It’s hard to think of a more courageous (or audacious) job for a writer than to reimagine Shakespeare. The best-selling thriller writer Jo Nesbo is the latest to give it a try, in “Macbeth,” reviewed for us by James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar and the author of several acclaimed books about the Bard.
“I think Nesbo is the greatest contemporary writer of the thriller, and he understands that Macbeth is the great grandaddy of the thriller, the murder mystery,” Mr. Shapiro says on this week’s podcast. “He gets that as well as any writer can.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Shapiro says, there is “always a price to pay when you are turning a Shakespeare play into something else.” He discusses what he considers the many strengths of Mr. Nesbo’s novel along with that price to pay.
Leila Slimani joins us this week to discuss her novel “The Perfect Nanny,” which won the Prix Goncourt award in France. The book echoes a real-life tragedy, the case of Yoselyn Ortega, who was recently convicted of the murder of two children left in her care.
“In France, there is a tradition of writers who are inspired by the reality and then try to imagine and build a fiction,” Ms. Slimani says, going back to the classics of Flaubert and Zola.
Ms. Slimani says the reaction from readers in the United States has included a question she never gets in France: “What is the message of the book?” Other readers have emphasized their moral judgment of the characters. “I think it’s very surprising to judge characters so much, to have a moral way of reading a novel,” Ms. Slimani says. “There is no message. I think that literature is here to ask questions, not to answer questions. A novel is not a trial. We are not here to judge characters, and maybe that’s why I write, because literature is a space where you can stop judging people and try just to understand them, even people who are very, very different from you, even people who are monstrous.”
Also on this week’s podcast, Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; and Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai talk about this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners and the books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.
Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:
“The Emissary” by Yoko Tawada
“Brown” by Kevin Young
“Wade in the Water” by Tracy K. Smith
“God Save Texas” by Lawrence Wright
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
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