Gilbert Cruz: 20 years ago this month, the New York Times published its very first podcast.

Sam Tannenhouse: This is Sam Tannenhouse, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and welcome to our podcast where we huddle each week on the shores of light and curse the encroaching darkness. Starting with...

Gilbert Cruz: Yes, that was the very first episode of the show. Two decades later, hundreds of notable authors and literary personalities have passed through these metaphorical walls. Tony Morrison, Robert Carrow, Coulson Whitehead, Jonathan Franen, Judy Bloom, Stephen King. I could go on and on and on. Even Keith Richards came through and I was sadly not here for that one. Today, to celebrate this August occasion, we're going to look back at the last 20 years in books, literary hits, fan favorites, scandals, and scuttlebutt. I'm Gilbert Cruz, and I have the ideal duo to mark the occasion with me. Tina Jordan, who has worked in and around books for 35 years and is now deputy editor of the book review. Tina, welcome.

Tina Jordan: Hi, Gilbert.

Gilbert Cruz: And Dwight Garner, longtime book critic here at the Times. and appropriately for this episode, the man who came up with the idea for this very podcast in the first place. Dwight, it's so great to have you here.

Dwight Garner: Great to be here, Gilbert.

Gilbert Cruz: So, let's go back 20 years to when this podcast first came out. It's 2006. GW Bush was president. Twitter had just launched. We did not know the joys that this platform would bring us in the ensuing decades. The iPhone had not been invented yet, thankfully. And just as the year kicked off, the book world was consumed with a scandal.

James Frey: I I don't know what is true, and I don't know what isn't. So, first of all, I wanted to start with with the smoking gun report, um, titled The Man Who Conned Oprah, and I want to know where they write.

Gilbert Cruz: I I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate. Absolutely. In January of 2006, there was a controversy involving a book called A Million Little Pieces. This was a big deal. Do you remember this?

Dwight Garner: Of course, I do. You know, it had this just coming through the door, you felt this book had a bit of electricity. It had this great cover, this hand covered with sort of like the sprinkles on an ice cream cone and and they evoked drugs. It was a bright cover and you just thought, "This looks like something."

Gilbert Cruz: This was a book by James Fry. It had come out in April 2003. And in September 2005, Oprah selected it as a selection for her book club, which had existed at that point for uh almost 10 years. It propelled it onto the bestseller list. And then Tina, what happened?

Tina Jordan: What happened was Oprah had him on the show in October 2005 and something must have ticked off the people at the website called The Smoking Gun. Do you guys remember this website?

Gilbert Cruz: I remember it only because of this book.

Tina Jordan: Yes. So, the smoking gun, I believe the last week in December, published a piece called A Million Little Lies, and they took the book apart. Like, they had found his arrest records, you know, basically everything he said had happened. You know, the girlfriend dying, the arrest, none of it had happened. And this was a memoir in which James Fry talked about his addiction to drugs and alcohol and his attempt to rehabilitate himself by going to a clinic.

Gilbert Cruz: Correct. And interestingly, he had tried to sell this book as a novel and double day to whom he sold it said, "Wait, did all this stuff happen to you? Let's publish this as a memoir."

Tina Jordan: Mhm. So they did and he actually told the Times later and I quote, "It was written exactly as it was published." So he didn't change a word.

Tina Jordan: And unlike most memoirs at the time, which came with like a little paragraph at the beginning saying, you know, this is how I remember it. Obviously, I've had to make up quotes, blah, blah, blah. There was none of that. this phenomenon of a memoir being written and then people finding out that some of it is not true or much of it is not true was not necessarily a new thing. Uh something that felt new to me at the time and and Dwight, correct me if I'm wrong, was was the public shaming that that James received on live television when he had to go on Oprah in early 2006 and sit there as Oprah sort of confronted him about this.

Dwight Garner: Yeah, it was it was ugly. There was something about James Fry that was a little bit confrontational, a little bit, you know, he was he was sort of Mailor-like. He was sort of, you know, puffed up and and and was ready to take on the world. And then seeing him dragged low by Oprah was kind of a every writer's worst nightmare of sort of your fear of being revealed. And actually, this is every memoir's worst nightmare because, you know, we all know by now that memoirs are at least a slightly a species of fiction. And I mean, you you you don't remember everything that happened to you in these conversations and and we're aware of that, but to have someone actually track down everyone who knew you and re-report your own memoir is, I don't think something that any memorialist would want to go through, but this was an egregious case.

