We're joined by Lauren Grodstein, author of several novels, including the New York Times bestseller A Friend of the Family, to discuss Philip Roth's Everyman. As a Jewish author from New Jersey, Grodstein says Roth has loomed large throughout her life, and she's wrestled with how to think about his legacy, particularly in light of the recent scandal involving his biographer, Blake Bailey. But even more broadly, how are we meant to reckon with an author who is wise in so many ways, but also clearly limited in others?

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We're joined by Jeff Chon, author of the new novel Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun, to talk about political fiction, conspiracy theories, and why some editors are cowards. We also talk about the South Korean novel The Disaster Tourist, by Yun Ko-Eun (translated by Lizzie Buehler), which Jeff says he picked up as part of his ongoing project to "be a better Korean," but then fell in love with because of its lively voice and dark humor.

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We're joined by John Kell (freelance journalist, PR rep for Chobani) to talk about why the pandemic inspired him to read more books featuring gay male characters, which he recently wrote about in a piece for Fortune. We discuss one of those books, Edmund White's Our Young Man, and why John felt somewhat ambivalent about its main character, a gorgeous male model who is trying not to age out of the industry. We also talk about what kinds of gay lives get represented in fiction, which fictional universes we'd like to see get COVID updates, and what it's like to make the move from journalism to public relations.

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