if version and the actual version.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Interesting.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And then they cross back over in interesting ways. But that's. That is a. That And Aaron said to this like that was a way of her exploring multiple different things. That wasn't the point. It wasn't the point. Like let me think of this weird sort of metatextual thing she wanted to write about. Frankly the kinds of people in which you or I. We are in this social class in this. It's a little more. It's a set in this town. I believe I know what town it is in Hudson Valley where white collar workers who still are like it's not quite us, but we're in this social class. It's certainly not us. But like we know these people. We swim in these waters. And then of course the affair essentially gives you a novel of manners. As she said. It's like. Like it grew out of a short story which is set in this world like on a yoga mat at like a baby and me class.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Put it in my veins.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes. And it's a send up of these folks and also in a way, a tender portrait of these people too. It is not a stone cold bummer of a book as some affairs could be. I was so glad when I asked her like, did you have sort of the great titans of affair literature in mind? She's like, well, Rabbit Run still works. I'm like, yes, it does. So Rabbit Run, have you ever read Rabbit Run?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I haven't, no. I missed. That's on my list. Maybe that'll be my one of the things I can read for funds going into the next.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Anyway, so the Affair gives you an awfully compelling structure around which to write a novel of manners. A how we live now for a certain kind of thing.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm so ready. You set off Mike yesterday. You were talking about having read this and you went and it's terrific.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's so funny. She writes so just great dialogue.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Verbal exclamation points from you are rare. And so I pay attention to. To them. And hearing you say then that this will be, you think in your top 10 novels for the year. That's. I downloaded it as soon as I heard. It's terrific. Like, okay, he really means that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And. And none of us that see ourselves in this book at all get out alive. I'll put it that way.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's how it should be. You should take some strays. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And she says, you know, I. I'm most interested in turning the cannon on myself. Right. So I really liked it. I hope that book does well. It feels old fashioned in a way, but maybe that was part of the. Part of the pleasure of it anyway. The Ten Year Affair by Aaron Summers. October 1st from. Oh, I'm sorry, publisher. I can't remember. I think Simon and Schuster.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's too many publishers, Jeff.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No one's gonna look at it that way. It's. Oh, the Tenure Fair by Aaron Summers. Not by that. It must be the wrong book. All right, Rebecca, that's it. Go to the show notes bookriot.com Listen, you can find a link there to subscribe to zero to will. Right. You can also find it wherever you podcast. You'll find a link there if you want to sign up for the Book Riot newsletter which frankly, if you're listening this news, this podcast, you're not. Shame on you. Should you just. You're gonna light. You're gonna be find something there. What are you doing?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You are gonna like it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Just you are gonna find something there. Check out first edition and I think that's it for now. The Book Riot Podcast, is a proud member of the Airway Podcast Network. Rebecca, we'll talk to you later.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Have a good one.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yo, this is important, man. My favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I think they're pace breakers. The ones with all the pockets. Well, I just got back from vacation, and I think I left them in my hotel room. And, dude, I need to replace these shorts. I wear them, like, every day with that Lulu hoodie you got me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Could you send me the link to.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Where you got them? Thanks, bro. Talk soon.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Looking for your newest go to's shop. Lululemon's best sellers [e-mail].