The writer and editor Robert Gottlieb does double duty on this week’s podcast. He talks about the life and career of Sinclair Lewis, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of “Babbitt,” Lewis’s best-selling novel about the narrow-mindedness and conformity of middle-class America in the first half of the 20th century. But first, he talks about his own new book, “Garbo,” a biography of the movie star Greta Garbo, whose impact on the culture was matched by the sense of mystery that surrounded her.“I understood the power of the impact, but I didn’t really understand — because I hadn’t been seeing her movies, I was too young — I didn’t really understand what she was on the screen and how she got to the screen in the first place. So as usual, it was curiosity that led me to write about her,” Gottlieb says. “No one had ever seemed like her before, and no one has ever seemed like her since. So to trace what those qualities were became the subject of the book.Carl Bernstein visits the podcast to discuss his new memoir, “Chasing History.” The book is about a time before Bernstein and Bob Woodward became household names for their Watergate reporting. Subtitled “A Kid in the Newsroom,” Bernstein’s memoir focuses on the years 1960 to 1965, when he worked at The Evening Star in Washington, then the chief rival of The Washington Post. He was first hired as a copyboy when he was only 16.“I was spending a lot of time at the pool hall,” Bernstein says of his life before he got the job. “I was getting terrible grades in school. I was working Saturdays at a low-rent department store in a bad part of town.” At the newspaper, he saw a clearer future. “The greatest reporters of their time, many of them were in this newsroom. And I saw what they were doing, and I studied what they were doing and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Jennifer Szalai and Molly Young talk about the books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:Books about Stoicism“How Civil Wars Start” by Barbara F. WalterWe would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected]

Throughout the year, we hear from many of you, and are always glad when we do. From time to time, we try to answer some of your questions on the podcast. This week, for the second time, we dedicate an entire episode to doing just that. Some of the many questions addressed this week:Who are literature’s one-hit wonders?What are some of our favorite biographies?What are empowering novels about women in midlife?How do we assign books to reviewers?Who are writers that deserve more attention?How does the practice of discounted books work?Providing the answers are the book critic Dwight Garner, the editors Lauren Christensen, MJ Franklin and John Williams, and the reporters Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris. Pamela Paul is the host.We mention many more books than usual on this episode. Here’s a list for reference:“A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole“Gilead,” by Marilynne Robinson“The Master and Margarita,” by Mikhail Bulgakov“The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt“The Secret History,” by Donna Tartt“Natural Opium,” by Diane Johnson“In Trouble Again,” by Redmond O’Hanlon“Into the Heart of Borneo,” by Redmond O’Hanlon“Venice,” by Jan Morris“On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac“Minor Characters,” by Joyce Johnson“The Life of Samuel Johnson,” by James Boswell“William James,” by Robert D. Richardson“Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley,” by Peter Guralnick“Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley,” by Peter Guralnick“Samuel Pepys,” by Claire Tomalin“No One Here Gets Out Alive,” by Jerry Hopkins“The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” by Paul Elie“Virginia Woolf,” by Hermione Lee“The Stone Angel,” by Margaret Laurence“Memento Mori,” by Muriel Spark“The Friend,” by Sigrid Nunez“What Are You Going Through,” by Sigrid Nunez“The Journals of John Cheever”“A Manual for Cleaning Women,” by Lucia Berlin“The Blood of the Lamb,” by Peter De Vries“Go Tell It on the Mountain,” by James Baldwin“Sula,” by Toni Morrison“Lot,” by Bryan Washington“Little Fires Everywhere,” by Celeste Ng“The Yellow House,” by Sarah M. Broom“Sing, Unburied, Sing,” by Jesmyn Ward“The Topeka School,” by Ben Lerner“Modern Lovers,” by Emma StraubThe fiction of Randall Kenan“Popisho,” by Leone Ross“Detransition, Baby” by Torrey Peters“The Magician,” by Colm Toibin“When We Cease to Understand the World,” by Benjamín Labatut“Say Nothing,” by Patrick Radden Keefe“Empire of Pain,” by Patrick Radden Keefe“Bad Blood,” by John CarreyrouThe poetry of Emily DickinsonThe poetry of Ada Limón“Piranesi,” by Susanna Clarke“Klara and the Sun,” by Kazuo IshiguroWe would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected]

