The Intricacies of Trust and Capital in Fiction

In honor of what is for many people the final days of summer, the New Yorker Radio Hour team presents a conversation that may inspire your end-of-summer reading list: David Remnick talks to Hernan Diaz about his book, Trust, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023. The novel’s plot focuses on the daughter of eccentric aristocrats after she marries a Wall Street tycoon of dubious ethics during the Roaring Twenties. The novel is told by four people in four different formats, which offer conflicting accounts of the couple’s life, the tycoon’s misdeeds, and his role in the crash of 1929. “What I was interested in, and this is why I chose finance capital, I wanted a realm of pure abstraction,” he tells David Remnick. Diaz’s first book, In The Distance, will be released in hardback for the first time in October.