What's it like to be an American ambassador to Russia during the Putin era?

Michael McFall will be here to talk about his new book from Cold War to Hot Piece.

Would sleeping for a year solve everything?

That's the main character's plan in the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Otessa Mochvag joins us to talk about it.

Alexander Alter will give us an update from the publishing world.

Plus we'll talk about what we and the wider world are reading.

This is the Booker V Podcast from The New York Times.

I'm Pamela Paul.

Joining us now is Michael McFall.

He is a professor of political science and the director and senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute

for international studies at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution,

as well as the author of a new book from Cold War to Hot Piece,

an American ambassador in Putin's Russia.

Michael, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So this is a memoir primarily of your years as ambassador to Russia under Obama.

You were there for two years or three years?

Well, a little bit longer than two, but 2012 to 2014, yeah.

So here's the question that many of us often wonder,

because there are different routes to becoming an ambassador.

How did you get to be the ambassador to Russia at that time?

...