Welcome to the Book Review Podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz, the new editor of the bookstask,

and for the next many months we'll be highlighting great interviews from our decade plus archive.

Why are we doing that? Well, we're planning a new iteration of this podcast, and as a result,

we'll be using the rest of the year to figure out what that might sound like. Until then,

we hope you enjoyed these trips down memory lane.

This week we have two conversations for you. In 2017, Andrew Shawne Greer released his

comic novel Less. The following year, to his great surprise, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

He found out this news from the author Michael Shabon while at a writer's residency in Tuscany

after having put a diaper on a pug. That's just one of the many delightful details in our new profile

from Greer, which was written by Alexandra Alter. Greer's new book Less is Lost is a sequel to that

prize-winning novel, and we're using this as an opportunity to look back on a conversation that he

had five years ago with then book review editor Pam LaPole. Our second conversation is from 2015.

That's when we spoke to William Finnegan, the New Yorker staff writer, about his memoir Barbarian Days,

which details his life traveling through many parts of the world chasing his surfing obsession.

I don't know how to swim, let alone surf, which is probably why it's worth through this book seven

years ago and was compelled to highlight it now. Andrew Shawne Greer joins us now. His new novel is

called Less, and it is on the cover of the New York Times Book Review this week. Andy, thank you

for being here. Thanks for having me. All right, this is a book about failed novelist. You are not

a failed novelist. What drew you to this foreign creature? I think it's not hard for any novelist to

consider themselves failed at any point. Even the greatest writers I know, they feel like they're

on the outside because I think you're alone all the time, so you're sure you're, you've just lost

it every day. And a failed novelist is sort of not a foreign creature in the world of letters.

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