This week, we talk with Evan Friss, author of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, out now from Penguin Random House. Starting with Benjamin Franklin and moving up to the present day, it is a love letter to bookstores that The New York Times calls "A spirited defense of this important, odd and odds-defying American retail category."

Books We Talk About: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs and the works of Donna Tartt, Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders.