Shopping at the Strand with Michael Orthofer

Soon I will be recording a podcast-only, no live attendance, no live video Conversations with Tyler with Michael Orthofer.  Michael runs the site Literary Saloon and is perhaps the world’s most productive book reviewer and book review blogger, with a focus on foreign fiction translated into English.  Michael is a deeply devoted infovore, and I expect this to be one of the most interesting conversations in the series.

That is the latest entry in the Conversations with Tyler series, here is the transcript, audio, and video.  Here is the overview:

Got an advance copy. Between my non-manual-labor job, Netflix’s excellent recommendations (The OA is so good), and virtue-signaling to my in-group on Twitter, I guess I just wasn’t feeling it.

As you may know from the series, I put in a good amount of preparation for each guest, generally absorbing as much of their life’s work as I can get my hands on.  Even for authors where I have read plenty of them before, I try to reread them fairly comprehensively and all at once, plus some of the secondary literature, criticisms, and the like.  And of course hardly anyone else does this in such a concentrated manner, even if they over time have read everything an author has produced.

Tyler and I are always pleased to get emails like this: Dear Prof Alex and Prof Tyler,

I was sent an email asking what I myself thought of the recent Jeff Bezos charity query, and that email contained a number of questions.  I’m not at liberty to reproduce it, but with some minor edits I think you will be able to make sense of my responses, as given here:

The subtitle is Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy, and the author is leading Syrian intellectual Yassin Al-Haj Saleh.  Imagine having a well-written book, totally conversant in the arguments of the social sciences, that set out to explain the Syrian tragedy to an intelligent reader.  Here is one typical bit:

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: