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Okay, on to the show. I'm Gilbert Cruz editor of the New York Times Book Review and this is the Book Review

Podcast.

This week I'm joined by Jean Hymph Corlitz.

Her 2021 novel, The Plot, was a literary thriller about the world of literature,

the world of writing fellowships and failed careers and ones promising authors fading into oblivion.

Her new novel, called the sequel, is a sequel to the plot, a direct sequel.

And as such, we'll be discussing some key twists from Jean's first book and

if you haven't read that one you should do so and then come back and listen to this conversation.

Jean, welcome back to the book review podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

You were last year for the plot?

Naturally, you couldn't really talk about any of the twists in that book. I'm hoping we can do so a little bit today in order to segue into talking about the sequel. But first, big picture sequels don't always live up to the original.

In the text of this very book, you have an agent that says,

sequels can be very enticing when the initial book is done well

...