Gilbert Cruz: Um, another book from that year that turned out to be a very big deal. I'm going to turn to you, Tina to talk about this one, was Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. This was a memoir that was eventually, in addition to being a bestselling book, was made into a movie starring Julia Roberts. I looked this up. The title of the book has commas. The title of the movie does not have any punctuation. It's just Eat, Pray, Love. No commas. Tell us about Eat, Pray, Love.

Tina Jordan: All right. So, Elizabeth Gilbert was this glamorous New York City journalist who had come through, I think, a divorce and a rebound relationship and decided she was going to chuck it all and go find herself and figure out what made her happy. And she went on this year-long trip which took her to India and Indonesia and Italy. And then she wrote a book. And the book, if I were to summarize it in a few lines, would be a woman always defined by her relationships learns how not to do that. And it was incredibly polarizing, of course, because here was this, you know, privileged woman who could take a year off to take this trip, right? But I think it touched a chord with people because at its at its heart what the book was about was we have so much why are we so unhappy?

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Tina Jordan: She could also really write. I mean the book is you know and it inspires you to get out. It inspired a lot of women to sort of you know try to find themselves and some didn't have the experience she did or many didn't.

Gilbert Cruz: Right. So it was and and remind me because it's been a while since I've had to think about Eat Pray Love. It was it she went to one place and sort of like did a food thing, she went to another place, did a spiritual thing and

Tina Jordan: something like that.

Gilbert Cruz: That's roughly right. And then went to another place and met a man. Would you say, Tina, that this this is a self-helpy book?

Tina Jordan: I would say this is a self-helpy book for a certain kind of woman.

Gilbert Cruz: And and did it signal something at the time or going forward about the type of self-helpy type book that there would be?

Tina Jordan: I think you saw certainly a lot of copycats and you saw a lot of books that were about women finding happiness for themselves. Not through their jobs, not through their partners, none of that.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. What is the closest you have done to an Eat, Pray, Love situation?

Tina Jordan: One time I left my husband and children and went to Morocco for three weeks. Yes. and and the Canary Islands. And when I came home, my husband had gotten another dog.

Gilbert Cruz: Three weeks.

Tina Jordan: I'd had it. I was done. I was done.

Gilbert Cruz: Oh, good on you.

Gilbert Cruz: We're going to jump ahead to a book or a series of books that continue to resonate in the culture all these years later. This is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The first book came out in 2008. Uh she published a trilogy and since then two prequels have been published. The most recent being last year, Sunrise on the Reaping. It was a big success last year. So, we're almost 20 years on from the first Hunger Games book. Uh, and it's still sort of a going concern. There's a movie version of Sunrise and the Reaping coming out later this year. Uh, what do you recall about this phenomenon, when it happened, and and sort of what it said about dystopian fiction, YA fiction? I think it's the moment where YA fiction started to get really really dark. I mean, the premise of the book, let's don't forget, is about teenage kids who fight to the death in a televised show.

Tina Jordan: That's what the book is about. And it inspired the same kind of fandoms that we saw with Twilight. The first Twilight book with was 2005. um and with Harry Potter for that matter.

Gilbert Cruz: Right. Harry Potter, if I'm recalling correctly, the last book, the seventh book, uh Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had come out the year before. Yes.

Tina Jordan: 2007.

Gilbert Cruz: And I looked this up so I am going to say this because this is a crazy fact, but at least according to the Guinness Book of World Records, it was the fastests selling book in its first 24 hours of all time. That seventh Harry Potter book. So that series had just finished and Hunger Games comes in on you know a year later and it kicks off its own I don't want to call them copycats necessarily because it's derogatory but its own set of books that sort of followed in its wake. You had the divergent books which came out right in 2011. the Mazer Runner books which came out in 2009 and these are essentially all trilogies or thereabouts dark trilogies, dark YA trilogies about kids who are in dystopian societies, right? But more than that, what all of these books had were a lot of adult readers.

Gilbert Cruz: Twi moms.

