The Book Review

The Time Loop Book Series You Should Be Reading

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

How is it that a seven-book series written in Danish about a single day repeating over and over has become something of a sensation among the literary set? Since the English translations of Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume” series were first published in the United States in 2024, they have been nominated for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award.

With the latest volume to be translated into English, Book IV, out this week, Gilbert Cruz sat down with A.O. Scott, a critic at large, and Joumana Khatib, a Book Review editor, to talk boredom, stuckness and time loops. Plus, the books in translation you should read next.

Books discussed on this episode:

“On the Calculation of Volume,” by Solvej Balle

“The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann

“Tyll,” by Daniel Kehlmann

“Breasts and Eggs,” by Mieko Kawakami

“Heaven,” by Mieko Kawakami

“Sisters in Yellow,” by Mieko Kawakami

“King Kong Theory,” by Virginie Despentes

The “Vernon Subutex” trilogy, by Virginie Despentes

“Time Shelter,” by Georgi Gospodinov

“Territory of Light,” by Yuko Tsushima

“The Betrothed,” by Alessandro Manzoni

“Kairos,” by Jenny Erpenbeck

“Go, Went, Gone,” by Jenny Erpenbeck

“In Search of Lost Time,” by Marcel Proust

“Ulysses,” by James Joyce

“Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy

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Patrick Radden Keefe on the Mystery at the Center of ‘London Falling’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Patrick Radden Keefe joins “The Book Review” to discuss his new book, “London Falling,” which begins when a family loses a 19-year-old son, Zac Brettler, under mysterious circumstances. His parents eventually discover he had been living a secret life, posing as the son of a Russian oligarch.

Speaking with the host Gilbert Cruz, Keefe describes the moment he first heard the story and how he immediately knew it would become his next major project. He talks about gaining the trust of the young man’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, and following the threads of their son’s life into a world of wealth, influence and deception in London.

The conversation also explores how the book moves beyond the night of Zac’s death and into a broader story about ambition, reinvention and the uneasy question at its center: How well can we ever know the people closest to us?

Books discussed on this episode:

“Say Nothing,” by Patrick Radden Keefe

“Seasons of Fury,” by Rozina Ali

“The Emperor’s Children,” by Claire Messud

“Out of Sheer Rage,” by Geoff Dyer

“Middlemarch,” by George Eliot

“In Cold Blood,” by Truman Capote

“The Power Broker,” by Robert A. Caro

“Far From the Tree,” by Andrew Solomon

“Chatter,” by Patrick Radden Keefe

“The Last Samurai,” by Helen DeWitt

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We Want to Hear From You

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to thebookreview@nytimes.com.

Credits

“The Book Review” podcast is hosted by Gilbert Cruz and produced by Amy Pearl and Sarah Diamond. The show is edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Rosado.

Special thanks to MJ Franklin, Dahlia Haddad and Brooke Minters.

Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Erik Tanner for The New York Times

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23 Books We Are Looking Forward to This Spring

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

We have made it to April. We survived the snowstorms and the cold, and now that the days are getting longer, there’s more time to read. So this week, if you are looking for some books to tide you over until summer, our Book Review editors Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib have got you covered.

Also on this week’s episode, the former United States poet laureate Ada Limón joins us to talk about her new book, “Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry.” And she reads two of her poems.

Books discussed on this episode:

“Transcription,” by Ben Lerner

“This Land Is Your Land,” by Beverly Gage

“The Witch,” by Marie NDiaye

“London Falling,” by Patrick Radden Keefe

“Prophecy,” by Carissa Véliz

“Ghost Town,” by Tom Perrotta

“From Life Itself,” by Suzy Hansen

“The Calamity Club,” by Kathryn Stockett

“Dog Days,” by Emily LaBarge

“The Midnight Train,” by Matt Haig

“The Land and Its People,” by David Sedaris

“On the Calculation of Volume (Book 4),” by Solvej Balle

“Famesick,” by Lena Dunham

“The Sane One,” by Anna Konkle

“On Witness and Respair,” by Jesmyn Ward

“John of John,” by Douglas Stuart

“The Things We Never Say,” by Elizabeth Strout

“Yesteryear,” by Caro Claire Burke

“Arsenio,” by Arsenio Hall

“Five Weeks in the Country,” by Francine Prose

“The Ending Writes Itself,” by Evelyn Clark (V.E. Schwab and Cat Clark)

“Go Gentle,” by Maria Semple

“True Crime,” by Patricia Cornwell

“Against Breaking,” by Ada Limón

Listen to and Follow ‘The Book Review’

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadio

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We Want to Hear From You

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to thebookreview@nytimes.com.

Credits

“The Book Review Podcast” is hosted by Gilbert Cruz and produced by Amy Pearl and Sarah Diamond. The show is edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Rosado.

Special thanks to MJ Franklin, Dahlia Haddad and Brooke Minters.

Illustration by The New York Times; Inset photos: Scribner; Viking; Spiegel & Grau

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Kin,' by Tayari Jones

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:34:20 +0000

Tayari Jones’s new novel, “Kin,” follows two orphaned girls, Annie and Niecy, who grow up together in Louisiana in the 1950s. Annie was abandoned as a baby when her mother ran away to Memphis, while Niecy was orphaned when her father murdered her mother. The girls grow up under the shadow of loss, but at the very least they have each other, two “cradle friends” so close they’re practically sisters.

After high school, though, they take different paths: Niecy sets out for Spelman College to try to make a name for herself, while Annie flees to Memphis to seek the mother she never knew. Along the way, each must confront major questions about love and family, including what sacrifices are acceptable to achieve them.

On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin talks about “Kin” with his colleagues Lauren Christensen and Elisabeth Egan.

Other books mentioned in this episode:

“An American Marriage,” “The Untelling” and “Silver Sparrow,” by Tayari Jones

“Clutch,” by Emily Nemens

“This Is Not About Us,” by Allegra Goodman

“Lonely Crowds,” by Stephanie Wambugu

“The Vanishing Half,” by Brit Bennett

“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

“Sula,” by Toni Morrison

“Beaches,” by Iris R. Dart

“Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,” by Lorrie Moore

“Cat’s Eye,” by Margaret Atwood

“The Calamity Club,” by Kathryn Stockett

“South to America,” by Imani Perry

“Witness and Respair,” by Jesmyn Ward

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Andy Weir on Writing the Hit Book Behind the Movie ‘Project Hail Mary’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Andy Weir’s first time at the Hollywood rodeo was a singular trip. His debut novel, “The Martian,” went from self-published project to blockbuster, best picture-nominated film starring Matt Damon.

His most recent book, “Project Hail Mary,” was also a sensation, and its adaptation, starring Ryan Gosling as a middle school science teacher tasked with saving humanity from slow extinction, charts warmly familiar territory: a lone man, stuck in space far from Earth, solving science problem after science problem with many a humorous aside.

Weir joined the Book Review’s podcast and spoke to the host, Gilbert Cruz, about the similarities and differences between Mark Watney and Ryland Grace (the main characters of “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary”), his second novel, “Artemis,” and the alien character that readers have fallen in love with.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to thebookreview@nytimes.com.

“The Book Review Podcast” is hosted by Gilbert Cruz and produced by Sarah Diamond and Amy Pearl. The show is edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Rosado.

Special thanks to MJ Franklin, Dahlia Haddad, and Paula Szuchman.

Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

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Louise Erdrich on Her New Story Collection and the Mystery of Writing

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Since the publication of her first novel, “Love Medicine,” in 1984, Louise Erdrich has written fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s books. Her work has earned multiple awards, including the National Book Award (“The Round House”) and the Pulitzer Prize (“The Night Watchman”).

On this week’s episode, Erdrich talks with Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, about her new short story collection, “Python’s Kiss.” She reflects on some of the formative experiences that shaped her as a writer, including watching “Planet of the Apes” and growing up in North Dakota, a state that housed hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

She says that writing has been her “only real way of processing” her experiences and that her creative process is full of mystery.

“There’s really no way to control everything that happens in a piece of art. Some of these stories — I wasn’t sure that I had written it,” she said, adding: “And yet, obviously, it was in my handwriting.”

Plus, Erdrich recommends the one book that always puts her to sleep.

Books discussed on this episode:

“Animal Farm,” by George Orwell

“Brawler,” by Lauren Groff

“Winter in the Blood,” by James Welch

“The Pillow Book,” by Sei Shōnagon

“The Death of the Heart,” by Elizabeth Bowen

“Save Me, Stranger,” by Erika Krouse

“The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison

“Austerlitz,” by W.G. Sebald

“The Rings of Saturn,” by W.G. Sebald

“Whistler,” by Ann Patchett

“Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest,” published by Maitland Systems Engineering

Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

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The Avett Brothers’ Bassist on Writing a John Quincy Adams Book

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Mar 2026 16:59:05 +0000

For more than two decades, Bob Crawford has toured the country as the bassist for the Avett Brothers. But long before he began his career as a musician, he was obsessed with American history. After turning that obsession into two podcasts, he has now written his first book, “America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, From President to Political Maverick.”

On this week’s episode, Crawford talks with Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, about what it was like writing a book for the first time and the authors who have inspired him. In addition to discussing what he loves about John Quincy Adams, the country’s sixth president and the son of John Adams, Crawford also talks about the research he did for the book. That included scouring Adams’s 14,000-page diary.

“He’s not a perfect man — he’s far from perfect,” Crawford said of Adams. “But he’s so human. He’s suffered depression, and just the humanness in his diary, not to mention the actual historical narrative, is just incredible.”

Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Wuthering Heights,' by Emily Brontë

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:33:39 +0000

Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is a tale of star-crossed lovers: Catherine, the wild daughter of an aristocratic family, and Heathcliff, an orphan whom Catherine’s father brings home unexpectedly. While Catherine’s brother and mother denigrate Heathcliff, depriving him of an education and forcing him into a servant-like role, Catherine forms an intense, almost spiritual bond with her family’s new charge.

Despite their deep connection, however, she marries the scion of a nearby wealthy family — a decision that leaves Catherine yearning, Heathcliff bent on revenge and everybody in their orbit on a path to calamity.

Brontë’s classic has long been a favorite among readers, and the novel is back in the zeitgeist thanks to Emerald Fennell’s recent film adaptation. On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin discusses “Wuthering Heights” with colleagues from the New York Times Book Review.

Other works discussed:

“Wuthering Heights,” the song by Kate Bush

“Twilight,” by Stephenie Meyer

“But Daddy I Love Him,” by Taylor Swift

“Wuthering Heights,” the 2026 film directed by Emerald Fennell

“The Safekeep,” by Yael van der Wouden

“Mexican Gothic,” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The “Wuthering Heights” comics in Kate Beaton’s “Hark! A Vagrant” series

“Villette,” by Charlotte Brontë

“Rebecca,” by Daphne du Maurier

“The Idiot,” by Elif Batuman

“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The Count of Monte Cristo,” by Alexandre Dumas

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Director Clint Bentley on Adapting ‘Train Dreams’ for the Big Screen

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:00:00 +0000

The latest film from the writer and director Clint Bentley, “Train Dreams,” is nominated for four Oscars, including best adapted screenplay. The movie is based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name and tells the story of Robert Grainier, a logger in the Pacific Northwest, in stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear prose. This week, Gilbert Cruz talks with Bentley, who wrote the screenplay with Greg Kwedar, his longtime collaborator, about how he went about translating Johnson’s work into a visual medium.

Bentley first read “Train Dreams” just after college, long before he ever thought of making it into a movie. When producers with rights to the book approached Bentley, he was suddenly worried. “Going back and reading the book again,” Bentley said, “I was like, Oh, maybe this thing is unadaptable.” Set on capturing the spirit of the book, Bentley and Kwedar focused on “the vastness of this small little life,” he said.

“We very rarely have an understanding of our lives in the moment we’re actually living them,” Bentley said. “We only start to understand them when it’s too late.”

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Guillermo del Toro on Writing and Directing the Oscar-Nominated ‘Frankenstein’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:00:00 +0000

For decades, the director Guillermo del Toro has built a career blending the grotesque and the beautiful in films like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Shape of Water” and “Pinocchio.” Now he’s earned his latest Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of “Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley’s classic novel. On this week’s episode, he talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about discovering the book as a lonely child, how it shaped his worldview and why this screenplay is the one he’s proudest of.

“I always felt the creature is me,” del Toro said of the first time he read the book. “I felt so alone at age 11, and so full of love to give and so full of rage to dispose of. It was a very complicated emotional scope for somebody that young.”

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Julia Quinn on Her 'Bridgerton' Books and the Smash Netflix Series

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:26:00 +0000

Julia Quinn published "The Duke and I," the first book in the 'Bridgerton' series, in 2000. Seven books and a quarter century later, its adaptation remains one of the biggest series ever to air on Netflix. Quinn spoke to host Gilbert Cruz about the show, her books and why the heck that family has so many children.

"I don't even remember why I made eight kids," said Quinn. "I just, I wanted her to have a big family and somehow that's how many kids there were. And if I had planned on eight, I would've plotted things out better. There were a number of places where I really wrote myself into a corner."

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How Nintendo Became the World's Most Fun Video Game Company

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Feb 2026 20:55:17 +0000

Keza MacDonald, the video games editor at The Guardian and author of the new book “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play,” chose to write her first book about Nintendo because it has been so central for so long to the culture of games. “It was the company that got me into video games,” she says. “I know that’s the same story that millions of other people have had as well." She speaks with host Gilbert Cruz about the iconic Japanese company as well as how the perception of gaming has changed over the decades.

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Hounding' by Xenobe Purvis

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 18:53:10 +0000

Xenobe Purvis’s slim but powerful debut novel, “The Hounding,” opens with a jolt: “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body. Marching up the river path, the villagers.”

How did we get here, with five young sisters living in 1700s England being hunted by an angry mob that suspects them not only of murder but also of the demonic ability to transform themselves into a pack of wild dogs? That is the tale “The Hounding” unfolds, in a gothic parable about male ego, cultural misogyny and the dangers of gossip run amok.

On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin discusses “The Hounding” with his fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.

Other books and works mentioned in this podcast:

“The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson

“The Sound of Music,” directed by Robert Wise

“The Testament of Yves Gundron,” by Emily Barton

“The Scarlet Letter,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch,” by Rivka Galchen

“Delicate Edible Birds,” by Lauren Groff

“Paradise,” by Toni Morrison

The podcast “Normal Gossip”

“You Didn’t Hear This From Me,” by Kelsey McKinney

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Chuck Klosterman Has So Much to Say About Football

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:47:25 +0000

The journalist, novelist and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman is best known for writing about rock music and pop culture in astute essay collections like “The Nineties,” “X” and “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.” But Klosterman got his start in college as a sports journalist, and with his new book, “Football,” he has finally devoted an entire collection to the sport that has fundamentally shaped him alongside American society at large.

“I’ve unconsciously been thinking about football for most of my life,” Klosterman tells host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s episode. “I decided at some point, I do want to write a book about sports. You know, I’d always mentioned sports here and there in the culture writing I had done, or the kind of conventional pop culture writing I’d done, but I wanted to do a real sports book. And initially my idea was it would be about basketball — but over time it became very clear to me it had to be about football, for a variety of reasons. … It seemed as though if you’re going to do a sports book, particularly as it relates to society, there is only one choice in the United States.”

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The Books We're Excited About in Early 2026

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:33:12 +0000

A new year means new books are on the way! So many new books. On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin about the upcoming fiction and nonfiction titles they’re most anticipating between now and April.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Vigil,” by George Saunders
“Where the Serpent Lives,” by Daniyal Mueenuddin
“Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings and the Rebirth of White Rage,” by Heather Ann Thompson
“Five Bullets,” by Elliot Williams
“Lost Lambs,” by Madeline Cash
”Half His Age,” by Jennette McCurdy
“A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” by Michael Pollan
“On Morrison,” by Namwali Serpell
“Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon,” by Toni Morrison
“Clutch,” by Emily Nemens
“Murder Bimbo,” by Rebecca Novack
“Kin,” by Tayari Jones
“Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks,” by Benjamin Hale
“Lake Effect,” by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
“Now I Surrender,” by Alvaro Enrigue
“The Keeper,” by Tana French

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'The Correspondent' Author Virginia Evans On Her Breakout Year

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Jan 2026 17:27:56 +0000

Virginia Evans’s debut novel, “The Correspondent,” was published last April and became one of the publishing industry’s heartwarming champions of 2025: a slow-burn success story that gathered momentum over the summer and fall and finally topped the New York Times hardcover best-seller list in December. For Evans, who had written and failed to sell seven previous novels, the book’s popularity has felt magical, as she explains to host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s podcast.

“I went on a kind of a brief book tour in the fall, meeting hundreds of people,” Evans says, “and … different bookstores were starting to say, this is becoming a thing, we can’t keep it in the store. We keep running out of stock. And then they were going back, reprint after reprint. So then I started to think, oh, it’s getting bigger. But I think, I just didn’t have a context. I still don’t understand publishing. So I thought every step of the way was the mountaintop. I keep getting a new mountaintop.”

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Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘What We Can Know’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “What We Can Know,” is many things at once: It’s a science fiction imagining of a future world devastated by climate catastrophe; it’s a literary mystery about a scholar’s search for a long-lost poem; it’s a deep dive into complicated marriages; and it’s a meditation on how the past lingers and how history morphs with time.

“It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review. “It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.”

In this episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses “What We Can Know” with his colleagues Sarah Lyall (who profiled McEwan for the Book Review this year) and Leah Greenblatt. You can follow along, and add your own comments to the discussion here.

Other Books mentioned in this discussion:

“Atonement,” “Saturday,” “On Chesil Beach,” “The Comfort of Strangers,” “The Cement Garden” and “Enduring Love,” by Ian McEwan

“Fleishman Is in Trouble,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

“Fates and Furies,” by Lauren Groff

“Marston Meadows: A Corona for Prue,” by John Fuller

“How the Word Is Passed,” by Clint Smith

“The Stranger’s Child,” “The Line of Beauty” and “Our Evenings,” by Alan Hollinghurst

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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What Did 2025 Mean for Books?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:26:50 +0000

From political tell-alls to the continued triumph of romantasy novels, it’s been an eventful year in the publishing world. On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin talks with his Book Review colleagues Alexandra Alter, Tina Jordan and John Maher about the biggest book stories and most significant reading trends of 2025.

Correction: An earlier version of this podcast referred incorrectly to an arts grant from the Mellon Foundation. The $50 million initiative, launched by Mellon, is a collaborative effort with six other foundations and is intended to support nonprofit literary organizations across a range of genres and forms; it is not solely intended to support poetry.

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Our Book Critics on Their 2025 in Reading

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 16:18:29 +0000

Here we are in mid-December, which means that along with all of the other year-end lists we produce and avidly consume at this time each year, The New York Times Book Review's staff critics are also looking back on everything they read in 2025, and toasting the books that have stayed with them.

On this episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai about their standout fiction and nonfiction of the past 12 months.

