Book Review Podcast: What Literature Owes the Bible December 23, 2011, 12:45 pm In this Sunday's Book Review, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson considers the debt that Western literature owes to the Bible. Ms. Robinson writes: The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world's eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too. On this week's podcast, John Horgan talks about "The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life" by Robert Trivers; Christopher Beha discusses several new books about the relationship between humans and animals; Julie Bosman has notes from the field and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus, the Book Review's editor, is the host.