The Book Review

The latest film from the writer and director Clint Bentley, “Train Dreams,” is nominated for four Oscars, including best adapted screenplay. The movie is based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name and tells the story of Robert Grainier, a logger in the Pacific Northwest, in stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear prose. This week, Gilbert Cruz talks with Bentley, who wrote the screenplay with Greg Kwedar, his longtime collaborator, about how he went about translating Johnson’s work into a visual medium.

Bentley first read “Train Dreams” just after college, long before he ever thought of making it into a movie. When producers with rights to the book approached Bentley, he was suddenly worried. “Going back and reading the book again,” Bentley said, “I was like, Oh, maybe this thing is unadaptable.” Set on capturing the spirit of the book, Bentley and Kwedar focused on “the vastness of this small little life,” he said.

“We very rarely have an understanding of our lives in the moment we’re actually living them,” Bentley said. “We only start to understand them when it’s too late.”

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For decades, the director Guillermo del Toro has built a career blending the grotesque and the beautiful in films like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Shape of Water” and “Pinocchio.” Now he’s earned his latest Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of “Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley’s classic novel. On this week’s episode, he talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about discovering the book as a lonely child, how it shaped his worldview and why this screenplay is the one he’s proudest of.

“I always felt the creature is me,” del Toro said of the first time he read the book. “I felt so alone at age 11, and so full of love to give and so full of rage to dispose of. It was a very complicated emotional scope for somebody that young.”

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Julia Quinn published "The Duke and I," the first book in the 'Bridgerton' series, in 2000. Seven books and a quarter century later, its adaptation remains one of the biggest series ever to air on Netflix. Quinn spoke to host Gilbert Cruz about the show, her books and why the heck that family has so many children.

"I don't even remember why I made eight kids," said Quinn. "I just, I wanted her to have a big family and somehow that's how many kids there were. And if I had planned on eight, I would've plotted things out better. There were a number of places where I really wrote myself into a corner."

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Keza MacDonald, the video games editor at The Guardian and author of the new book “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play,” chose to write her first book about Nintendo because it has been so central for so long to the culture of games. “It was the company that got me into video games,” she says. “I know that’s the same story that millions of other people have had as well." She speaks with host Gilbert Cruz about the iconic Japanese company as well as how the perception of gaming has changed over the decades.

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Xenobe Purvis’s slim but powerful debut novel, “The Hounding,” opens with a jolt: “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body. Marching up the river path, the villagers.”

How did we get here, with five young sisters living in 1700s England being hunted by an angry mob that suspects them not only of murder but also of the demonic ability to transform themselves into a pack of wild dogs? That is the tale “The Hounding” unfolds, in a gothic parable about male ego, cultural misogyny and the dangers of gossip run amok.

On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin discusses “The Hounding” with his fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.

Other books and works mentioned in this podcast:

“The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson

“The Sound of Music,” directed by Robert Wise

“The Testament of Yves Gundron,” by Emily Barton

“The Scarlet Letter,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch,” by Rivka Galchen

“Delicate Edible Birds,” by Lauren Groff

“Paradise,” by Toni Morrison

The podcast “Normal Gossip”

“You Didn’t Hear This From Me,” by Kelsey McKinney

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