Books mentioned:

"What We Can Know," by Ian McEwan
"Flesh," by David Szalay
"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny," by Kiran Desai
"Playworld," by Adam Ross
"When the Going Was Good," by Graydon Carter
"I Regret Almost Everything," by Keith McNally
"When All the Men Wore Hats," by Susan Cheever
"Notes to John," by Joan Didion
"A Flower Traveled in My Blood," by Haley Cohen Gilliland
"38 Londres Street," by Philippe Sands
"Wild Thing," by Sue Prideaux
"Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life," by Dan Nadel
"Class Clown," by Dave Barry
"Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel," by Frances Wilson
"Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson," by Ted Geltner
"Shadow Ticket," by Thomas Pynchon
"Selected Letters of John Updike," edited by James Schiff
"Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford," by Carla Kaplan
"More Everything Forever, AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity," by Adam Becker

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The 10 Best Books of 2025

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Tue, 2 Dec 2025 10:15:37 +0000

All year long, the staff of The New York Times Book Review conducts a running discussion over what belongs on its year-end Top 10 list. In this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz gathers a group of fellow Book Review editors to talk about the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

Fiction

“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai
“Angel Down,” by Daniel Kraus
“The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
“The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann
“Stone Yard Devotional,” by Charlotte Wood

Nonfiction

“A Marriage at Sea,” by Sophie Elmhirst
“Wild Thing,” by Sue Prideaux
“Mother Emanuel,” by Kevin Sack
“There Is No Place for Us," by Brian Goldstone
“Mother Mary Comes to Me,” by Arundhati Roy

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Hamnet'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 14:10:07 +0000

History has not graced us with many details about Shakespeare as a person, but we do know that he and his wife had three children, including a son named Hamnet who died at the age of 11 in 1596, four years before Shakespeare went on to write his great tragedy “Hamlet.”

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel “Hamnet” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020, and the source of Chloé Zhao’s new movie of the same name — starts from those scant facts, and spins them into a powerful story of grief, art and family steeped in the textures of late-16th-century life.

In this episode of the Book Review Book Club, host MJ Franklin discusses “Hamnet” with his colleagues Leah Greenblatt, Jennifer Harlan and Sarah Lyall.

Other works mentioned in this podcast:

“Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “The Winter’s Tale,” by William Shakespeare

“Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott

“Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” by Max Porter

“Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders

“Fi,” by Alexandra Fuller

“Things In Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li

“The Accidental Tourist,” by Anne Tyler

“Will in the World” and “Dark Renaissance,” by Stephen Greenblatt

“Gabriel,” by Edward Hirsch

“Once More We Saw Stars,” by Jayson Greene

“The Dutch House,” by Ann Patchett

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Welcome to Literary Award Season

books@nytimes.com (Hosted by MJ Franklin) — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Literature isn’t a horse race. Taste is subjective, and artistic value can’t be measured in terms of “winners" and “losers.”

That doesn’t mean it’s not fun to try.

The book world’s awards season officially kicked off on Oct. 9, when the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize, and continued this month when the Booker Prize in England went to the novel “Flesh,” by the British writer David Szalay (also of Hungarian descent, as it happens). Then this week, five National Book Award winners were crowned in various categories at a ceremony in New York.

On this episode of the podcast, the host MJ Franklin talks with his fellow Book Review editors Emily Eakin, Joumana Khatib and Dave Kim about the finalists, the winners and what this year’s big book awards might tell us about the state of literature in 2025.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Nicholas Boggs on Writing a James Baldwin Biography

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:57:31 +0000

Nicholas Boggs’s “Baldwin: A Love Story,” is many things at once. It’s a comprehensive biography of James Baldwin. It’s a nimble excavation of Baldwin’s work, filled with astute literary analysis of his books and prose. And, most pressingly, it’s an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin through the lens of love. The biography is structured around Baldwin’s relationships with a series of men — relationships that, as Boggs outlines, shaped Baldwin’s life and writing in crucial ways. Boggs joins MJ Franklin on this week's episode to talk about his new book.

Other works mentioned in this discussion:

Zadie Smith’s essay “Conscience and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person,” from her new collection “Dead and Alive”
“James Baldwin: A Biography,” by David Leeming
“Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood,” by James Baldwin, illustrated by Yoran Cazac, edited by Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody
“Goodbye Days,” by Jeff Zentner
“Virginia Woolf,” by Hermione Lee

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The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, 50 Years Later

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Nov 2025 18:00:03 +0000

On Nov. 10, 1975, during a calamitous storm, the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk below the waves of Lake Superior. All 29 men aboard went down with the vessel. With no survivors and no eyewitnesses, there’s always been a sense of mystery to what is arguably the most famous shipwreck in American history. The story itself was almost immediately immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s surprise hit ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Fifty years on, John U. Bacon has written a new account of the disaster. In “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he humanizes the story, telling stories of each man on the ship as well as several of the families left behind. (Readers will also learn a good deal about the history of industry and shipping on the Great Lakes.). In this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, Bacon spoke with the host Gilbert Cruz about his new book.

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 14:06:53 +0000

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones, is two things at once: a searching historical novel that examines America’s past sins and also a gory horror thriller.

The book opens in 2012, when a construction worker in a dilapidated church parsonage finds a 100-year-old journal written by a pastor named Arthur Beaucarne. The journal recounts a strange tale: In 1912, a mysterious Indigenous man, Good Stab of the Blackfeet tribe, walked into Arthur’s church and revealed the harrowing and disturbing story of how he had been transformed into a vampire who sought revenge for the violence done unto his people.

In this Halloween episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” with his colleagues Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib.

Other books and movies mentioned during this discussion:

“Dracula,” by Bram Stoker

“Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” by V.E. Schwab

“Sinners,” directed by Ryan Coogler

“Twilight,” by Stephenie Meyer

“Twin Peaks: The Return,” created and directed by David Lynch

“Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears,” by Diane Glancy

“Lone Women,” by Victor LaValle

“The Reformatory,” by Tananarive Due

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Joe Hill's Scary Book Recs and Victor LaValle on "The Haunting of Hill House" (Rerun)

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 18:18:46 +0000

May October never end! As Halloween approaches, we present you with two conversations from years past with great horror authors. Joe Hill, whose latest, "King Sorrow," is out now, recommends several great spooky reads. And Victor LaValle ("Lone Women") talks about the book he has read the most in his life: Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House."

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Stephen King Isn't Always Scary (with Sean Fennessey)

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 16:34:07 +0000

It's October, which means it's time for scary books and scary movies. There's one person who is well known for both: Stephen King. Since his first novel, "Carrie," was published in 1974 and adapted into a hit film two years later, his novels and short stories have been a reliable source of material for film and TV adaptations. And while he's known as a master of horror, some of the more popular films based on his work are drawn from non-horror material. On this week's episode, Sean Fennessey, co-host of the Ringer podcast "The Big Picture," joins Gilbert Cruz to talk about "Stand By Me," "The Shawshank Redemption" and more.

Books and movies discussed in this episode:

"Stand by Me," based on the novella "The Body" from 1982's "Different Seasons"
"The Running Man," based on the 1982 novel of the same name published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman
"The Shawshank Redemption," based on the novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" from "Different Seasons"
"Dolores Claiborne," based on the 1992 novel of the same name
"The Green Mile," based on the 1996 serial novel of the same name
"The Life of Chuck," based on the novella from 2020's "If It Bleeds"
"The Long Walk," based on the 1979 novel of the same name published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman

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Brandon Taylor On His New Novel, 'Minor Black Figures'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 18:49:16 +0000

The novelist Brandon Taylor has been a force to reckon with right from the start: His debut, “Real Life,” was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2020, and he quickly followed that up with two other books, the story collection “Filthy Animals” in 2021 and another novel, “The Late Americans,” in 2023, along with a steady stream of reviews, essays and literary hot takes he publishes on his popular Substack account, Sweater Weather.

Now Taylor returns with a new novel, “Minor Black Figures,” about a 31-year-old painter on the Upper East Side of Manhattan who falls unexpectedly in love with a former Catholic priest. On this week's episode, MJ Franklin speaks with Taylor about how he came to write “Minor Black Figures” and what drew him to the world of fine art as a setting.

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The Sunday Special: The Books We Read in School

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Oct 2025 14:58:27 +0000

This week, the Book Review podcast presents an episode of The Sunday Special from early September.

Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz talks with fellow word lover Sadie Stein and the author Louis Sachar (“Wayside School” series, “Holes”) about the books that they all read when they were students, and ways to encourage young readers today to keep reading.

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Pride and Prejudice'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 12:59:12 +0000

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

So opens Jane Austen’s Regency-era romantic comedy “Pride and Prejudice,” which for centuries has delighted readers with its story of the five Bennet sisters and their efforts to marry well. While the novel moves nimbly among all of the family members and their various entanglements, its particular focus remains on the feisty second-eldest daughter, Elizabeth, and her vexed chemistry with the wealthy, arrogant, gorgeous Mr. Darcy. Their sharp wit, verbal jousting and mutual misunderstandings form the core of what might be considered the first enemies-to-lovers plot in modern literature.

On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “Pride and Prejudice” with his colleagues Jennifer Harlan, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles, and Austen in general with The Times’s Sarah Lyall.

Other books and authors mentioned in this discussion:

“Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors,” by Sonali Dev

“Book Lovers,” by Emily Henry

“The Marriage Plot,” by Jeffrey Eugenides

“Washington Square,” by Henry James

“Such a Fun Age,” by Kiley Reid

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Mary Roach Loves Writing About Weird Science

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 16:45:16 +0000

The best-selling science journalist Mary Roach has written about sex and death and the digestive system — basically, all of the topics that children are taught to avoid in polite company. In her latest, “Replaceable You,” she examines prosthetics, robotics and other ways that technology can interact with human anatomy.

