In this episode of Private Life, Rachel Kushner reads an excerpt from Leslie A. Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), which was reissued by New York Review Books in April. In Kushner’s selection, Fiedler writes about Mark Twain and the themes and characters of his books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Kushner is best known for her novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018). Her most recent novel is Creation Lake (2024).

Leslie A. Fiedler (1917–2003) was a literary critic and novelist. His books include The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972), Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978), and Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (1991).

Last week’s episode featured Edwin Frank in a conversation about Fiedler’s literary criticism and Love and Death in the American Novel. You can find Love and Death in the American Novel at nyrb.com or at your favorite bookseller.

In this episode of Private Life, Edwin Frank joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), which was reissued by NYRB Classics in April. They discuss the preoccupations of Fiedler’s literary criticism, the process of putting together a collection of criticism, and Frank’s book Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel (2024).

Edwin Frank is the editor of New York Review Books as well as the founder and editorial director of the NYRB Classics series. In addition to Stranger than Fiction, he has also released a collection of poems, Snake Train (2015).

Leslie A. Fiedler (1917–2003) was a literary critic and novelist. He published two novels and three short story collections, as well as dozens of volumes of criticism, including The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972), Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978), and Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (1991).

Next week’s episode will be a selection from Love and Death in the American Novel, read by the writer Rachel Kushner. You can find Love and Death in the American Novel at nyrb.com or at your favorite bookseller.

In this episode of Private Life, the actress Holland Taylor reads Renata Adler’s essay “The Perils of Pauline,” an expansive assessment of Pauline Kael’s film criticism from the Review’s August 14, 1980, issue. Taylor has been working on films, television, and Broadway since the 1960s. She is a nine-time Emmy nominee, winning once, in 1999, for her role as a judge on The Practice. She was nominated for a Tony Award in 2013 for playing Texas governor Ann Richards in Ann.

Renata Adler is a journalist and film critic who was a staff writer at The New Yorker for four decades. Her books include A Year in the Dark (1969); Toward a Radical Middle (1970); Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999); and the novels Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), which were both reissued by NYRB Classics.

Last week’s episode was an interview with Lucy Sante that discussed Adler’s essay and film criticism. You can read “The Perils of Pauline” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963.