Who is Edward P. Jones and what makes his work worth reading now?

A.O. Scott, who was here last to discuss Wallace Stegner, joins us to talk about the second

writer in his essay series, The Americans.

How have hurricane shaped damaged and destroyed parts of the United States over the years?

Eric J. Dolan will be here to talk about his new book, A Furious Sky.

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

This is the Booker View Podcast for the New York Times.

It's August 14th. I'm Pamela Paul.

A.O. Scott joins us now to talk about Edward P. Jones. Tony, thanks for being here.

It's great to talk with you.

So Edward P. Jones is the second in a series of essays that you're writing

for the Booker View called The Americans.

The last one, and the first, was Wallace Stegner.

You were here to talk about him.

Talk a little bit about the project generally and the kind of writers you're looking at and why.

It was partly motivated by a kind of frustration with some of the discussions about

American culture, American identity, American history that are happening now in this highly

politicized, highly polarized environment that tends to sort of squeeze everything down to red

and blue to liberal conservative in all of these very kind of reductive ways.

And it had been my experience for a long time reading American writers from various

eras, of various backgrounds that the picture that we get of what American life is in literature

is always more complicated, more contradictory, more nuanced, less easily assimilated to or

...