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Roach tells host Gilbert Cruz how she comes up with her ideas and what keeps drawing her back to the bizarre, hilarious bits of trivia that the human body offers up.

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17 Nonfiction Books We’re Looking Forward to This Fall

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:59:15 +0000

In last week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, host Gilbert Cruz and his fellow editor Joumana Khatib offered a preview of some of the fall’s most anticipated works of fiction. This week they return to talk about upcoming nonfiction, from memoirs to literary biographies to the latest pop science offering from the incomparable Mary Roach.

Books discussed in this episode:

“All the Way to the River,” by Elizabeth Gilbert

“Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” by Stephen Greenblatt

“Mother Mary Comes to Me," by Arundhati Roy

“Poems and Prayers,” by Matthew McConaughey

“The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us,” by John J. Lennon

“We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution," by Jill Lepore

“Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel,” by Francis Wilson

“Joyride: A Memoir," by Susan Orlean

“Next of Kin,” by Gabrielle Hamilton

“Paper Girl,” by Beth Macy

“Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America,” by Jeff Chang

“Book of Lives," by Margaret Atwood

”The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding,” by Joseph J. Ellis

“History Matters," by David McCullough

“The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II,” by David Nasaw

“Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor,” by Christine Kuehn

“Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy," by Mary Roach

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10 Novels We're Looking Forward To This Fall

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Sep 2025 15:57:55 +0000

Every fall brings the promise of some of the year’s biggest books and this one is no different. On this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, the host Gilbert Cruz and fellow editor Joumana Khatib talk about several of their most anticipated titles as well as a few upcoming big screen adaptations. (Come back next week for our fall nonfiction preview.)

Books mentioned in this episode:

“The Secret of Secrets,” by Dan Brown

“The Wayfinder,” by Adam Johnson

“Clown Town,” by Mick Herron

“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai

“The Impossible Fortune,” by Richard Osman

“We Love You, Bunny,” by Mona Awad

“Shadow Ticket,” by Thomas Pynchon

“What We Can Know,” by Ian McEwan

“Trip,” by Amie Barrodale

“King Sorrow,” by Joe Hill

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Wild Dark Shore,' by Charlotte McConaghy

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 03:00:00 +0000

Charlotte McConaghy’s latest novel, “Wild Dark Shore,” opens with an enigma: A mysterious, half-drowned woman washes ashore.

The stranger’s name is Rowan, and she has arrived on Shearwater, a remote island near Antarctica. The island, which houses an important seed bank, was once teeming with a community of scientists, but now the project is shutting down, the workers have left and the land lies quiet and deserted, everybody gone except for the Salt family, whose members are all lost in their own way. And all are hiding terrible secrets.

They’re not alone. Rowan herself has come to the island with a hidden purpose, putting this small community on a crash course for a long-overdue reckoning.

On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “Wild Dark Shore” with his colleagues Lauren Christensen and Elisabeth Egan.

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The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: 'Pachinko' (Rerun)

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 13:47:27 +0000

Summer is slipping away and we are on break this week. But we have a fantastic rerun for you — our conversation with Min Jin Lee from last summer, when her book "Pachinko" was named one of the "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" by a New York Times Book Review panel. She spoke about her novel as well as the book she's read the most times — George Eliot's "Middlemarch."

“I’m willing to say it’s the best English language novel, period. Without question,” Lee says. “George Eliot is probably the smartest girl in the room ever as a novelist. She really was a great thinker, a great logician, a great empathizer and also a great psychologist. She was all of those things. And she was also political. She understood so many aspects of the human mind and the way we interact with each other. And then above all, I think she has a great heart.”

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This Reporter Can Tell Us What Nuclear Apocalypse Looks Like

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Aug 2025 15:00:00 +0000

Imagine, if you will, that for unknown reasons North Korea has just launched a nuclear bomb at the United States. What happens next?

The journalist Annie Jacobsen has imagined exactly that, and spent more than a decade interviewing dozens of experts while mastering the voluminous literature on the subject — some of it declassified only in recent years — for her 2024 book “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” which walks readers through the 72 minutes from launch to global annihilation. In the Book Review last year, Barry Gewen said the book was “gripping,” and declared it essential reading “if you want to understand the complex and disturbing details that go into a civilization-destroying decision.”

This week, Jacobsen visits the podcast to talk about her book and why she wrote it, as well as offering some hope that catastrophe can be avoided. “I wanted to write a book that showed in absolutely appalling detail how horrific nuclear war would be,” she tells the host Gilbert Cruz. “And so when people say to me either ‘I could barely read your book, but I had to read it.’ or ‘I had to read it in one sitting, I was terrified, I was horrified,’ I believe I did my job.”

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It's Still Summer. Let's Talk Road Trip Books.

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Aug 2025 16:24:29 +0000

Summer is the season for road trips, and also for road trip stories. Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” may be the most famous example in American literature — but there are lots of other great road trip books, so this week the Book Review’s staff critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai presented readers with a list of 18 of their favorites. On this episode of the podcast they chat with host Gilbert Cruz about the project, their picks and the top-down, wind blown, carefree appeal of the road trip narrative as a genre.

Books discussed in this episode:

“On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac

“Sing, Unburied, Sing,” by Jesmyn Ward

“Lost Children Archive,” by Valeria Luiselli

“I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home,” by Lorrie Moore

“Tramps Like Us," by Joe Westmoreland

“Driving Mr. Albert,” by Michael Paterniti

“Gypsy: A Memoir," by Gypsy Rose Lee

“The Dog of the South,” by Charles Portis

“All Fours,” by Miranda July

“Hearts,” by Hilma Wolitzer

“The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life,” by John le Carré

“Machine Dreams,” by Jayne Anne Phillips

“Lonesome Dove,” by Larry McMurtry

“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov

“The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck

“The Price of Salt,” by Patricia Highsmith

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Catch,' by Yrsa Daley-Ward

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 11:16:02 +0000

In this month’s installment of the Book Review Book Club, we’re discussing “The Catch,” the debut novel by the poet and memoirist Yrsa Daley-Ward. The book is a psychological thriller that follows semi-estranged twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey, who were babies when their mother was presumed to have drowned in the Thames.

The novel begins decades later, when Clara sees something strange: A woman who looks just like their mother is stealing a watch. Clara believes this is her mother, and wants to welcome her back into her life. Dempsey is less certain, in part because the woman doesn’t seem to have aged a day. She believes the woman is a con artist because it’s simply not possible for her to be their mother … right?

What’s real? What’s not? And what does that mean for the lives of these struggling sisters? Daley-Ward unpacks it all in her deliciously slippery novel. On this episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin talks about “The Catch” with fellow Book Review editors Jennifer Harlan and Sadie Stein.

Other books mentioned in this week’s episode:

“The Other Black Girl,” by Zakiya Dalila Harris

“The Haunting of Hill House,” by Shirley Jackson

“Wish Her Safe at Home,” by Stephen Benatar

“Erasure,” by Percival Everett

“Playworld,” by Adam Ross

“The House on the Strand,” by Daphne du Maurier

“Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” by Max Porter

“The Furrows,” by Namwali Serpell

“Dead in Long Beach, California,” by Venita Blackburn

“The Vanishing Half,” by Brit Bennett

“Death Takes Me,” by Cristina Rivera Garza

“Audition,” by Katie Kitamura

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The Best Books of the Year (So Far)

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 16:35:27 +0000

We’re halfway through 2025, and we at the Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the ones that just won’t let us go. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the best books of the year so far.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“King of Ashes,” by S.A. Cosby

“The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann

“A Marriage at Sea,” by Sophie Elmhirst

“Careless People,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams

“Isola,” by Allegra Goodman

“The Catch,” by Yrsa Daley-Ward

“Daughters of the Bamboo Grove,” by Barbara Demick

“The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones

“Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin,” by Sue Prideaux

“Raising Hare,” by Chloe Dalton

“To Smithereens,” by Rosalyn Drexler

“The Fate of the Day,” by Rick Atkinson

“Flesh,” by David Szalay

“Things in Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li

“These Summer Storms,” by Sarah MacLean

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The True Story of a Married Couple Stranded at Sea

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:45:33 +0000

Some time ago, the British journalist Sophie Elmhirst was reporting a story about people who try to escape the land and to live on the water. “I found myself trolling around as you do in these moments, online and on a website devoted to castaway stories and shipwreck stories,” she tells host Gilbert Cruz. “There were lots of photographs and tales of lone wild men who were pitched up on desert islands and had various escapades. And in among all of these was a tiny little black-and-white picture of a man and a woman."

The couple were Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a husband and wife who took to the seas from 1970s England, selling their suburban home to buy a boat and sail to New Zealand. Nine months into the trip, a sperm whale breached under their boat, leaving them stranded on a crude raft with an assortment of salvaged items, luckily including water, canned food, a camera — and a biography of King Richard III. Elmhirst tells the Baileys’ story in her new book, “A Marriage at Sea."

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Mrs. Dalloway" at 100

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 18:44:51 +0000

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”: So reads one of the great opening lines in British literature, the first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s classic 1925 novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.”

The book tracks one day in the life of an English woman, Clarissa Dalloway, living in post-World War I London, as she prepares for, and then hosts, a party. That’s pretty much it, as far as the plot goes. But within that single day, whole worlds unfold, as Woolf captures the expansiveness of human experience through Clarissa’s roving thoughts. On this week’s episode, Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses it with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Laura Thompson.

