Nerdette Book Club: Marie-Helene Bertino on ‘Beautyland’
Happy To Be Here
Greta Johnsen
4.6 • 924 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2024
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our April selection is Marie-Helene Bertino’s gorgeous and entrancing novel 'Beautyland.' It’s about Adina, who realizes she is actually an alien disguised as a young girl living in Philadelphia. Her task is to send reports on humanity back to her home planet via fax machine. The novel is tender, full of heart and weird in the best possible way.
Listen to this spoiler-free interview with the author and read along with us! We’ll be back with a spoiler-filled panel discussion on the last Tuesday of the month. You can join the conversation by sending a voice memo to nerdettepodcast@gmail.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still |
| 0:06.1 | watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you, |
| 0:12.7 | soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making, |
| 0:18.0 | Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago. Join me as I share how the genre |
| 0:22.3 | began, their social impact, and why these stories endure. Listen wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:30.6 | WB.EZ is supported by Chicago Humanities, presenting its spring festival on April 27th in Lakeview |
| 0:37.0 | with historians Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder, |
| 0:40.6 | Jonathan Blitzer on Immigration, |
| 0:42.7 | University of Chicago Professor Agnes Collard on Socrates, |
| 0:46.2 | and documentaries Unblocked Englewood by Chicago's Tanika Lewis Johnson, |
| 0:50.8 | and Beyond Closure on the 2013 Chicago Public School closures. Tickets and more conversations |
| 0:56.4 | on arts, culture, and current affairs at Chicago Humanities.org. |
| 1:05.5 | From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is the Nerdat Book Club. It's just like a |
| 1:10.8 | regular book club, except sometimes the author Book Club. It's just like a regular |
| 1:11.0 | book club, except sometimes the author stops by. It is April, and our selection this month is |
| 1:15.8 | Marie Helene Bertino's gorgeous and entrancing novel Beauty Land. It's about Edina, born in Philadelphia, |
| 1:22.2 | at the same moment in 1977 that the Voyager won spacecraft leaves Earth. When she is a young girl, she realizes |
| 1:29.3 | she's actually an alien disguised as a person. And her task is to send reports back to her home |
| 1:34.5 | planet about humanity via fax machine. That is all I want to say for now, since we're going to do |
| 1:39.6 | our best to keep this a spoiler-free conversation. Marie, welcome to NurdDab. It's so nice to be here. Thank you, |
| 1:44.9 | Greta. So you were born in 77, right? I was in Northeast Philadelphia, like our heroine. |
| 1:51.1 | Do you remember the point at which you first learned about Voyager? I think it was maybe |
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