Gays Reading

Host Jason Blitman talks to acclaimed author Xochitl Gonzalez (Olga Dies Dreaming) about her lates book, Last Night in Brooklyn.

Conversation highlights include:
🎉 Parties in the aughts
🌃 The magic of New York
🏘️ Urban planning and future extrapolation

Xochitl Gonzalez is a contributor to The Atlantic, where she was recognized as a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning novel Olga Dies Dreaming, the Reese’s Book Club Pick Anita de Monte Laughs Last, and her latest novel Last Night in Brooklyn. A native Brooklynite and proud public school graduate, Gonzalez holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is a trustee of the corporation of Brown University and the Brooklyn Public Library.

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In this episode of What Are You Reading?, Jason sits down with Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jayne Anne Phillips to discuss books she's been reading and her highly anticipated memoir-in-essays, Small Town Girls, which Oprah named her #1 most anticipated read of the year.

Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, Quiet Dell, and Night Watch, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. Her work has been a finalist once for the National Book Award and twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Howard, Bunting, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Boston and New York.
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Host Jason Blitman talks to debut novelist Abigail Savitch-Lew about Livonia Chow Mein.

Conversation highlights include:
🪧 Local activism
🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Family legacy

Abigail Savitch-Lew is a writer of fiction and nonfiction and an American of Jewish and Chinese (Ashkenazi and Toisanese) descent. She 🪧has a BA in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of the novel Livonia Chow Mein, and her short stories have been published in The Round, Post Road, The Best Teen Writing of 2010, and The Apprentice Writer. Previously, she was a staff reporter for City Limits, an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellow, and an adjunct professor of creative writing at Rutgers. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the artist Emmanuel Knight, her sister-in-law, and their cat.
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In this episode of What Are You Reading? Jason talks to author Jessica Geroge (Maame) about what she's been reading and about her latest novel, Love by the Book.

Jessica George is the New York Times bestselling author of Maame. She was born and raised in London to Ghanaian parents and studied English Literature at the University of Sheffield.
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Host Jason Blitman talks to acclaimed journalist Patrick Radden Keefe about his latest book, London Falling. London Falling is the April 2026 Late Show with Stephen Colbert Book Club pick.

Conversation highlights include:
🤫 How we all tell lies in one way or another
🐱 Cats, the musical
⚽️ The various sports Keefe has played

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain (winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize) and Say Nothing, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the Twenty Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times Book Review. His work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He served as an Executive Producer on the award-winning FX series “Say Nothing,” based on his book. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast “Wind of Change,” about the strange convergence of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music, which The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly named the #1 podcast of 2020.
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CONTACT! [email protected]
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