What's the latest in romance?

Each established writer has clearly established a constituency, and it's fun to follow that.

Robert Gottlieb will be here to talk about this season's bounty of love stories.

How do you follow up a runaway best seller of a debut?

One thing that I wanted to try to do was to write sort of on a little bit bigger of a canvas.

The less Tang will join us to talk about her new novel, Little Fires Everywhere.

Alexander Alter will tell us about the latest goings-on in the literary world, and we'll

talk about what we and the wider world are reading.

This is Inside the New York Times Booker View.

I'm Pamela Paul.

Robert Gottlieb joins us now.

He is the author most recently of a memoir, Avid Reader.

He has also served as the editor-in-chief of Kanoff, Simon & Schuster and of The New Yorker.

Bob, thanks for being here.

And this week you wrote a roundup of the season's romance novels, which is a bit of a change

from your last review for us, which was of a Tuscanyne bio.

Have you always been a fan of romance?

Well, to the extent that I've indulged myself in dipping into it, yeah, I enjoy it because

on the one hand, it does its job often quite well.

On the other hand, it's preposterous.

Nothing is at stake.

So you can just enjoy what you can enjoy and then forget it.

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