David Sedaris’s second volume of diaries, “A Carnival of Snackery,” covers the years 2003 to 2020. On this week's podcast, he talks about the diaries, and about being on the road again — we caught him in Montana, a stop on his sprawling reading and signing tour.“I’ve been surprised by what people are willing to — ‘You want us to show proof of vaccination? OK, we’ll do it. You want us to wear a mask the entire time? OK, we’ll do it,’” Sedaris says. “And then the book signings have lasted as long as they always did, so people are still willing to wait in line. I’ve really been touched by that. And I’m willing to make whatever sacrifices I need to.” He added: “I’m just so grateful to be out again.”The poet Paul Muldoon visits the podcast to talk about his work editing Paul McCartney’s two-volume collection “The Lyrics.” He says becoming involved with the project was an easy choice.“Through his career, as a Beatle, of course, and then with Wings and his solo career, he’s been a force in my life and certainly in the lives of many people who were even vaguely sentient through the 1960s and since,” Muldoon says of McCartney. “What’s fascinating about his career with the Beatles is that they were, of course, very much of their moment, they were defined by their moment — including, at the risk of sounding a bit banal — the optimism that was associated in the U.K. with the postwar period. But of course, extraordinarily, they went on to influence their moment also; they came to define their moment, and to define the rest of us, actually. It was a very interesting phenomenon. So yeah, I was thrilled to be involved, and continue to be thrilled to be involved.”Muldoon also talks about, and reads from, his new poetry collection, “Howdie-Skelp.”Also on this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:“Middlemarch” by George Eliot“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer“The Corrections” by Jonathan FranzenWe would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected]

In 2007, Debby Applegate won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Most Famous Man in America,” her biography of the 19th-century preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. Applegate’s new book, “Madam,” is another biography, of a very different subject: Polly Adler, who ran a brothel and had many famous friends during the Jazz Age in New York City. On this week’s podcast, Applegate describes the challenges of running a business in the underworld.“You have to depend on your reputation,” Applegate says. “You can’t advertise, you can’t sell your product in a normal market square. So you have to cultivate your own kind of word of mouth and your own kind of notoriety. Polly worked out of small but luxurious apartments that were hidden away and constantly moving, so she could stay one step ahead of the cops or other crooks. What Polly did was use that small town but big city of Manhattan, which was really thriving in those years between World War I and World War II, and she became a critical player — a ‘big shot,’ as the gossip columnists called her.”Matthew Pearl visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “The Taking of Jemima Boone,” about the kidnapping of Daniel Boone’s daughter in 1776. Pearl is well known as a novelist, and he says that this work of nonfiction has many of the elements he looks for in any good story.“Jemima is such a strong and incredible character to work with,” he says. She was one of the Boones’ 10 children, though “not all of them survived into childhood or adulthood, and Jemima was one who was very close with her father, in particular, and she had really her father’s spirit of persistence and independence.”Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world, and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:“The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails”“Accidental Gods” by Anna Della SubinWe would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected]

James Andrew Miller has written a series of oral histories about some our biggest cultural institutions: “Saturday Night Live,” Creative Artists Agency and ESPN. His new book, “Tinderbox,” follows HBO from its start in 1972 through its transformative “Sopranos” years and up to the present day.“One of the things that struck me was just how emotional people were,” Miller says on this week’s podcast. “First of all, HBO was a place that people didn’t date, they married. There were people that were there for 20 years, 25 years, 30, 35 years. They stayed there for their careers, and they were very, very wedded to it. I’m not bragging about this, but there were at least — more than — a dozen people who cried during interviews, who called me back the next day and said, ‘Now I have PTSD revisiting some of what I went through.’” He says he learned that “this was not just a place that people checked in on a time clock and left; it was like a tsunami that washed over their lives.”Mayukh Sen visits the podcast to talk about his new book, “Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America.”“Five of the seven women whom I focus on in this book are no longer with us,” Sen says, “and in the absence of their presence I really wanted to understand how they spoke and how they wanted to present themselves to the world. And I really wanted to find them speaking in their own words. So the way I sought that out was to find their memoirs, or cookbooks with memoiristic passages or any interviews they gave throughout their lifetime that really presented them speaking without that kind of filter.”Also on this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:“Now Beacon, Now Sea” by Christopher Sorrentino“A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles“Ghost Light” by Frank Rich“Fairyland” by Alysia Abbott“Life Inside” by Mindy Lewis