Jeff Deutsch, Tananarive Due, Hernan Diaz & Robert Martin With Pamela Paul: A Conversation

Tananarive Due is an academic and author whose books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. Her collaborator and husband, Steven Barnes, is a New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 novels. In their collaboration The Keeper (Harry N. Abrams), illustrated by Marco Finnegan, Aisha has lost her parents in a car crash, and now she must move to decrepit and derelict Detroit to live with her ailing grandmother. But shortly after Aisha’s move, her grandmother’s health rapidly deteriorates. With her dying breath, she summons the dark spirit that has protected their family for generations to watch over her granddaughter. At first, it seems that this spirit, the Keeper, is doing what it was asked. But Aisha finds that this being can only sustain itself by stealing life from others, and she and her friends must come together to destroy it or die trying.

Hernan Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.  He has also written a book of essays, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. In Trust: A Novel (Riverhead Books), it’s the 1920s and everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth – all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Diaz puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another, and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and also oversees book coverage at the Times, where she hosts the weekly Book Review podcast. She is also an author whose books include My Life with Bob; How to Raise a Reader; By the Book; Parenting, Inc.; Pornified; The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony; and Rectangle Time, a book for children. Before joining The New York Times, she was a contributor to Time and The Economist, and her work appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Vogue. In her most recent book, 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet (Crown Publishing Group), Paul’s musings turn to modern life and its absolute entrenchment in the digital space. Today we exist, for the most part, in the filtered and isolated corners of the internet – a place that has all at once become our local library, office, bar, movie theater, and concert hall. While the internet has put an entire world at our fingertips, it has also taken away many of the fundamental human experiences that sustain us.

Robert Martin is the founder of TheIndependentBookseller.com, a free resource for independent booksellers. He has worked for regional and national bookselling trade associations and consults with both established independent bookstores and entrepreneurs looking to enter the market. He is based in Minneapolis.

Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which in 2019 he helped incorporate as the first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling. His tome In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton University Press) is an eloquent and charming reflection on the singular importance of such entities. Do we need bookstores in the 21st century? And if so, what makes a good one? Here, Deutsch pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. Along the way, he also predicts – perhaps audaciously – a future in which the bookstore not only endures but also realizes its highest aspirations. In exploring why good bookstores matter, he draws on his lifelong experience as a bookseller and his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew. This spiritual and cultural heritage instilled in him a reverence for reading, not as a means to a living, but as an essential part of a meaningful life. In the age of one-click shopping, this is no ordinary defense of bookstores – it’s an urgent account of why they are essential places of discovery, refuge, and fulfillment that enrich the communities lucky enough to have them.