Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz, and this is the book review from the New York Times.

We've all made it somehow to April. We've had our snowstorms. We have survived the cold.

And now that the days are getting longer, it feels like there's more time to read.

I'm certainly staying up later with the sun out longer.

So this week on the book review, we've got you covered.

We are going to be talking about a few books coming out in the next couple of months that

we are particularly excited about.

Plus, we're going to hear from former poet laureates of the United States,

Ada Limon. She is out with a new book where she makes the case for poetry. It is National

Poetry Month. That is later in the show. But now, Shumana, Shumana Khatib, is here to talk about

spring books. Hello, Jumana. Hi, Gilbert. We are going to talk about spring books here.

We're going to talk about books that are coming out in April and May,

because in a couple months, we are going to have a grand summer book preview episode.

Do we have books to tie us over until summer?

We do.

Although I want to prophes this by saying that this is a weird season. This particular spring is kind of weird for books. Why is that? I'm going to talk about more nonfiction than I typically do on these episodes, which, you know, it's good. I'm growing. Yeah, that's what spring is for. Well, tell us about the first

book that you're excited about. Okay, so this one is a novel. Although, it's kind of debatable,

but it is a work of fiction. We'll start there. So this is transcription by Ben Lerner. Ben is the author

of leaving the Atotia Station, the Topeka School, 1004. He's very brainy and

intellectual. He's also a really great poet and critic. So his work tends to be very sort of

ideas driven and the language is very beautiful. And this is a very different kind of novel than what he's written before.

This one is a lot looser.

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