The Orchid Thief's Susan Orlean on the books that made her
Nightlife

The Orchid Thief's Susan Orlean on the books that made her

B2Upper-intermediateOctober 9, 202630 min
  • Interview
  • Arts & culture

For Susan Orlean, Tom Wolfe's book documenting the LSD experiments of the 1960s provided a masterclass in the art of writing non fiction.

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the extraordinary within the ordinary and has found it in space.

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Nightlife as my guest in The Writers Tonight is someone who spent her career looking for the extraordinary within the ordinary and has found it in space. You might be familiar with Susan Orlean's 1994 book The Orchid Thief. Susan spent a couple of years shadowing an eccentric plant dealer in the swamps of Florida

0:30

and became immersed in the world of awkward fanatics. That book, you also might remember, was sort of adapted for the film Adaptation, which was a very meta film about a filmmaker trying to adapt this book. And in it, Susan was played by Meryl Streep.

0:47

Susan's written many other works of nonfiction. Her subjects range from the true story of the dog, Rin Tin Tin, to a work exploring the experience of Saturday night across communities in the US. She's also a staff reporter with the New Yorker.

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