On this episode of Writers at Work, I'm joined by Alex Lin, playwright and screenwriter, whose métier per Forbes magazine is the lives of, "complex women in power while also working to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and pop culture." I quote Forbes because its editors recently placed Alex on its 30 Under 30 list, naming her one of America's brightest young talents.

Alex's achievements thus far include two plays premiering at major New York theaters in the same season, Lao Wang: A Chinatown King Lear at Primary Stages, and Chinese Republicans at the Roundabout Theater. Alex also wrote for the AMC series The Audacity, which premiered this past Sunday. A graduate of Juilliard, Alex is the winner of a Stavis Award presented by the National Theatre Conference, and two Kennedy Center awards.

Her plays have been developed by countless regional theaters and workshops, and she's worked as an actor. As I understand it, she's now at work on a play about the first Cantonese language translator working at Angel Island in San Francisco, the primary immigration station on the West Coast in the early part of the 20th century.

With me on this episode of Writers at Work is Mark Braude, author of THE TYPEWRITER AND THE GUILLOTINE: AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST, A GERMAN SERIAL KILLER, AND PARIS ON THE EVE OF WWII. The American journalist is Janet Flanner, best known for her work for The New Yorker. The German serial killer is a wormy, self-deluded, lifelong criminal, and the setting is, as stated, Paris during the build-up to the Second World War.

THE TYPEWRITER AND THE GUILLOTINE is the third non-fiction work by Mark Brodie, whose previous KIKI MAN RAY: ART, LOVE, AND RIVALRY IN 1920s PARIS was named a notable book of 2022 by the New York Times, and a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. In 2018, he published THE INVISIBLE EMPEROR: NAPOLEON ON ELBA FROM EXILE TO ESCAPE, and two years earlier, MAKING MONTE CARLO: A HISTORY OF SPECULATION AND SPECTACLE.

Mark holds a PhD in History from the University of Southern California, and a Master's in French Studies from New York University.

An aside: I just returned from a writer's conference where I think I may have spoken more about THE TYPEWRITER AND THE GUILLOTINE than I did my own novels. I'm eager to find out how this book I admire so came to be.

I'm pleased to be joined today on Writers at Work by Ron Charles, the book critic best known for his reviews published in the Washington Post, his former employer. If you know Ron's work, it goes without saying that his unceremonious exit from the Post represents another blow to the relevance of books and literature in American mainstream media.

On his Substack, Ron discussed his situation with characteristic self-deprecation. "I didn't start off as a journalist," he wrote. "Some might say I didn't end up one either. 30 years ago, I gave up a perfectly respectable job teaching English to write book reviews for the Christian Science Monitor." His aunt's huffy reaction? "'Surely, they're not gonna pay you to do that?' They did." Ron said he had some of the best years of his life at the Monitor, even if he toiled in relative obscurity. After a series of interviews, he was hired as a critic by the Washington Post. In time, he became editor of its Book World section.

After two decades and having received a National Book Critics Circle Award and served as a Pulitzer Prize judge, Ron was let go by the Post and Book World was shut down. As the New Yorker's Becca Rothfeld summarized, "No one who has anything to do with books remains employed at the Post."

Among US mainstream media, only the New York Times has a section dedicated to book reviews, though my former employer, the Wall Street Journal, regularly publishes book reviews. We can find publications and blogs dedicated to books, but as Becca points out, "They are produced for an audience that already knows or cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados. It seeks new recruits."

It's been reported that at Ernst Lubitsch's funeral in 1947, Billy Wilder said, "No more Lubitsch" and William Wyler replied, "Worse than that, no more Lubitsch films." We can find online book reviews Ron Charles wrote for the Post and his reviews for CBS Sunday Morning on YouTube, but are we at the point of no more new Ron Charles book reviews?