Tina Jordan: I don't know. It was whatever it was. Like they that was a big part of like why these books were so successful.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. Dwight, what do you remember about dystopian fiction around this time? Because 2 years before The Hunger Games um in 2006 uh Cormack McCarthy's The Road came out and that was this moment where this sort of literary titan dipped into genre in a way by writing this dystopian book, right? And now of course you know dystopia dystopias are on are the morsel at the end of every fork in terms of every novel you pick up even the most I mean we're living in this world that writers feel like they need to respond to and and the only way they can I'm not speaking about every writer but so many even our best literary writers just feel like in order to respond to this moment they also almost have to go beyond it almost to imagine where where we might be in in 10 years or so and um um Hunger Games books were were so I remember my kids being so enveloped in them. I mean, just obsessive. And I remember just taking them to the Strand to buy them on the days when they came out, you know, and they they love them so much.

Gilbert Cruz: Um Tina, I'm going to go back to you just because you are the expert on this next topic, which is Nordic noir, you know, sort of Scandi thrillers, right?

Tina Jordan: Um you know, we're talking here primarily about the girl with the dragon tattoo, which came out in 2008. it crystallized or popularized for many a genre that had been around for a very long time before this but that this was sort of like this moment when it exploded at least in America right you had seen Nordic noir here before Henning Mangel so on but this was the huge novel I think it had come out in in Sweden three years before it's about a disaffected journalist who hires a sirly young hacker to help him solve the mystery of the disappearance of a young girl. And there was something about both of those characters that just grabbed American audiences. And those books were huge, but they also like opened these floodgates and American publishers could not pick up Norwegian and Danish and Swedish thriller writers fast enough. It was actually to the point where there was a shortage of translators.

Gilbert Cruz: Is that so?

Tina Jordan: It's true. Like if you if you could translate Norwegian thrillers, man, you a lot of money because because there just weren't enough people to do it.

Gilbert Cruz: To your recollection, what were some of the sort of big authors that that American audiences got to know after? I'm thinking of like Yo Nesbo and people like

Tina Jordan: Yo, Nesbo is probably the big one to mention. Henny Manuel became huge after, right? Like he he's sold I think in small numbers, right? and his his series which is or one of his series which is focused around a gentleman named Wallander um had been around for a while before the dragon tattoo but it it it was something people start to right pick up more after and what these books share is like an incredibly dark worldview I mean there's no redemption in most of these these books I mean the crime gets solved but horrible things happen. It is the most ironic thing because of course I'm sure you both know every year the Nordic and Scandinavian countries are so high on the list of the happiest nations in the world.

Gilbert Cruz: Let's talk a little bit more about the Scandinavians. We should go to 2009, which is when in America, a book named My Struggle or the first volume in a in a multibook series by Carl O Canowskard came out.

Dwight Garner: Oh god. That you know, he he came out of nowhere. Um Canowskard. Um these books are set in Oslo. What's what's you know, it's a series of novels. Basically, they're they're what we now call autofiction. I mean, they're mostly about a character who is very much like him and and what is so powerful about them is just he's sort of unflinching about his own life. It just it's it's sort of the books are kind of simply written, although they're powerfully written. He has a strong voice, but it's like watching a man lay bricks and suddenly realize he's built the pyramids, you know, it's just this slow accumulation and you only realize how grand this stuff is once you get a bit of distance and view on it. the first two books um um but his life with his father and his childhood and and sort of growing up I think are the best two in the series and if you want to taste these books those are the books to read I even think book two is the is the great one

Gilbert Cruz: can you um because I want to ask you a little bit more about this movement or this subg genre what how do we define autofiction or how do we understand it

Dwight Garner: I mean we've reinvig this is a new term but it's an old it's an old thing I mean you know I mean Janeer is is autofiction you know David Copperfield um Joyce you know, portrait of an artist is is autofiction, but we've come up with this new term for it and a flood of young writers have sort of reinvested this form with new energy. You know, a lot of them I mean I mean not necessarily a younish writer, but but Elena Ferrante's novels are are often viewed through this lens. They're they're autobiographical to a degree, but not quite the way others are. We're talking here about people like Rachel Kusk in her outline trilogy. Uh Sheila Hedi, who wrote a book called How Should a Person Be? um Tju Cole's novels about Nigerian immigrants and his own travels in Nigeria um and and you know in a way and Ben learner his novel 104 and books like this and I think she had title um how Should a person be is such a it's almost the best book title of all time in in my in my in my book because it that's what novels seek to find out you know in these and by writing about themselves they're investigating themselves to find out you know sort of how a person feels about being in the world um and yet I also you know I love these novels and I understand why why people sometimes say to me they hate them because as John Uptek once said um who wants to read another book about a writer, you know, and um but so I get both sides of this, but I I'm a huge fan of these writers and and what they're doing.

