Gilbert Cruz

And these 10 books are the result of that vote.

Um, the five fiction books, some of them might be familiar to you. All Fours by Miranda July, Good Material by Dolly Alderton, James by Percival Everett, Martyr by Kaveh Akbar, and You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique.

I do. And I think it's the smallest book on this list, actually. It is You Dream of Empires by the Mexican writer Alvaro Enrique. And it essentially imagines the first meeting between Hernan Cortes and Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor, in what is now Mexico City in 1519. It is an imaginative sort of psychedelic look at what that encounter might have been like. It's very funny.

It's very sort of descriptively written, like there are smells and sights that pop off the page. And again, it's slim. And that's important when you're reading a lot of books over the course of a year.

Sure. So nonfiction is a mix of biography, history. We have stuff like Reagan by Max Boot. It's about Ronald Reagan. Everyone Who's Gone is Here by Jonathan Blitzer. The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides, which I will talk about in a minute because I really loved it. I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sant. And then Cold Crematorium by Yosef Debrezeni.

The Wide, Wide Sea. So The Wide, Wide Sea is about Captain Cook, Captain James Cook. It's about his third and final voyage. He was sent in the year 1776, a year that we're all very familiar with, to the South Pacific to return a Polynesian man to his home island in the South Pacific. He was also sent to try to find... the Northwest Passage, which is something that many explorers were looking for.

It was not accessible at the time. And then something bad happened to him. He died. That is bad. That is bad. And I love this book so much because I just love tail set on the high seas. I love books about what it's like to be on a, you know, a big boat with big sails, drinking grog, possibly getting scurvy and not knowing what you're going to encounter the next day.

Well, the secret is that one does not. One relies on many other people. We decided to take advantage of the fact that we have access to thousands of authors who write reviews for us all the time and sort of lean on their expertise. These are all people that are extremely well-read. So we sent a survey out to 1,200 or so people. A lot of them were authors.

You know, Stephen King, Bonnie Garmis, Curtis Sittenfeld, R.L. Stine. Then we had editors in the publishing industry, people that own bookstores, librarians. famous people who read a lot of books, like Sarah Jessica Parker. We asked them what their 10 best books published in English since January 1st, 2000 were. We didn't define best for them at all.

We got back their responses, we added them all up, and we published a list of 100, which is a lot of books, to be fair.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. My Brilliant Friend is a book in translation. It's translated by Anne Goldstein, and it's the first in a four-book series that we now refer to as the Neapolitan Quartet. The first book is about two young girls growing up in post-war Italy in the 1950s.

Well, so, I don't know if you can cast your mind back to the time when, like, Ferrante fever was sweeping the literary world.

These books were coming out and people were obsessed with them. And I think something that is undeniable about these books for people who love them is that they capture... female friendship in a way that is truly unique in 21st century literature.

There is something sort of realistic about the way that these two young girls, and they grew up over the course of these four books, come together and pull apart and love each other and hate each other. It is, I think the first book takes a while to get into, but once you get into it, if you connect with it, you sort of just want to keep reading all four books.

Absolutely. There's a book that came in at number six, 2666, by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. And it is one of these massive, slightly impenetrable literary works, partly having to do with the murder of hundreds of women in Mexico and partly to do with lots of other stuff. The fact that it came in so high was surprising to me.

There was a book that came in at number eight called Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, which is a book about a young man in mid-century Europe, sort of lusciously and beautifully written novel. This book came out in 2001. It was one of the oldest books on the list. And I don't know that it's particularly well-known these days. I was surprised by how high it placed.

I would say flip that on its head and think about how much reading, how much wonderful, delightful reading is ahead of you. You can feel badly about this or you can say, oh my God, look at all these amazing books I want to read. I did not. I'm looking at my tally right now, which I'm 100% not going to tell you what the number is. And it's embarrassing.

I'm the editor of the New York Times Book Review. I should have read more books on our list than this.

Yeah. I mean, look, I bring up all the time I still have not read Middlemarch by George Eliot, but I have read... I don't know, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, right? So which is more valuable? I don't think there's an answer to that. I think it's just where your taste leads you.

