The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading ...
Book Club: Let's Talk About "Orbital," by Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey’s novel “Orbital,” which won the Booker Prize last year, has a tight, poetic frame: We follow one day in the lives of six people working on a space station above Earth, orbiting the planet 16 times every 24 hours. But this is not a saga of adventure or exploration. It’s a quiet meditation on what it means to be human, prompted by a series of personal reckonings each character faces while floating 250 miles above home.This week on the Book Review Book Club, MJ Franklin talks about “Orbital” with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and Jennifer Harlan.
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Celebrating 100 Years of Edward Gorey
You’re familiar with Edward Gorey, whether you know it or not. The prolific author and illustrator, who was born 100 years ago this week, was ubiquitous for a time in the 1970s and 1980s, and his elaborate black-and-white line drawings — often depicting delightfully grim neo-Victorian themes and settings — graced everything from book jackets to the opening credits of the PBS show “Mystery!” to his own eccentric storybooks like “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” in which young children come to unfortunate but spectacular ends.On this week’s episode, the Book Review’s Sadie Stein joins Gilbert Cruz for a celebration of all things Gorey.“He was so incredibly prolific,” Stein says. “He was Joyce Carol Oates-like in his output. And it’s amazing when you look at the work because the line drawings, as you mentioned, are so intricate. It looks almost like pointillism sometimes, like it would have taken hundreds of hours. But he was either preternaturally disciplined or incredibly fast, and each one that I’ve ever seen at least is beautiful. And complete in a way.”
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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