Hi, everybody. Welcome to the librarian is in the New York Public Library's podcast about books, culture, and what to read next. I'm Gwen. And I'm Simone de Beauvoir. And both of us are so excited today to welcome Nancy Pearl to our podcast. Nancy, thank you so much for joining us. Totally my pleasure. I'm looking forward to talking to you. Oh, my gosh. I'm so excited about this. I hear we're doing the guessing game with Nancy, which I'm thrilled about that. Nancy, you're going to read us a passage for a book

and we're going to have to guess it. That's like my favorite thing to do. I can imagine, yes, I love it. I love doing this. Yeah. I just enjoy failure because I fail all the time. But I love what people decide to read and hearing them read it. So that's exciting to me. But we'll do that later. Okay. Yep. Sure. We can do that later. Why don't we start a little bit by you just telling us

about you and your work? And we can reveal our super secret hidden connection also.

Okay. Well, I am, I got my library degree many, many, many years ago at the University of Michigan.

What was then their library school is now their school of information

and have worked in bookstores and public libraries for my whole career,

basically until I started writing books, the Booklust series,

which is a series of books about my recommended

books to read, arranged in all four of them are arranged in very quirky, fun categories.

And then out of the blue, these two characters came to me one night when I was trying to fall

asleep, and they just

a man named George and a woman named Lizzie, and they just stayed with me, and I kept

thinking about them, and they somehow became more real to me than almost anybody else that I

knew. And then after three or four years of just kind of thinking about

their lives and discovering more and more about them, I wrote a novel called George and Lizzie,

which is coming out September 5th. Right. Yeah. I mean, you're like the preeminent book recommender.

You know, with your book, lost books like that.

I mean, you said, but then you said out of the blue you had this idea, literally.

Had you been thinking about writing a novel or fiction before that?

You know, I wrote poetry and short stories in my 30s and then stopped and really just, you know,

concentrated on raising a family and, you know, working as a librarian. So I didn't. I really,

I really didn't even think it was a novel when I was sitting down and writing it.

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