Other books mentioned in this episode:

“The Passion According to G.H.,” by Clarice Lispector

“A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” by Eimear McBride

“The Lesser Bohemians,” by Eimear McBride

“To the Lighthouse,” by Virginia Woolf

“Orlando,” by Virginia Woolf

“A Room of One’s Own,” by Virginia Woolf

“The Hours,” by Michael Cunningham

“Headshot,” by Rita Bullwinkel

“Tilt,” by Emma Pattee

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A.O. Scott on the Joy of Close Reading Poetry

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:10:38 +0000

On this week's episode, A.O. Scott joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about the value of close reading poetry. And New York Times Book Review poetry editor Greg Cowles recommends four recently published collections worth reading.

Books mentioned in this episode

* "New and Collected Hell: A Poem," by Shane McCrae

* "Ominous Music Intensifying," by Alexandra Teague

* "Ecstasy: Poems," by Alex Dimitrov

* "New and Selected Poems," by Marie Howe

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50 Years After ‘Jaws’ Terrified Filmgoers, a Reporter Looks Back

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 03:00:00 +0000

Steven Spielberg’s movie “Jaws” hit theaters 50 years ago this month, in June 1975, and became a phenomenon almost instantly. In some ways that was no surprise: The Peter Benchley novel it was based on, also called “Jaws,” had been a huge best seller the year before, and the public was primed for a fun summer scare. Brian Raftery — the author of “Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” — wrote about “Jaws” for the Book Review last year in honor of the novel’s 50th anniversary, and this week he visits the podcast to talk about the book, the movie adaptation and the era of blockbuster thrillers.

“If you’ve seen ‘Jaws,’ you could probably guess what the opening chapter of the book is,” he tells Gilbert Cruz (who has indeed seen “Jaws,” dozens of times). “It’s this shark attack, where this shark at night just devours this young female swimmer. The writing is really fun. It’s really gnarly, and it’s one of those amazing opening chapters where the book is moving as fast as the shark. After you read that first chapter, you are just completely pulled in.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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S.A. Cosby on Writing Southern Crime Fiction

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Jun 2025 13:59:23 +0000

In S.A. Cosby’s latest thriller, “King of Ashes,” a successful and fast-living financial adviser is called suddenly back to the small Virginia hometown he fled, where his family runs the local crematory and his father is in a coma stemming from a car crash that may not be as accidental as it seems.

Cosby himself is from a small Virginia town, and on this week’s podcast he discusses the allure of homecoming, the tricky emotional terrain of complicated families and the reason he keeps revisiting the rural South in his fiction.

“Once manufacturing moved out of these places, these rural places, there was nothing left to replace it. But crime — crime is America’s great secret industry. It’s our great secret empire. And when the legitimate businesses leave, crime steps in the fold. Nature abhors a vacuum, so crime steps in to fill that place. And I wanted to talk about cities like that."

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Safekeep'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 May 2025 15:12:08 +0000

MJ Franklin, who hosts the Book Review podcast’s monthly book club, says that whenever someone asks him, “What should I read next?,” Yael van der Wouden’s “The Safekeep” has become his go-to recommendation. So he was particularly excited to discuss the novel on this week’s episode.

Set in the Netherlands in 1961, “The Safekeep” is one of those books it’s best not to know too much about, as part of its delight is discovering its secrets unspoiled. As the reviewer for The New York Times coyly wrote in her piece about the book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024: “What a quietly remarkable book. I’m afraid I can’t tell you too much about it.”

Here are some other books discussed in this week’s episode:

“The Torqued Man,” by Peter Mann

“The Little Stranger,” by Sarah Waters

“Mice 1961,” by Stacey Levine

“The New Life,” by Tom Crewe

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'Fun Home' Author Alison Bechdel on Her New Graphic Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 May 2025 16:35:08 +0000

Alison Bechdel rose to fame as the creator of a long-running alt-weekly comic strip before jumping to an even wider audience by way of her celebrated graphic memoirs “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” Her new book, “Spent,” is a graphic novel — but it was originally meant to be another memoir, as Bechdel tells Gilbert Cruz on this week’s podcast.

“Over the years that I turned myself from being a comic strip writer into a memoirist, I got very sort of self-righteous about memoir as a genre,” Bechdel says. “I just thought, why would you bother making anything up? Life is incredible. It’s all right there. It’s served up on a platter every day. Write about that. My friends who are fiction writers would say, You’re able to tell a deeper kind of truth with fiction, don’t you think? And I would agree with them, but secretly I would think, no, you can’t. You’ve got to tell the actual truth. But that does get really tiresome. It gets tiring."

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Ron Chernow on His New Mark Twain Biography

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 May 2025 15:01:12 +0000

The biographer Ron Chernow has written about the Rockefellers and the Morgans. His book about George Washington won a Pulitzer Prize. His book about Alexander Hamilton was adapted into a hit Broadway musical. Now, in “Mark Twain,” Chernow turns to the life of the author and humorist who became one of the 19th century’s biggest celebrities and, along the way, did much to reshape American literature in his own image.

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Chernow tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he came to write about Twain and what interested him most about his subject.

“The thing that triggered this Mark Twain mania in me was more Mark Twain the platform artist, Mark Twain the political pundit, Mark Twain the original celebrity, even more than Mark Twain the novelist or short story writer,” Chernow says. But at the same time, “I felt that he was very seminal in terms of bringing, to American literature, really bringing the heartland alive — writing about ordinary people in the vernacular and taking this wild throbbing kind of madcap culture, of America’s small towns in rural areas, and really introducing that into fiction.”

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12 Summer Books We're Looking Forward To

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 May 2025 19:28:07 +0000

Summer arrives just over a month from now, and along with your last-minute scramble for a house share or a part-time job scooping ice cream, you’re probably also wondering what to read. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Joumana Khatib about some of the books they're most looking forward to, from a James Baldwin biography to the true-life story of a young couple shipwrecked in the Pacific and a political thriller co-written by James Patterson and Bill Clinton.

Books discussed:

“The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda,” by Nathalia Holt

“Atmosphere: A Love Story,” by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild,” by Bryan Burrough

“Next to Heaven," by James Frey

“A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck,” by Sophie Elmhirst

“The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

“The First Gentleman,” by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

“King of Ashes,” by S.A. Cosby

“Bonding," by Mariel Franklin

“Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” by V.E. Schwab

“Katabasis,” by R.F. Kuang

“Baldwin: A Love Story,” by Nicholas Boggs

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'The Interview': Isabel Allende Understands How Fear Changes a Society

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 May 2025 17:22:42 +0000

At 82, Isabel Allende is one of the world’s most beloved and best-selling Spanish-language authors. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and 80 million copies of her books have been sold around the world. That’s a lot of books.

Allende’s newest novel, “My Name Is Emilia del Valle” is about a dark period in Chilean history: the 1891 Chilean civil war. Like so much of Allende’s work, it’s a story about women in tough spots who figure out a way through. Thematically, it’s not that far off from Allende’s own story. She was raised in Chile, but in 1973, when she was 31, raising two small children and working as a journalist, her life was upended forever. That year a military coup pushed out the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who was her father’s cousin. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote “The House of the Spirits,” which evolved from a letter she had begun writing to her dying grandfather. That book became a runaway best seller and it remains one of her best-known.

Allende and Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz spoke about her life and career.

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Book Club: Let’s Talk About Adam Ross’s ‘Playworld’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:09:28 +0000

Set in New York in the 1980s, Adam Ross’s new novel, “Playworld,” tells the story of a young actor named Griffin as he navigates the chaos of the city, of his family and of being a teenager, and the dangers that swirl around each.

Although “Playworld” grapples with bleak material, it sparkles with Ross’s vivid eye and sardonic sense of humor. The result is a dark, off-kilter bildungsroman about one overextended teenager trying to figure himself out while being failed, continually, by every adult around him.

On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “Playworld” with his colleagues Dave Kim and Sadie Stein.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Playworld,” by Adam Ross

“Mr. Peanut,” by Adam Ross

“The Catcher in the Rye,” “Nine Stories,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” and “Franny and Zooey,” by J.D. Salinger

“Long Island Compromise,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

“How Little Lori Visited Times Square,” by Amos Vogel, illustrated by Maurice Sendak

“The Squid and the Whale,” directed by Noah Baumbach

“The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt

“Headshot,” by Rita Bullwinkel

“The Copenhagen Trilogy,” by Tove Ditlevsen

“Jakob von Gunten,” by Robert Walser

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What It Was Like to Edit The 'Wolf Hall' Books

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 15:03:58 +0000

Last summer, when The New York Times Book Review released its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, one of the authors with multiple titles on that list was Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022. Those novels were “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” the first two in a trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the all-purpose fixer and adviser to King Henry VIII.

Those books were also adapted into a 2015 television series starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damien Lewis as King Henry. It’s now a decade later and the third book in Mantel’s series, “The Mirror and the Light,” has also been adapted for the small screen. Its finale airs on Sunday, April 27.

Joining host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s episode is Mantel’s former editor Nicholas Pearson. He describes what it was like to encounter those books for the first time, and to work with a great author on a groundbreaking masterpiece of historical fiction.

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'The Great Gatsby' at 100

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:36:40 +0000

A century after “The Great Gatsby” was first published, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender novel about a mysterious, lovelorn millionaire living and dying in a Long Island mansion has become among the most widely read American fictions — and also among the most analyzed and interpreted. As the Book Review’s A.O. Scott wrote in a recent essay about the book’s centennial: “What we think about Gatsby illuminates what we think about money, race, romance and history. How we imagine him has a lot to do with how we see ourselves.”

Scott joins the host Gilbert Cruz on the podcast this week to discuss Fitzgerald’s novel and its long afterlife, looking at the ways “Gatsby” has made its way into the fabric of American culture.

