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Gabrielle Zevin’s new novel, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” is set in the world of video game design and follows two friends, Sadie and Sam, who work together on what becomes a hugely successful game.
“A friend of mine described the book as what it’s like to co-parent something that isn’t a child,” Zevin says on this week’s podcast. “Sam and Sadie, they are more intimate with each other than anyone in their lives. Yet they are not husbands, and he is not her child, and yet this is the most important relationship they both have. So that’s what I wanted to write about: What if the most important person in your life was really your colleague and your friend?”
Morgan Talty visits the podcast to discuss his debut story collection, “Night of the Living Rez.” set on the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation in Maine, where Talty grew up.
“I was well aware that Indigenous fiction is trying to perform for a white readership, or a mostly white readership, and there have been instances in books that I admired by Indigenous writers that I could see this. And I always wanted to be there. recoiling, because I didn’t want to keep delving into those kinds of stories,” Talty says. “Throughout the book, there’s less association with Indigenity in the characters, so it’s the characters that take center stage, it’s their human nature that is central, as opposed to perhaps something cultural.”
Also in this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris talks about how #BookTok has become a dominant engine for fiction sales; and Dwight Garner and Alexandra Jacobs talk about what people read. John Williams is the landlord.
Here are the books discussed by The Times critics this week:
We’d love to hear what you think about this episode, and about the Book Review podcast in general. You can send them to books.†