Tina Jordan: Can I ask a question about Cancard specifically? If those books had been written by a woman, do you think they would have had the same impact?

Dwight Garner: That is so hard to say. Um but I don't see why not. What What do you think?

Tina Jordan: I don't know. I feel like if a woman had been writing about changing diapers and cooking dinner and I don't know

Gilbert Cruz: Um you mentioned um Elena Ferrante. I want I want to stay a beat on this because uh what eventually came to be known as Ferrante fever became such a a a major thing at least in in literary fiction circles. The first book, My Brilliant Friend, uh was published here, translated and published here in in 2011. There are four books that are now called the Neapolitan novels. The fourth book was published in 2015. Uh it's called the story of the lost child. This is a book that are 500, you know, authors and panelists called the best book of the 21st century so far. Uh what do you remember about this this moment and why these books, Tina, were so so very popular?

Tina Jordan: I remember women passing them around the same way we passed around, you know, are you there, God? It's me, Margaret, when we were when we were in fifth grade.

Gilbert Cruz: So good. It's so true. I remember it too with my wife and her friends.

Tina Jordan: Yeah. We were all like this is it like female rage. And what was it that it's a story over these four books of of two friends in postwar Italy when the book start right in postw war Italy two very different friends and fierce friendship that waxes and waines over the years and it the books just capture all the messy difficult hard parts of being a woman like she does not flinch. There also, I have to imagine, was a bit of a juice behind these books because of of of the mystery behind who the author is, right? Do do we know? Do we know, Tina? I mean, I

Gilbert Cruz: So, Elena Ferrante is a name of an author whose true identity has never been officially confirmed. There have been lots of theories there. You know, we we've we ran a story a few years ago about all the theories about who Elena Fonte actually is, but at the time at least, you know, I don't know that anyone knew and and there was there was this fund and like who is this person, right?

Dwight Garner: Right. It it's it's such a hard trick to pull off in the modern age. I mean, only Pinchin, I think, is is has done it in the way that she's done it. I mean, it just and there are so many new ways of of tracking a writer's DNA from from his or her pros. And it's amazing this this mystery hasn't been fully cracked.

Gilbert Cruz: Dwight, a few years ago, the book review gathered, as I referenced, 500 authors and the like to vote on the best books of the 21st century. But in 2006, the book review looked back at the previous 25 years in great American fiction uh and they came up with a list and the only person who published a book that is still near the top of that list is Don Dilo because all the other authors Tony Morrison whose beloved was at the top uh Philip Roth, John Updike, Cormack McCarthy, they are all gone.

Dwight Garner: Yeah. Um, you know, it's funny. We we've sort of found ourselves, I mean, you know, one one of the one of the salient points about the last 20 years is that we've lost this sort of post-war generation. I mean, Saul Bellow died in 2005, Noran Mailor 2007, John Updike 2009, uh, Philip Roth 2018, Tony Morrison 2019, Martin Amus 2023. Um, these were sort of the figures that filled the public's skies. I mean, you know, they were they were what American fiction was to a large degree during this period. and to sort of have them all vanish in this period. It's been interesting to watch who is going to kind of replace them. And our culture, we may never replace them. You know, our culture has become so bifurcated just the same way music has that we'll never agree on things the way we agreed about these writers, you know, for whether that was good or bad. Um there was sort of a a mass consensus that doesn't exist anymore. And um anyway, but it's it's it's you know, we're seeing a new generation come up now. We're still the Franens and the Zadei Smiths came up behind these writers and now there's a new generation but no one has quite I think filled their shoes.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. Um Tina, we're going to talk about one of your favorite topics. Historical fiction.

Tina Jordan: That is one of my favorite topics.

Gilbert Cruz: Uh in 2009 there was a book published called Wolf Hall.

Tina Jordan: What a book. I know. What a book. So this is uh the first of Hillary Menel's trilogy of books about Thomas Cromwell. the uh real life historical adviser to um Henry VIII. Uh the other books are Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light. Uh and these books were acclaimed and they were popular and historical fiction as a genre again has been around forever, but this was sort of a a moment when uh so much energy coalesed around these books and then they exploded I feel like to where historical fiction is one of the more popular genres in in fiction.

Gilbert Cruz: And at the point where when Wolf Hall came out, historical fiction was sort of in decline. There was it was there was not nearly the same amount being published. It didn't it wasn't selling. And then here came these beautifully written and researched books that immersed you in tutor England in a story where hey, you knew what the outcome was going to be, but you were still completely riveted.

Tina Jordan: Yeah. And it that and then so Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies I think both of those won the Booker. Is that right? I think so. I think that's right. Yeah. And historical fiction just exploded. I actually went and did a quick look at recent Pulitzers and 12 of the last 15 Pulitzers have for fiction have gone to historical fiction which is astonishing to me.

Gilbert Cruz: Let's move to 2010 just to take you back remind you what was happening in the world then many of us were on Facebook still uh the iPad had just come out Spotify was in its very earliest days and that year two great books came out two memoirs by rock stars life which was a Keith Richards memoir and just kids by Patty Smith

Dwight Garner: you know yeah it's funny I mean the the our ideas about the rock memoir have really changed in the past 20 years I mean These books used to be mass market quickies, you know, and and I I I miss we me pause for a moment to to uh you know, mourn the loss of mass market books. Um but they were they were little thin books you'd put in your pocket, you know, and they were they were about I don't know, they're about um Pink Floyd or something, you know, and and and you would carry it around and um but they were quickies. And there's something to be said for quickies. I mean I you know sometimes a dashed off book is kind of what you want to read about something and not not you don't want to read 400 pages but um books like Keith Richards books like um Bob Dylan's memoir Patty Smith's memoir Elvis Costello wrote a great one Lucinda Williams is pretty good Gil Scott heron um did I say Springsteen already his book is so well written I mean you Born to Run yeah Born to Run I mean I was just floored by it and I don't think he had a ghostriter I was sorry to to learn that Lucinda did have one because I think she's such a great lyricist and Lucinda, you could have written that yourself. It would have been better. Anyway, I I um I just think we've suddenly come to take this genre much more seriously and we expect more from these writers who are writing about their careers.

Tina Jordan: But I think the interesting thing is and why we like them so much is they're much more unvarnished and franker like Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, they don't care about burning bridges. I mean, any actor who writes a memoir, I don't care how old they are, it's still going to be carefully couched, right? Like these rock memoirs are pretty they're pretty blunt.

Gilbert Cruz: We're going to take a break and when we come back we are going to pick up with another turning point. One of the literary classics of these past 20 years, Fifty Shades of Gray. We'll be right back. Okay, Tina. 50 Shades of Gray by Eel James came out in 2011. This was a a book that started as Twilight fanfiction. It did.

Tina Jordan: We talked about Twilight sort of four book series of vampire romance novels. Um and Eel James ended up writing a trilogy of books. Uh Fifty Shades of Gray, 50 Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Free. Why were these books so popular? These books were so popular because they were great smut. Can I just say that on the air?

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. So, what do what are they actually about?

Tina Jordan: They're about a kink relationship between an older man and a younger woman. Mhm. Three books. It is a little over long. Um there is sex on almost every single page. That is what you read it for. Neil James can write sex. um the rise of these books and the success sort of coincided with the Kindle. Fifty Shades of Gray was the bestselling book of the decade. All right. And

Gilbert Cruz: and the Kindle came out in 2007. So it had been around for a few years.

Tina Jordan: It's been around. Okay. But so here was a book where maybe you didn't want people to, you know, see you reading it on the subway, right? Like you could be reading these books and no one would know. something like the almost all of the first 250,000 copies sold were digital copies which was just unheard of. Yeah. At that time we uh at the time in 2012 we we had a story by then publishing reporter Julie Bosman and it it sort of detailed the the rise uh of of these books and how the ebook sales as you say were really the thing that that helped it. It was initially published by a small Australian indie press. Print copies were short supply. And so it was those ebook sales that really propelled it to prominence and led to it being picked up by a major publisher for a seven figure deal.

Gilbert Cruz: But also like these books sort of they really legitimize the romance novel part of the business. And don't forget that romance novels, even though they were a billion dollar part of book publishing, had probably subsidized, you know, much of the rest of the business. They'd always sort of been looked down on. Yeah. And boy, after these books, all of that changed.

Gilbert Cruz: Uh, in 2012 there was a a giant thriller that came out, Gone Girl by uh, Gileian Flynn. Uh, this was another massive hit, something that started its own little subgenre. Uh, made into a a great, I thought, movie starred Ben Affleck. Um, and it it it kicked off this idea that had been in in mysteries and thrillers for as long as mysteries and thrillers have been around um of the the untrustworthy female narrator. What what what is this book about and why was it such a big deal?