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Colum McCann on Undersea Cables and His New Novel "Twist"

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Apr 2025 19:47:24 +0000

In his new novel, “Twist,” the National Book Award-winning Irish writer Colum McCann tells the story of a journalist deep at sea in more ways then one: A man adrift, he accepts a magazine assignment to write about the crews who maintain and repair the undersea cables that transmit all of the world’s information. Naturally, the assignment becomes more treacherous and psychologically fraught than he had anticipated. On this week’s episode, McCann tells host Gilbert Cruz how he became interested in the topic of information cables and why the story resonated for him at multiple levels.

“Now, I don’t know if the novel is prescient in any way. I wanted to talk about repair. And when I got deep into the subject, I did talk about repair — which is, human repair or actual repair of a cable. But I also ended up talking about sabotage, too. And the sabotage of these cables is something that has to be on our minds.”

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Book Club: Let's Talk About "We Do Not Part," by Han Kang

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:45:37 +0000

The novel “We Do Not Part,” by the Nobel laureate Han Kang, involves a pet-sitting quest gone surreal: It follows a writer and documentarian whose hospitalized friend beseeches her to take care of her stranded pet parakeet on an island hundreds of miles away. When she arrives, the writer finds not only the bird but also an apparition of her friend, who has a devastating history to tell.

Transforming real life into a haunting dreamscape, “We Do Not Part” is about grief, tragedy, the weight of the past, and the painful but essential work of remembering, delivered by one of the most electrifying writers working today. (Han’s 2016 novel, “The Vegetarian,” won the International Booker Prize and was chosen as one of The New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century.) On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “We Do Not Part” with with fellow Book Review editors Lauren Christensen and Emily Eakin.

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Steven Soderbergh on His Reading Life (Rerun)

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:46:28 +0000

The director Steven Soderbergh has just released his second film of 2025: the spy thriller "Black Bag," starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett. In January 2024, Soderbergh spoke with host Gilbert Cruz about some of the more than 80 books that he read in the previous year. (This episode is a rerun.)

Books discussed:

"How to Live: A Life of Montaigne," by Sarah Bakewell

"Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining,'" by Lee Unkrich and J.W. Rinzler

"Cocktails with George and Martha," by Philip Gefter

The work of Donald E. Westlake

"Americanah," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Pictures From an Institution," by Randall Jarrell

"Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," by Robert M. Sapolsky

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Spring Preview: A Few Books We're Excited For

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Mar 2025 12:32:14 +0000

Every season brings its share of books to look forward to, and this spring is no different. Host Gilbert Cruz is joined by Book Review editor Joumana Khatib to talk about a dozen or so titles that sound interesting in the months ahead.

Books discussed on this episode:

"Dream Count," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Sunrise on the Reaping," by Suzanne Collins

"The Buffalo Hunter Hunter," by Stephen Graham Jones

"Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools," by Mary Annette Pember

"Great Big Beautiful Life," by Emily Henry

"John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs," by Ian Leslie

"Yoko: A Biography," by David Sheff

"Searches," by Vauhini Vara

"Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America," by Michael Luo

"Rabbit Moon," by Jennifer Haigh

"Mark Twain," by Ron Chernow

"Authority," by Andrea Long Chu

"Spent," by Alison Bechdel

"Fish Tales," by Nettie Jones

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Book Club: Let's Talk About "Orbital," by Samantha Harvey

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:48:05 +0000

Samantha Harvey’s novel “Orbital,” which won the Booker Prize last year, has a tight, poetic frame: We follow one day in the lives of six people working on a space station above Earth, orbiting the planet 16 times every 24 hours. But this is not a saga of adventure or exploration. It’s a quiet meditation on what it means to be human, prompted by a series of personal reckonings each character faces while floating 250 miles above home.

This week on the Book Review Book Club, MJ Franklin talks about “Orbital” with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and Jennifer Harlan.

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Celebrating 100 Years of Edward Gorey

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:34:27 +0000

You’re familiar with Edward Gorey, whether you know it or not. The prolific author and illustrator, who was born 100 years ago this week, was ubiquitous for a time in the 1970s and 1980s, and his elaborate black-and-white line drawings — often depicting delightfully grim neo-Victorian themes and settings — graced everything from book jackets to the opening credits of the PBS show “Mystery!” to his own eccentric storybooks like “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” in which young children come to unfortunate but spectacular ends.

On this week’s episode, the Book Review’s Sadie Stein joins Gilbert Cruz for a celebration of all things Gorey.

“He was so incredibly prolific,” Stein says. “He was Joyce Carol Oates-like in his output. And it’s amazing when you look at the work because the line drawings, as you mentioned, are so intricate. It looks almost like pointillism sometimes, like it would have taken hundreds of hours. But he was either preternaturally disciplined or incredibly fast, and each one that I’ve ever seen at least is beautiful. And complete in a way.”

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Inside the Making of ‘Wicked’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

One day, several decades ago, the writer Winnie Holzman was shopping in a Manhattan bookstore where a particular cover caught her eye. It showed a woman with a green face, a black hat pulled down over her eyes. The book was “Wicked” by Gregory Maguire, a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” stories from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. “When I turned it over and read the little précis on the back, it blew my mind,” Holzman said. “I thought it was such a brilliant premise.” The book ended up on Holzman’s bookshelf, with its enigmatic cover facing out.

Years later, the composer Stephen Schwartz contacted Holzman to ask if she’d be interested in adapting Maguire’s book for the stage. The musical they wrote together opened in 2003, and it is now one of the most successful shows in Broadway history. The producers started talking about a movie adaptation, but Holzman was cautious: “We had to really kind of clear our minds and kind of reconceive the whole story.”

The film version of “Wicked” opened in 2024, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and with a screenplay by Holzman and Dana Fox. It is one of the highest-grossing movies of the year and is nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Winnie Holzman joins Gilbert Cruz, the editor of the Book Review, to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of adapting your own adaptation.

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Adapting the Twists and Turns of ‘Conclave’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The screenwriter Peter Straughan has become adept at taking well known — and beloved — books and adapting them for the big and small screens. He was first nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of the 2011 film “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” based on the classic John le Carré spy novel, and then adapted Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy into an award-winning season of television, with an adaptation of the third novel coming out soon. Now he has been nominated for a second Oscar: for his screenplay for “Conclave,” based on Robert Harris’s political thriller set in the secret world of a papal election.“It’s almost like mosaic work,” Straughan tells Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, about adapting books. “You have all these pieces; sometimes they’re going to be laid out in a very similar order to the book, sometimes a completely different order. Sometimes you’re going to deconstruct and rebuild completely.”In the third episode of our special series devoted to Oscar-nominated films adapted from books, Cruz talks with Straughan about his process of translating a book to the screen, and about the moments in ‘‘Conclave” that he found most exciting to adapt.

Produced by Tina Antolini and Alex Barron
Edited by Wendy Dorr
Engineered by Daniel Ramirez
Original Music by Elisheba Ittoop
Hosted by Gilbert Cruz

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Is Bob Dylan Still a ‘Complete Unknown’?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties,” traces the events that led up to Bob Dylan’s memorable performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The book is about Dylan, but also about the folk movement, youth culture, politics and the record business. For the writer and director James Mangold, Wald’s work provided an opportunity to tell an unusual story about the musician.

“You could structure a screenplay along the lines of what Peter Shaffer did with “Amadeus,’” Mangold told the Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz. “I don’t really know what I learned about Mozart watching “Amadeus.” But I do know that I learned a lot about how we mortals feel about people with immense talent.”

Mangold’s film “A Complete Unknown” is a chronicle of Dylan’s early years on the New York folk scene, and it avoids easy explanations for the musician’s genius and success. “What if the thing we don’t understand, we just don’t want to understand,” said Mangold, “which is that he’s actually different? That he’s just a different kind of person than you or I?”

In the second episode of our special series devoted to Oscar-nominated films adapted from books, Cruz talks with Mangold about making a film centered on one of music’s most enigmatic figures.

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How ‘Nickel Boys’ Became One of the Year’s Most Visually Striking Films

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

When the filmmaker and photographer RaMell Ross first read “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black boys in a dangerous reform school in the 1960s, he couldn’t help but put himself in the shoes of its protagonists, Elwood and Turner.

In his film adaptation of the book, Ross does that to the audience: You see what the characters see, because it’s filmed from the main character’s point of view. “I wondered,” Ross said, “how do you explicitly film from the perspective of a Black person?”

It was an experiment that has paid off in critical acclaim. “Nickel Boys” has been nominated for two Academy Awards: best adapted screenplay and best picture.

In the first episode of our special series devoted to Oscar-nominated films adapted from books, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Ross about why he made the film this particular way.

Produced by Tina Antolini and Alex Barron

With Kate LoPresti

Edited by Wendy Dorr

Engineered by Sophia Lanman

Original music by Elisheba Ittoop

Hosted by Gilbert Cruz

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Book Club: Let’s Talk About Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘Our Evenings’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 19:56:10 +0000

The novel “Our Evenings,” by Alan Hollinghurst, follows a gay English Burmese actor from childhood into old age as he confronts confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate in the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s the story of a life — beautifully related by a literary master whose 2004 novel “The Line of Beauty” won the Booker Prize and was named to the Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

Reviewing “Our Evenings” for us last year, Hamilton Cain wrote that the book “is that rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language, surrounding us like a Wall of Sound.”

You can join our book club discussion in the comments here.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Alafair Burke On Writing Crime Novels and Teaching Law

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 19:44:50 +0000

In Alafair Burke’s new thriller, “The Note,” three friends are vacationing together in the Hamptons when they have an unpleasant run-in with a couple of strangers and decide to exact drunken, petty revenge. But the prank they pull — a note reading “He’s cheating on you” — snowballs, eventually embroiling them in a missing-persons investigation and forcing each woman to wonder what dark secrets her friends are hiding.

