We're celebrating July's Best Books with critic and essayist Maris Kreizman.

This episode of Fully Booked is dedicated to July’s hottest titles. First, in a special editors’ segment, Laurie Muchnick, John McMurtrie, Mahnaz Dar, and Laura Simeon share their top picks in books for the month. Then I’m joined in conversation by Maris Kreizman, author of one of July’s most anticipated titles, I Want To Burn This Place Down (Ecco, July 1). In our review, Kirkus calls Kreizman’s collection “an intelligent and entertaining read” featuring “unexpectedly charming personal essays about disillusionment, diabetes, and despair.”

Kreizman is an essayist and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and Cosmopolitan, among others. She currently writes a biweekly column for Lit Hub. From 2018 to 2023, she hosted the Maris Review, a literary podcast, and now writes a newsletter of the same name. She is the author of Slaughterhouse 90210 (and she is my friend). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, her dog, and her books.

Here’s a bit more from our review: “While [Kreizman] opines convincingly about various societal issues—climate change, health care, corporate capitalism—the personal remains at the heart of her work, and some of the best essays are about her experience with diabetes, shedding light on the wider experience of chronic illness. It’s the writing that makes it sing: ‘Puberty beat the shit out of me in unique and astounding ways. My hormones, surging like a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke when you open it immediately after you’ve dropped it on the floor, caused my blood sugar to rise and fall and rise even higher with seemingly no correspondence to the insulin I was taking or the food I was eating.’…Along with righteous anger, there’s plenty of sweetness, with evocative passages about her New Jersey childhood and paeans to her very happy union with a nice man named Josh.”

Kreizman and I discuss chronic illness and mental health, temporal shifts within essays, the challenges of being a woman in the literary world, reading recommendations, and much more.

BEST BOOKS OF JULY 2025:

These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean (Ballantine)

A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead)

Fish Fry Friday by Winsome Bingham, illus. by C.G. Esperanza (Abrams)

This Book Might Be About Zinnia by Brittney Morris (Simon & Schuster)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Caravaggio by Ken Mora, illus. by Cyrus Mesarcia

Whiskey Rebel by Jeffrey Dunn

Learning and Teaching Creativity by Dan Hunter

Jazei by Justin Murray

Eyes of Iris by Joshua A.H. Harris

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.