Tina Jordan: So, the book is about a marriage gone bad and as the book opens, you sus the wife is missing and you suspect something has happened to her and you hear the story of the marriage in alternating chapters. The thing is, it's not just one untrustworthy narrator here. It's two. It's the husband and the wife. And you're right when you say that the untrustworthy narrator had been around, but often the untrustworthy narrator was like somebody who was just wasn't setting out to deceive. They just sort of didn't know what was going on. Like these two characters want to manipulate you. And it it was pretty intoxicating. Uh, why was this such a big hit?

Gilbert Cruz: Because it was really well written. It is a really wellwritten book. Well, I was surprised when it did not end up on our list of the top hundred books of the 21st century. Stunned. Yeah. Um, it's smart. It's well written. It's like nothing you've ever read before. The twist is genuinely shocking. So many novels came in the wake of this book with the word girl in it, which of course is like one of the most common words in the English language. But this idea of dark thrillers with potentially untrustworthy narrators in which the title had the word girl in it. Yeah. There are girls on trains. There are girls in windows. They're all over the place. They're all over the place. Final girls, missing girls, luckiest girl alive.

Gilbert Cruz: Um Dwight, speaking of great writers, 2015, a book came out that you um when you worked on a project at the book review about the funniest book since Catch22 put on the list. This is a book called The Sellout by Paul Batty.

Dwight Garner: Paul Batty. Yeah. It's it's sort of, you know, it's it's set in LA. It's it's just this wild scabous satire of of black life in LA and um you feel a direct connection between someone like Richard Prior in this novel. I mean he's he's aiming for the stars. He's pinwheeling. This is Money Python meets Richard Prior. Um and uh it's been a while since I'd read um a book quite like that in terms of its topicality dealing with situations in LA. It's also has this it it bends into weird places. I mean, it's there are weird scenes in it and you know, horses galloping through the streets and things that don't always make sense, but yet they make narrative sense to this book. And talk about writers who haven't published a book for a while. I mean, we haven't seen another book from him since his book came out. And um I miss his voice. Um it's funny the these sort of um we've had so many great great books by by black writers in this decade. Um, this is maybe the funniest one, you know, which which is um and and Coulson Whitehead can be very funny as well, by the way. I'm not sure we've talked about him enough in this in this, but um but yeah, and also, you know, Paul Batty edited this anthology of of of black humor, which is one of the best anthologies that I think anyone's ever put together sort of historically, you know, and it just it sort of recasts um African-American experience in this country. And um I just I just think he he's all that. Yeah, it it was also interesting because he uh was um the first American to win what I would argue is the is one of the biggest, if not the biggest prize in English language uh publishing right now, which is the Booker.

Gilbert Cruz: I agree with that. At the same time, I I'm sympathetic to those people who wish it had remained a UK phenomenon only because I remember, you know, when it would often introduce you to writers who you'd never heard of before, which was part of its draw and and I guess that the heyday of the Booker was back before the internet and and so we really knew less about a lot of these writers than it was sort of introduced to us by the Booker Prize. Um, and now it's, you know, it sort of competes with the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. It's like one of the, you know, three. But yeah, I mean, Batty deserved it. I I want to uh linger on on literary prizes for a moment because something happened in the period of time that we're talking about here, the 20 years of the existence of this podcast that I argue was crazy, which was for the first time since 1977, the Pulitzers did not award uh a Pulitzer for fiction. This happened in 2012. I believe two of the finalists were Train Dreams by Dennis Johnson and Swamplandia. Yeah. And the third one was the pale king. Oh, the pale king by David Foster Wallace.

Tina Jordan: And I think it was one of it made people understand like what happens at the Pulitzers, which is you have a fiction committee that recommends a winner to the Pulitzer board and they in turn can say yay or nay. Yeah. And so they didn't think any of those books. It is so it's so bizarre to me to assign a task to a jury and say you have to read a ton of books. Those books are brought to the board. Certainly very few people on that board read more fiction than anyone on the jury whose job it was specifically to read fiction and they can take a vote and if they don't reach a majority there's no Puliter Prize for fiction. Right. It's it is absolutely wild.