Burke joins host Gilbert Cruz and talks about how she came up with the idea for “The Note,” and how she goes about writing her books in general.

“I always have a few ideas, just, like the setup in my head,” she says. “And then I also have characters in my head. They’re not aligned together initially. I might just be thinking about a character who’s interesting to me for various reasons. It might be the back story that’s interesting, or it might be a personality trait that’s interesting. And then I’ll have a setup, like, three women go on vacation and stir up some nonsense that gets them in trouble. And for me, when I can start writing is when — it’s almost like matchmaking: Oh, OK, if I take that character that I’ve been thinking about with that back story and that set of anxieties and I put her in this scenario, that’s going to get interesting.”

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How a Wildfire Sent Pico Iyer in Search of Silence

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 17:52:51 +0000

Decades ago, after he lost in home in a California wildfire, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer started to go to a small monastery in Big Sur in search of solitude. On this week's episode he discusses those retreats, which he writes about in his new book "Aflame: Learning from Silence."

"It's true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery or convent and I felt a kind of longing, the way other people feel a longing when they see a delectable meal or a Pistachio gelato."

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The Books We’re Excited About in Early 2025

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 20:34:46 +0000

And we're back! Happy new year, readers. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the upcoming books they’re most anticipating over the next several months.

Books discussed on this episode:

"Stone Yard Devotional," by Charlotte Wood

"Aflame: Learning from Silence," by Pico Iyer

"Onyx Storm," by Rebecca Yarros

"Glyph," by Ali Smith

"The Dream Hotel," by Laila Lalami

"The Colony," by Annika Norlin

"We Do Not Part," by Han Kang

"Playworld," by Adam Ross

"Death of the Author," by Nnedi Okorafor

"The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary," by Susannah Cahalan

"Tilt," by Emma Pattee

"Dream Count," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Hope: The Autobiography," by Pope Francis

"Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church," by Philip Shenon

"The Antidote," by Karen Russell

"Source Code: My Beginnings," by Bill Gates

"Great Big Beautiful Life," by Emily Henry

"Sunrise on the Reaping," by Suzanne Collins

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The 20th Anniversary of "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell"

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 15:13:24 +0000

The Book Review podcast is off for the holidays, but please enjoy this episode of the The New York Times's Culture Desk show from earlier this fall.

In 2004, Susanna Clarke published her debut novel, the sprawling 800-page historical fantasy “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.” It was a sensation. Clarke sold millions of copies, won literary awards and landed on best-seller lists.

After just one book, Clarke was regarded as one of Britain’s greatest fantasy novelists. It would be 16 years before she resurfaced with her second novel, “Piranesi.”

So, where did she go? And what is she doing now?

On the 20th anniversary of her masterpiece, the Times reporter Alexandra Alter visited Clarke at her limestone cottage in England’s Peak District to discuss her winding path to literary stardom and, above all else, her complex relationship with magic.

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Book Club: "Small Things Like These," by Claire Keegan

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 16:49:36 +0000

Clare Keegan's slim 2021 novella about one Irishman's crisis of conscience during the Christmas season, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has also been adapted into a film starring Cillian Murphy. In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib, Lauren Christensen, and Elisabeth Egan.

Keegan's book was also one of The New York Times Book Review's 100 best books of the 21st century. As we wrote, "Not a word is wasted in Keegan’s small, burnished gem of a novel, a sort of Dickensian miniature centered on the son of an unwed mother who has grown up to become a respectable coal and timber merchant with a family of his own in 1985 Ireland. Moralistically, though, it might as well be the Middle Ages as he reckons with the ongoing sins of the Catholic Church and the everyday tragedies wrought by repression, fear and rank hypocrisy."

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Our Book Critics On Their Year in Reading

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:15:07 +0000

Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — staff critics for The New York Times Book Review — join host Gilbert Cruz to look back on highlights from their year in books.

Books discussed:

"Intermezzo," by Sally Rooney

"All Fours," by Miranda July

"You Dreamed of Empires," by Álvaro Enrigue

"When the Clock Broke," by John Ganz

"Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring," by Brad Gooch

"Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius," by Carrie Courogen

"My Beloved Monster," by Caleb Carr

"Rejection," by Tony Tulathimutte

"Beautyland," by Marie-Helene Bertino

"Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society," by Daniel Chandler

"Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera," by Ricky Ian Gordon

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Book Club: Dolly Alderton's 'Good Material' (Rerun)

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Dec 2024 18:21:43 +0000

Following our Top 10 Books of 2024 episode, we are re-running our book club discussion about one of the novels on our year-end list: "Good Material."

How to explain the British writer Dolly Alderton to an American audience? It might be best to let her work speak for itself — it certainly does! — but Alderton is such a cultural phenomenon in her native England that some context is probably helpful: “Like Nora Ephron, With a British Twist” is the way The New York Times Book Review put it when we reviewed her latest novel, “Good Material,” earlier this year.

“Good Material” tells the story of a down-on-his-luck stand-up comic dealing with a broken heart, and it has won Alderton enthusiastic fans in America. In this episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Emily Eakin and Leah Greenblatt.

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The 10 Best Books of 2024

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Tue, 3 Dec 2024 17:43:04 +0000

Don't let anyone tell you differently — end of year list time is a wonderful time, indeed. And, as we do every December, we are ready to discuss the 10 best books of the year. Host Gilbert Cruz gathers the editors of the New York Times Book Review to discuss the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year.

The New York Times Book Review's Top 10 Books of 2024

"James," by Percival Everett

"You Dreamed of Empires," by Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer

"Good Material," by Dolly Alderton

"All Fours," by Miranda July

"Martyr!," by Kaveh Akbar

"The Wide Wide Sea," by Hampton Sides

"Everyone Who is Gone is Here," by Jonathan Blitzer

"Reagan," by Max Boot

"I Heard Her Call My Name," by Lucy Sante

"Cold Creamatorium," by József Debreczeni; translated by Paul Olchváry

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Book Club: 'James,' by Percival Everett (Rerun)

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 19:46:09 +0000

The broad outlines of "James" will be immediately familiar to anyone with even a basic knowledge of American literature: A boy named Huckleberry Finn and an enslaved man named Jim are fleeing down the Mississippi River together, each in search of his own kind of freedom.

But where Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” treated Jim as a secondary character, a figure of pity and a target of fun, Percival Everett makes him the star of the show: a dignified, complicated, fully formed man capable of love and wit and rage in equal measure.

In this episode from May, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book, which was recently awarded the National Book Award, with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Gregory Cowles.

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Book Club: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 20:09:31 +0000

It begins with one of the most iconic lines in literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realist parable of imperialism in Latin America, is a tale of family, community, prophesy and disaster. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Gregory Cowles and Miguel Salazar.

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Patrick Radden Keefe on Taking "Say Nothing" From Book to Show

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 14:42:03 +0000

As part of The New York Times Book Review's project on the 100 Best Books published since the year 2000, Nick Hornby called "Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" one of the "greatest literary achievements of the 21st century." The author Patrick Radden Keefe joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about his book, which has now been adapted into an FX miniseries.

Keefe has now seen his reporting on the life of Irish Republican Army soldier Dolours Price and others make its way from a New Yorker magazine article to an acclaimed nonfiction book to a streaming series. "In terms of storytelling, I try to write in a way that is as visceral and engaging as possible," Keefe said. "But the toolkit that you have when you make a series is so much more visceral. It's almost fissile in its power."

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What It's Like to Write a New John le Carré Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Nov 2024 14:31:07 +0000

The works of John le Carré, who died in 2020, are among the most beloved thrillers of all time. For some, books like "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," "A Perfect Spy" and "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" are simply among their favorite works of literature ever.

So it was a perilous task that author Nick Harkaway, one of le Carré sons, set out for himself. The author of multiple well-received science fiction novels, Harkaway picked up the torch from his father to write a new tale starring George Smiley, the Cold War spy who has appeared in more than a half dozen novels. According to Harkaway, it took some work to figure out the right period to set the book in.

"Smiley's career is a little bit tricky in terms of the continuity because my dad, when he was writing these books, wasn't writing a franchise," Harkaway said. "He was writing one book after another, and each one was the only truth that he cared about."

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Sally Rooney's "Intermezzo": Our Book Club Conversation

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Nov 2024 19:41:19 +0000

Sally Rooney is a writer people talk about. Since her first novel, “Conversations With Friends,” was published in 2017, Rooney has been hailed as a defining voice of the millennial generation because of her ability to capture the particular angst and confusion of young love, friendship and coming-of-age in our fraught digital era.

“Intermezzo,” her fourth and latest novel, centers on two brothers separated by 10 years and periods of estrangement, who are grieving the recent death of their father. Peter Koubek is a 32-year-old lawyer with a younger girlfriend, Naomi, and an unextinguished flame for his ex, Sylvia; his brother, Ivan, is a 22-year-old chess prodigy who falls into a relationship with a 36-year-old divorcée, Margaret.

In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Sadie Stein and Dave Kim.

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Two Horror Authors on the Scary Books You Should Be Reading

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 01:22:39 +0000

Halloween is just around the corner, so we turned to two great horror authors — Joe Hill and Stephen Graham Jones — for their recommendations of books to read this season.

Books discussed:

"Mean Spirited," by Nick Roberts
"Maeve Fly," by CJ Leede
"Come Closer," by Sara Gran
"It," by Stephen King
"Experimental Film," by Gemma Files
"A Head Full of Ghosts," by Paul Tremblay
"Lost Man's Lane," by Scott Carson
"Fever House," by Keith Rosson
"The Devil by Name," by Keith Rosson
"The Reformatory," by Tananarive Due

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The Ezra Klein Show: Salman Rushdie

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 19:37:34 +0000

Salman Rushdie's "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder," has been nominated in the nonfiction category as part of this year's National Book Awards, which will take place in mid-November. This week, we are running Rushdie's conversation with Ezra Klein from earlier this year.