And I will say, if you look at this list of 100 and you see only one or two books that you want to read that you've never read before, then we succeeded. We did this whole thing and we found one book for you, the right book for you, success.

Absolutely. The one that stuck with me above all is Lincoln and the Bardo by George Saunders. A beautiful book, a book I should have read a long time ago. And it's a book that imagines Abraham Lincoln going to the cemetery where his son has been interred. And he is surrounded by a cacophony of voices, all these ghosts in the cemetery. And it was just so moving.

So beautiful, so odd and bizarre in its own way. I was like, everyone needs to read this immediately. I just, I did. I fell in love with it.

I can't wait to hear that.

Melissa, thank you for having me on.

Melissa, hi.

Sure. So a bunch of editors and critics over the course of the year, really, are meeting monthly. And at every one of those meetings, we're discussing books that we think are great. And these are books that sort of go through the ringer. We're really debating them over the course of the whole year. At the end of October, which is when this process ends, we take a vote.

Un poquito.

How did you explain it to your children?

Please, it is my great shame.

After the break, Isabel tells me about the years she spent writing daily letters to her mother.

Whenever I go back to see family in Puerto Rico, they give me the business all the time.

So, you wrote your first novel, House of the Spirits, at the age of 39. In Venezuela. And I think a lot of people have a feeling that at a certain point, maybe it's too late for doing the thing that they want to do. They were meant to do. They've always dreamed of doing.

When you got to that point where you started to write a letter to your grandfather that then turned into this incredible novel, did you think, what am I doing here? Like, this is not, I'm 39 years old. I'm not going to become a novelist at this age.

I obviously want to talk to you about your new book, about your personal history, and of course about writing and creativity. And I think for you, all of these things intertwine in many of your books, and they certainly do in your new novel. This is a book that is set in the 1890s. Your main character, heads down to witness the Chilean civil war that is happening there.

You say you had a feeling that your life was going nowhere. You had nothing to show for it other than your two children. I think if I felt that way, I would be overwhelmed, and I didn't know that I would be able to start anything. I'm wondering if you could talk about that feeling a little bit more.

It's been a little more than 30 years since you published that memoir that you just referred to, Paula, which is named after your daughter. Yes. It's about your life with her and the situation you found yourself in, where she was in a coma for quite a long time, and then she eventually passed. I'm curious how your grief has changed after or evolved in the 30 years since you lost your daughter.

And I'm wondering what was going through your mind when you said, this is the time period, this is the event, and this is what I want my character to see.

I get the impression, I think you've said this maybe before, that it's a book that still resonates greatly with people after all this time.

Speaking of letters, your first novel, of course, started as a letter. Your memoir was a letter to your daughter. And I'm wondering if we could talk about the exercise of writing letters for you. It's just not something that people do anymore. Sure.

That's so many words to have exchanged with another person. What did you learn about her from these letters?

Do you feel like there's just something inherent in, as you say, the intimacy of letter writing, the access you have to someone's inner feelings that just cannot be replicated when you're with that person, for the most part?

Got it.

Is it true that Roger reached out to you after hearing you on the radio by writing you a letter? Yeah. Well, an email. An email. Okay.

I was seeing him sitting down, taking out a piece of paper, writing a letter. Okay. An email.

That's quite powerful. You convinced a man to just get rid of his entire life and move across the country.

No, you didn't need to, clearly. Yeah.

Yeah, no material baggage. I read an interview with you where you said that when you got a divorce in your early 70s, some people around you thought maybe this is a little crazy. How did that feel to you at that stage in your life?

Mm-hmm. Um, you grew up in Chile, lived your young adult life there. And then, um, you've been in America for several decades. You said during a speech you gave in 2018, when you accepted an award from the National Book Foundation, uh, I was in the audience that night. Um, you said, although I am critical of many things about this country, I am proud of to be an American citizen.

I'm wondering how your thoughts about your citizenship have changed, if they have at all,

Yes.

