I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review and this is the Book Review

Podcast. On this week's episode, Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast.

On this week's episode, Times Book Critic White Garner joins me to talk about the oral history

that cacophonous format in which quotes from tens, dozens, hundreds of people are chopped up and

edited together to present a fragmented, very often entertaining version of events.

The reason for this specific conversation, a new book called The Freaks came out to write

the definitive history of the Village Voice, the radical paper that changed American

culture by Tricia Romano, which Dwight recently wrote about

for the book review. Dwight, welcome back to the podcast.

Hey Gilbert, it's great to be here.

So there's so many ways in which we can start this conversation, but let's just, I grew up in New York,

I've read the Village Voice really, or I read the Village Voice for so much of my life.

I like to assume that everyone knows what the village voice was. Maybe that's small-minded

of me in my own way. Tell us what was the village voice.

Well, there was once upon a time every major American city had an alternative weekly., kind of a little bit lefty, a lot of arts culture, a lot of arts coverage in it, good listings, good classified ads.

It's where you went to read movie reviews to find out where your favorite band was playing,

and that kind of thing.

And very few of them exist now in any kind of real state in America.

There's a good one still in Burlington, Vermont, but it's rare.

The voice was the sort of original. I mean it was founded by a group of writers and

editors in 1955 that included Norman Mailer and the paper was meant to be a downtown

New York paper. Downtown for people not in New York sort of means below 14th Street or it used to mean that.

...