Medaya Ocher talks with Ramaan Alam about his new novel, Entitlement, that tells the story of Brooke, a product of the upper middle class, who works for an aging billionaire looking for places to give away his fortune. Brooke comes to recognize all that she could do with a vast fortune of her own. Entitlement captures the centrality of wealth and dreams of wealth in the contemporary American imagination.
Also Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain, returns to recommend Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher talk to Emily Witt about her latest book, Health and Safety: A Breakdown. A personal history that reflects on this past turbulent decade, the book begins right before the election of Donald J. Trump, a time when Witt finds herself ever more drawn to Brooklyn’s underground techno music scene. Quitting Wellbutrin in 2012, she’d already started experimenting with psychedelics, but once she’s going out dancing all night, her drug use transforms from a focused ritual under the rubric of the vaguely therapeutic to something more like hedonism: a brief accessing of utopia one party at a time. Then she meets a DJ named Andrew who's at the heart of the scene, and the kind of conventional domestic life she thought she was foregoing suddenly comes into focus, before the pandemic and social uprising of 2020 arrive and change everything. Health and Safety is about trying to find different ways to survive, live, and make family, as well as the changing landscape of New York, the ingenuity and creativity of promoters and DJs, and the shaky line between the collective and the individual in a world gone mad.
Also, Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television, returns to recommend Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace.

Eric Newman speaks with Garth Greenwell about his latest novel, Small Rain. The novel picks up the story of the same unnamed narrator from Greenwell's earlier novels, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, a poet and teacher now in his forties and settled down with his partner in the Midwest. Their placid life is upended when a sudden and excruciating pain sends the narrator to the hospital, where he's diagnosed with an aortic tear -- a life-threatening condition. Unfolding from this point, the novel explores how the narrator navigates his recovery as he's treated in a cramped hospital room in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic. Dilating on the power of art and intimacy to buoy us up in moments of extreme suffering, as well as the moments in which suffering overwhelms the transcendent capacity of art, Small Rain reckons with how we make our way through the agonies and ecstasies, unique and mundane, of life itself.
Also, Sofia Samatar, author of Opacities, returns to recommend two books by Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline and These Possible Lives.