What would stop you? What would get in your way?

You have this humanitarian work that you're doing over here and then over here every day for eight, ten, however many hours you're in front of the keyboard and you're writing. Are those two things connected in your mind or do they exist in separate worlds?

And that's a conscious decision? Yes. Because I imagine given what you care about, what you're passionate about, the types of stories that you tell, that even if you're writing historical fiction or fiction set in the past, something will make its way in. There will be parallels. And even if that's not your intention. Yeah.

You've said that you write sometimes as an act of nostalgia, clearly as an act of remembering. What, as you look to the future, what do you think you want to remember now?

That's Isabel Allende. My name is Emilia Del Valle. We'll be out on May 6th. And you can find me every week over at the Book Review Podcast, where we talk about books new and old, and I speak with authors all the time. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme and Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon, original music and mixing by Sophia Landman. Photography by Devin Yalkin.

The main character, Emilia, she shares a last name with several other characters across your body of work, including several in your first book, The House of the Spirits. Why does this name resonate with you? What are you trying to say by sort of threading this name or this family line throughout several of your books?

Our senior booker is Priya Matthew. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddie Mazziello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnik. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to The Interview wherever you get your podcasts.

To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash the interview, and you can email us anytime at theinterviewatnytimes.com. Next week, David talks with writer Ocean Baum.

I'm Gilbert Cruz, and this is the interview from The New York Times.

At 82, Allende is one of the world's most beloved and best-selling Spanish-language authors. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages and 80 million copies of her books have been sold around the world. Allende's newest book is called My Name is Emilia del Valle, and it's about a dark period in Chilean history, the 1891 Chilean Civil War.

Well, speaking of relatives, Emilia, she doesn't have a relationship with her birth father. She goes looking for him. I know you did not have a relationship with your birth father. I'm curious about how your mother, Panchita, talked about your father when you were young and how you thought about him, if at all.

First of all, that sounds terrible.

Emilia also doesn't have a connection to her father for much of her life. However, the scenes in the book when Emilia does finally meet her father, not to give away too many details, I found quite moving. And I was wondering what it was like to write those scenes for you.

From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm guest hosting this week, filling in for Lulu. If you don't know me, I'm the editor of The New York Times Book Review and the host of The Book Review podcast. And I'm very happy to be getting the chance to talk with author Isabel Allende.

Emilia, not surprisingly, given who you are, she bucks a lot of convention for women of her time period. She goes on to become a war reporter. She writes gory dime novels about murder and vengeance. You have written and you've said many times that you've been a feminist since you were a child because of the way that you saw women.

your mother and women of your mother's generation treated when you were growing up in Chile. And I wonder, over the course of your career, has it been purposeful to write your female characters in this way? Or it's just like, this is the only way I know how to write women.

Like so much of Allende's work, it's a story about women in tough spots who figure out a way through. It's not that far off from Allende's own story. She was raised in Chile, but in 1973, when she was 31 and working as a journalist with two small children, her life was upended forever.

How old do you think you were when you realized it was a prison of sorts?

Did you have other female friends who you could sort of talk to about this? Not about this, no. This is not great. What's going on here? We got to break free. No, no.

It was then that a military coup pushed out the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who was her cousin. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote her first book, The House of the Spirits, which evolved from a letter she had started to her dying grandfather. That book became a runaway bestseller, and it remains one of her best-known works. She moved to the U.S.

That must have been so exciting. I mean, how? It was fascinating. How was it to find a place that you felt finally?

So early in your career, you were a journalist. You worked for this magazine, Paula, as well as several other places. And the story goes that you met one of the most famous Chilean writers of all time, the great Chilean poet.

And he said, Isabel, maybe this is it for you.

Let's just take a step back. You're in the home of this literary genius, and he tells you something that to most people would be crushing. I was crushed, too, of course.

But you did not listen to him at the time.

in the late 1980s, where she has been writing steadily ever since. Here is my conversation with Isabel Allende.

You had to go to Venezuela because there was a military coup. What was the moment you knew it's time for me to go?