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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
A Day in the Life of an Audiobook Narrator
I’m always curious about the nitty-gritty workday details of cool and interesting jobs—they almost always involve more spreadsheets and less glamor than you’d think—so I ate up this day-in-the-life interview with an audiobook narrator with a spoon. How long does it take to get a finished hour of recording? What if you have to pee in the middle of a chapter? How do publishers determine what to pay a narrator? What about the AI of it all? Freelance narrator Emily Ellet goes into all this and more.
Zen and the Art of Understanding Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead, quite possibly the greatest living American novelist, is one of those writers whose work simultaneously drives you to recommend it and also refuses to be summarized into an easy-to-share soundbite. You could spend a lifetime honing a way to talk about Whitehead’s work, and lucky for all of us, Derek C. Maus is doing just that. Maus, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Potsdam, is the author of a new book called Understanding Colson Whitehead. This dialogue between Maus and John Warner at The Biblioracle is the best articulation I’ve come across of what it feels like to engage with Whitehead’s work. Talking about what makes a writer hard to talk about is a tricky thing indeed, and Maus and Warner pull it off beautifully.
Warner’s definition of his own work is an added bonus for all of us who have nontraditional careers talking about books: “I’m just someone who reads books, albeit professionally, instead of recreationally. I have an educational background which has given me access to some approaches to reading and thinking about books that I might not otherwise have, but I am also not a “scholar.””
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The It Books of March 2025
On the Book Riot Podcast, Jeff O’Neal and I kick off every month with a knockout round analyzing 10 of the hottest new releases. March is packed with big new books—Laila Lalami! Karen Russell! Suzanne Collins!—and this one was a lot of fun. Listen wherever you get your pods.
