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Ben Lerner’s third novel, “The Topeka School,” reintroduces Adam Gordon, the narrator of his first novel, “Leaving the Atocha Station,” and, arguably, the unnamed narrator of his second, “10:04.” In the new book, set mostly in the 1990s and told through the perspective of several characters, Adam is a successful high school debater in Kansas, where his parents are therapists at a psychological institute. As in the previous two books, much of Lerner’s own life is discernible in the details.

Garth Risk Hallberg, the author of “City on Fire,” reviewed the book for us, and discusses it on this week’s podcast.

“In one way, it’s almost entirely about language, and that makes it sound really intellectual and forbidding in a way that it’s not,” Hallberg says of the novel. “A lot of the book is pleasingly diffuse in its exploration of culture and politics and all those things.”

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Bari Weiss visits the podcast to discuss her new book, “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” She discusses the history of the hatred and the current resurgence of it, fanned in part, she says, by the rhetoric of President Trump.