The Book Review26 Aug 2022

John Lithgow on “Drama” and Maggie O'Farrell on “Hamnet”

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2011 and 2021, respectively.

The actor John Lithgow has been nominated for 13 Emmy Awards and has won six times, for roles as varied as the British prime minister Winston Churchill (on “The Crown”) and the extraterrestrial high commander Dick Solomon (on “3rd Rock From the Sun”). In 2011 he talked to Sam Tanenhaus, the Book Review’s editor at the time, about his memoir “Drama” and his education as an actor. “The more that an actor can accommodate himself to the truth that he will eventually be forgotten, the better off he is,” he says.

Also this week, the writer Maggie O’Farrell discusses her acclaimed novel “Hamnet,” which imagines the life of William Shakespeare, his wife, Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, and the couple’s son Hamnet, who died at 11 years old in 1596. In her 2021 podcast appearance, O’Farrell told the host Pamela Paul that she hoped to capture a sense of the young boy at its center. “I think he’s been consigned to a literary footnote,” she says. “And I believe, quite strongly, that without him — without his tragically short life — we wouldn’t have the play ‘Hamlet.’ We probably wouldn’t have ‘Twelfth Night.’ As an audience, we are enormously in debt to him.”

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(600)

Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Switzy'

David Hastings is a retired business executive on a grim mission: He’s going to end his life.That’s the dramatic setup of Emma Cline’s latest novel, “Switzy.”When the story opens, David is on a plane,...

30 Okt 56min

What to Read This Halloween, According to Two Best-Selling Writers

Halloween is the season for scary stories, but what actually makes a book frightening? And where should you start if you’re not already a horror reader?This week on “The Book Review” podcast, Gilbert ...

23 Okt 51min

A Book Review Critics’ Roundtable

As much as we love hearing from authors on “The Book Review” podcast, there are precious few who have read more than our staff book critics — Jennifer Szalai, Alexandra Jacobs and Dwight Garner. The t...

16 Okt 41min

Min Jin Lee Wants Us to Rethink Education

For Min Jin Lee, the process of writing fiction usually begins with a deep dive into reality. She spends years researching, traveling and interviewing people.That process underscored her belief that e...

9 Okt 56min

Decades Later, Stephen King Is Finishing What He and Peter Straub Started

There are few living writers as closely associated with a genre as Stephen King is with horror. Over a career spanning more than 50 years, 70 novels and hundreds of short stories, King has terrified g...

2 Okt 36min

Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘Etna,’ by Paul Yoon

Paul Yoon’s new novel, “Etna,” follows a haunted, battle-scarred war veteran who wants desperately to go home. He also happens to be a dog — a mixed-breed shepherd trained to sniff out bombs for an un...

26 Sep 55min

John Green Knows a True Hollywood Ending is Complicated

MJ Franklin is in the host chair this week, in for Gilbert Cruz. MJ spoke with New York Times book critic Dwight Garner about Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers.” Dwight recently reviewed the...

18 Sep 57min

The Best Books of the 21st Century: Taffy Brodesser-Akner on ‘The Corrections’

If you were a reading adult in the early 2000s, you probably tackled, or at least heard about, “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s best-selling and much discussed book.The novel won the National Boo...

11 Sep 47min