Can't-Miss Culture: Books

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We continue now with our membership drive culture guide, where we end the show each day with some pointers to fall season standouts. Today, we're so happy to be joined by All Of It producer, Jordan Lauf. She runs the book club, Get Lit with All Of It, and she's here with some new books, mostly fiction, to look for. Hey, Jordan.

Jordan Lauf: Hey, Brian. So thrilled to be on. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Y'all read the book for your October Get Lit selection Yellowface. You want to just very briefly remind people what that was and why you picked it?

Jordan Lauf: Sure. Yellowface by R. F. Kuang is a novel about a white author who is not having a whole lot of success until she steals the manuscript of her dead friend, who happens to be Chinese American, and passes it off as her own. It's something that really gets into questions around cultural appropriation, who gets to write what, I think big stories that are top of mind for writers these days.

You might remember the piece Bad Art Friend that got into these thorny questions. R. F. Kuang is really known for writing fantasy. She wrote the Poppy War series. She wrote a great fantasy novel called Babel. This was her first delve into realistic fiction. We were thrilled to have her on to talk about that. We'll be airing the highlights from that event on our show on All Of It on November 6th at 1:00 PM.

Brian Lehrer: Cool. What's next for Get Lit?

Jordan Lauf: This month, we are thrilled to be reading Rouge by Mona Awad. It is a novel that's like a modern fairytale. Mona Awad is very good at that kind of mystical storytelling. This one follows a woman named Belle, who is obsessed with skincare, I would say unhealthily so. Her mother was as well, and her mother died very mysteriously. Belle decides to go investigate what happened to her mother, and that investigation takes her to this strange, culty wellness spa and a magical mirror that has maybe entranced her mother and might entrance Belle as well. It's sort of like a Sleeping Beauty meets satire of wellness culture. It's a really fascinating read.

Brian Lehrer: I know the in-person reservations for the October Get Lit event filled up. Can people sign up for November's already?

Jordan Lauf: Yes, they can. You can go to wnyc.org/getlit to find information on tickets. Also, our partners at the New York Public Library provide unlimited free e-copies for New Yorkers to download. You can find all of that information there as well. The event is on November 27th at 6:00 PM.

Brian Lehrer: Great. That's really not until after Thanksgiving, so people have a lot of time to plan.

Jordan Lauf: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure the competition is tough for those monthly selections. You've got some other books I see that you've read and loved from this fall, even though they didn't make it into the October or November Get Lit with All Of It book club.

Jordan Lauf: Yes. No, I've got a lot of other ones that I think are definitely worth checking out if you first pick up our Get Lit book and then if you got some time left over. I think the first one I wanted to recommend that just came out recently is titled Land of Milk and Honey. It's by C Pam Zhang. She came on the show. It's a short little novel, so you'll get through it pretty quickly. It's very poetically written. It is about a not-so-distant future world in which a smog has covered the globe, making it so that food resources are very, very scarce.

Most people are eating this gross gruel thing made out of soybeans. This story follows a chef who gets invited to join an elite mountain community run by an eccentric billionaire, who because he's a billionaire has access to all of the fresh ingredients and proteins that she really wants to work with. It's about her decision to go to that mountain community, explore her craft as a chef there, but also wondering how are my morals being compromised maybe by going to join this elite few who can afford to have these meats and grains and such. It's a really great and fascinating read.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Another one I see that's on your list is Happiness Falls by Angie Kim.

Jordan Lauf: This is a book that I think you might be able to read in two days, but it's a page-turner with a lot of substance to it. This is about a family in which the father of the family goes missing. He has been out in a park helping care for his son who has a disability that renders him unable to speak verbally. The son comes home, he's covered in blood, and the father does not come home. Of course, the only witness to what has happened is the son who is unable to verbally tell his sister, his brother, his mother, what has happened to his father.

The story goes from there as they try to figure out what happened to their dad but I think more importantly learning how to communicate with their son and brother Eugene, who just because he isn't able to communicate verbally doesn't mean that he can't communicate at all. I think that's something they learn throughout the course of the book and just becomes a fascinating element to the story and really challenges, maybe, notions of ableism and ideas we have about people with disabilities.

Brian Lehrer: I see another book on your list is A Man of Two Faces, a memoir, a history, a memorial by an author who's been in the news recently for an unrelated thing, right?

Jordan Lauf: Yes, it happened actually, I think, just the day after he came on our show. He was set to have a book event at the 92nd Street Y. I think now it's just called 92NY. It was canceled, I believe, ostensibly two reasons having to do with the fact that he signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Palestine. He ended up moving that event, I believe, to McNally Jackson.

Since then, my understanding is a few people at the 92nd Street Y have resigned in the wake of this. I will say, putting all of that aside, the memoir is excellent. It plays with format. It is almost a little poetic. It tells the story of his experience being a refugee from the Vietnam War. He came here with his family when he was only, I believe, three or four years old.

Brian Lehrer: This is Viet Thanh Nguyen. We haven't said the name of the author yet.

Jordan Lauf: Oh, yes, my apologies. Viet Thanh Nguyen who won the Pulitzer for his novel The Sympathizer. You might know him from his fiction. The memoir is really beautiful and worth picking up I think beyond the drama that's playing out now.

Brian Lehrer: In 20 seconds or so, you have a Stephen King book on your list-

Jordan Lauf: Oh, I love Stephen King.

Brian Lehrer: -[crosstalk] which one does not belong? Go ahead.

Jordan Lauf: [laughs] I know. It's spooky season. I got to throw in one horror novel, Holly by Stephen King. It's more of a whydunit than a whodunit. We know that there are two murderous professors who are elderly, terrorizing this town, but why are they killing people, and maybe are they eating their brains? That's my pitch for Holly by Stephen King.

Brian Lehrer: I noticed that your picks are mostly novels. On this show, as you know, we deal mostly in non-fiction, usually trying to fix a problem in society. Can you make a case for fiction as doing the same but on a different path in 30 seconds?

Jordan Lauf: Yes, I think the perfect example is Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. It's one thing to read headlines about the opioid epidemic and really take in the numbers, but it's another thing to read about the opioid epidemic through the eyes of a character that you really come to fall in love with. That's what her novel's about. I think that fiction has the unique ability like radio to create an intimacy between the reader and the novelist and the story that they're trying to tell and can make you have an emotional connection to something that maybe is important in the news but goes beyond the statistics.

Brian Lehrer: So well said. Jordan Lauf, producer who helps make All Of It with Alison Stewart sing.  Go do the rest of your job across the hall. Okay?

Jordan Lauf: [chuckles] Thanks. I'm running over right now.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks, Jordan.

 

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