The B&n Podcast

Award-winning critic and journalist Michelle Dean's new book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion is a group portrait of a set of nonfiction writers from Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy to Joan Didion and Nora Ephron — who Dean finds connected by the way each made powerful intelligence and a rapier wit a calling card. Dean joins us in the podcast studio to talk about how these women turned argument into art — and why we should learn from their razor-edged example.