Gilbert Cruz: Well, we get things wrong all the time. Uh, one time or two times in which we did not get something wrong, Dwight, to go back to an author that you talked about was when the Pulitzer board awarded Coulson Whitehead twice the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. in 2017 for the Underground Railroad and in 2020 for the Nickelboys, making him one of only a handful of authors who has received the Puliter twice for fiction. The others being John Updike and William Faulner and our favorite, Booth Tarkington. Yes, Booth Tarkington. Don't forget him. Coulson Whitehead's amazing. Yeah, Coulson. I mean, you know, I still I still can remember the days when he was just uh you just he was the TV critic of the Village Voice, you know, and you felt in his critical pros that you're dealing with a major major writer already. I mean, I just remember that. And um when you started writing fiction, it came right out of the gate and you just sort of knew this this was a special voice. God, some people just have it. Um 2018, Tina. Yes. Where the craw dad sing by Dia Owens, right? This was a book that Reese Witherspoon's book club sort of propelled uh into into public view. Um, celebrity book clubs, you know, became, were, and still in some ways, uh, drive the publishing industry. Oprah started in 1996, but then you had all these other people come in. You had all these other people come in. Reese was definitely the biggest. I believe she started the year before Where the Croad Sings, which seemed an unlikely pick for her. This this novel about a a young girl basically growing up in the swamps of North Carolina. Yeah. Um, and indeed she wasn't the sole reason that this book became as big as it did, but she's certainly what got it started. And you know, soon you had Read with Jenna. Uh, you had all these other smaller celebrity book clubs. You had President Obama's reading list. That's a celebrity book club.

Dwight Garner: You know, it was so clear that he was actually reading these books, right? Was it? I think it was. You know, he I wonder, but I I I bet he's more often than not. I bet he's turned most of the pages. Okay. What one of the great things about Obama's list, it sort of took you back. We like to think that our president swims in the same cultural waters that that people do, you know, and that, you know, he reads books, he pays attention to music. It's just a sign of a of a curious mind and it takes you back to sort of JFK, you know, in that you're being interested in culture. Um, I do have a I do have a quibble though with his list. I I don't love them for this reason. They feel very focus group to me. There's something for everyone. They don't feel like a real person's reading this to me. I mean, people people read idiosyncratically, and I'm sure he does, too. And this list feels a bit like let's find, you know, something for every person on your on your Christmas list. Yeah. So, that's my slight drawback. I don't I don't find many surprises on there.

Gilbert Cruz: Tina, we're gonna jump ahead to the biggest thing in books over the past several years, I would say, which is so multiple things related. It's the the rise of of romance fiction, the rise of bookstagram, the rise of book talk as a platform by which people u make recommendations to each other and then the rise of romantic which is this port manto word that combines romance and fantasy. All of these things are intertwined with one another and they have driven the book industry over the past several years to an extent that nothing else has. That's right. So Tik Tok I believe started in 2017. The first book talk hashtag is like two years later but during the pandemic is when it really exploded. And if you go back and watch especially some of these early you know book talk videos. They're very emotional. They're people fling books across the room. That became the cliche. That became the cliche. Right. And the first hits that that came out of book talk were actually old books. Um, Song of Achilles from 2011. Um, We Were Liars by El Cart. Mhm. Um, they weren't new books. And so publishers were perplexed by demand and didn't understand where this was coming from. Like the Times ran a story on Song of Achilles and the the publisher and the author were like, "We didn't know what was going on. We didn't know where this demand was coming from." But they wised up really fast. And book sellers did, too. You would walk into any not just a Barnes & Noble, but any independent bookstore, and you would see a table of like the big recommended book talk books right there up front.

Tina Jordan: Yeah. And so as far as romantasy goes, like one of the first writers who was championed was Sarah J. Moss, right? She's the author of the Acatar series, if I'm saying the the abbreviation right. A a court of thorns and roses. A court of thorns and roses, right? That's what I call it. Yeah. So both her and Rebecca Yaros, the fourth wing. like book talk got behind those in a big way and pretty much I don't know how much time you spend looking at the New York Times bestseller list Gilbert but there was a period even it's what I do every night before bed yeah there was a period of time where like half the books on there were romantasy

Gilbert Cruz: Dwight Tina, thank you so much for coming on and looking back at the past 20 years in publishing the past 20 years in the Bookview Podcast. I had such a good time. Tina, thank you so much. Uh Dwight, thank you so much. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.