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Stanley Tucci on His Year in Eating and a Look at the National Book Awards

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 20:03:22 +0000

The actor-director-producer Stanley Tucci is also, famously, an avid eater, who has explored his enthusiasm for food through his travel show “Searching for Italy” and through two books: “Taste,” in 2021, and now a food diary, “What I Ate in One Year." In this week’s episode, Tucci discusses his new book with host Gilbert Cruz and talks about bad meals, his food idol and his path to tracking a year’s worth of eating.

“The people at Simon & Schuster wanted me to write another book after ‘Taste,’ and I really didn’t know what to write,” Tucci says. “My wife said, Just write what you eat. So I did, because I do everything she says. And it actually ended up being such a pleasure to write. It just flowed very easily. As you start to write about the mundane, you start to mine all this stuff that you didn’t know you were thinking about, or that was happening. And that’s what the book is. It’s, in essence, the passage of time through the prism of food.”

Also on this week’s episode, Gilbert chats with Joumana Khatib about the National Book Award finalists in fiction and nonfiction.

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Jean Hanff Korelitz on "The Sequel"

books@nytimes.com (Hosted by Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 4 Oct 2024 19:00:00 +0000

In 2021, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz had a hit with “The Plot,” a book that was partly a mystery, partly a thriller and entirely a delicious sendup of the publishing industry. It told the tale of a once-promising writer, Jacob, who steals somebody else’s story idea and reaches undreamed-of levels of success before things go very badly for him.

Korelitz’s new novel, “The Sequel,” is — yes — a sequel to “The Plot.” It follows Jacob’s widow, Anna, who has unexpectedly become a writer herself, only to be confronted with her own dark secrets. On this week’s episode, Korelitz talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about the writing life, the shape of her career and her decision to write a sequel to “The Plot.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Book Club: 'The Hypocrite,' by Jo Hamya

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 19:37:37 +0000

Jo Hamya’s novel “The Hypocrite” follows a famous English novelist as he watches a new play by his daughter, Sophia, in London. The lights go down in the theater, and immediately the novelist realizes: The play is about him, the vacation he took with Sophia a decade earlier and the sins he committed while they were away.

The novel is an art monster story and a dysfunctional family saga that explores the ethics of creating work inspired by real life. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with editors Joumana Khatib and Lauren Christensen.

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The Fall Books We're Looking Forward To

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:50:38 +0000

This weekend marks the official start of autumn, so what better time to take a peek at the fall books we’re most excited to read? On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz chats with Joumana Khatib and Anna Dubenko about the upcoming season of reading and the books on the horizon that they’re looking forward to most eagerly.

Books mentioned in this week’s episode:

“Intermezzo,” by Sally Rooney

“Playground,” by Richard Powers

“Sonny Boy: A Memoir,” by Al Pacino

“Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” by Cher

“The Sequel,” by Jean Hanff Korelitz

“Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” by Ina Garten

“We Solve Murders,” by Richard Osman

“Creation Lake,” by Rachel Kushner

“V13: Chronicle of a Trial,” by Emmanuel Carrère

“Absolution,” by Jeff VanderMeer

“Lazarus Man,” by Richard Price

“Rejection,” by Tony Tulathimutte

“Colored Television,” by Danzy Senna

“Health and Safety,” by Emily Witt

“Patriot: A Memoir,” by Alexei Navalny

“The Message,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“The Serviceberry,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer

“Revenge of the Tipping Point,” by Malcolm Gladwell

“From Here to the Great Unknown,” by Lisa Marie Presley

“The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” by Haruki Murakami

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Robert Caro on 50 Years of 'The Power Broker'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 19:22:09 +0000

Robert Caro’s 1974 biography “The Power Broker” is a book befitting its subject, Robert Moses — the unelected parochial technocrat who used a series of appointed positions to entirely reshape New York City and its surrounding environment for generations to come. Like Moses, Caro’s book has exerted an enduring and outsize influence. This week, Caro joins the podcast and tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he accounts for its enduring legacy.

“People are interested in power,” Caro says. “This is a particular kind of power. Robert Moses’ power was unchecked power. We all live in a democracy where we think that power comes from our votes at the ballot box. He was a man who was never elected to anything and he held on to power for 44 years, almost half a century. And with the power, this man who wasn’t elected to anything shaped New York and its surrounding suburbs. So I think, if you’re interested in government, you have to say, as I said maybe 55 years ago when I started this, How did he do it? What happened here?”

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Kate Atkinson on the Return of Jackson Brodie

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Sep 2024 18:37:52 +0000

The British writer Kate Atkinson has had a rich and varied career since her debut novel, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1996; her 14 subsequent books have included story collections, historical fiction and an inventive speculative novel, “Life After Life,” that landed on the Book Review’s recent survey of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

But she may be best known for her Jackson Brodie series of crime novels, which began with “Case Histories” in 2004 and was later adapted into a British television show. The sixth book in the series, “Death at the Sign of the Rook,” has just been released, and from the title to the plot to the cast of characters it pays winking homage to the golden age of English cozy mysteries. Atkinson visits the podcast this week to discuss her new novel, and tells The Times’s Sarah Lyall how she approached her tribute to an earlier era.

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21st Century Books Special Edition: Isabel Wilkerson on 'The Warmth of Other Suns'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 14:00:26 +0000

As part of its recent "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Isabel Wilkerson joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss "The Warmth of Other Suns," her sweeping history of the movement of Black Americans from the south to points north over the course of the 20th century.

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Book Club: 'My Brilliant Friend,' by Elena Ferrante

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 13:40:05 +0000

This July, The New York Times Book Review published a list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The top choice was “My Brilliant Friend,” by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein.

The book is the first novel in Ferrante’s so-called Neapolitan quartet, which tracks the lifelong friendship between Lenù and Lila, two women from a rough neighborhood in Naples, Italy, even as family, relationships and work pull their lives in different directions.

In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.

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21st Century Books Special Edition: Jennifer Egan on 'A Visit from the Goon Squad'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 17:00:54 +0000

As part of its recent 100 Best Books of the 21st Century project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Jennifer Egan joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss her Pulitzer-winning novel about the music industry, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” and talks, among other things, about the early challenges it faced in finding an audience, the meaning of its title and her initial reluctance to decide whether the book was a novel or a story collection.

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Liz Moore on Her Summer Camp Mystery "The God of the Woods"

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 18:37:02 +0000

A summer camp in the Adirondacks. A rich girl gone missing, 14 years after her older brother also disappeared. A prominent local family harboring dark secrets. Liz Moore’s new novel, “The God in the Woods,” turns these elements into a complex and suspenseful meditation on parenting and social class and the rituals of summer friendship.

On this week’s podcast, Liz Moore chats with Gilbert Cruz about her new novel. (Spoiler alert: the last 10 or so minutes address the book's ending.)

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What We're Reading This Summer

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Aug 2024 14:40:56 +0000

It’s August, which means that Labor Day and back-to-school are just around the corner. The vacation that seemed so leisurely a month ago suddenly feels a little more frantic. But there’s still time to squeeze in a last batch of summer reading. On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz chats with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Anna Dubenko about the books that have been occupying their attention this season.

Books mentioned on this episode:

"Talk," by Linda Rosencrantz

"Crossroads," by Jonathan Franzen

"You Like It Darker," by Stephen King

"Transactions in a Foreign Currency," by Deborah Eisenberg

"Veronica," by Mary Gaitskill

"The Bright Sword," by Lev Grossman

"Asymmetry," by Lisa Halliday

"Out," by Natsuo Kirino

"The God of the Woods," by Liz Moore

"The Devil's Grip," by Lina Wolff

"Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay," by Elena Ferrante

"Spy Hook," by Len Deighton

"All Fours," by Miranda July

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21st Century Books Special Edition: George Saunders on 'Lincoln in the Bardo'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Mon, 5 Aug 2024 16:13:00 +0000

As part of its recent "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, George Saunders — who had three books on the list, including his short story collections "Pastoralia" and "Tenth of December" — joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss his novel "Lincoln in the Bardo."

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Sarah Jessica Parker on Her Life in Publishing

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Aug 2024 16:04:10 +0000

Sarah Jessica Parker has been a familiar presence on TV, movie screens and Broadway stages for five decades. But since 2016 she has also been a force in the book world, initially at the helm of the fiction imprint SJP for Hogarth and for the past two years with SJP Lit, an imprint at the independent publisher Zando.

Parker visits the podcast this week to chat with the host Gilbert Cruz about her lifelong love of reading, the kinds of books that excite her most and her entry into the publishing business, among other topics.

“I just keep learning,” Parker says. “And I think, every time I feel ill equipped, I just recommit to the idea of what books have meant to me since, well, my entire life, literally my entire life, and how I can help an author. … Every year we do this whistlestop of going to literary agents’ offices and just reminding them of the imprint and what we've published and who we're about to publish and the mission of our particular imprint. Because I think people have every right to assume those ideas — ‘dilettante,’ ‘not deserving’ or, like I said, ‘ill equipped.’ People have spent, you know, their whole lives in higher education, and then they come out and pursue this dream of being in publishing in a variety of jobs. And I didn't. And I was very concerned about perception, but also my own concerns for myself about taking care of a writer.”

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21st Century Books Special Edition: Min Jin Lee on 'Pachinko'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 14:16:24 +0000

As part of its recent "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Min Jin Lee joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss her novel, as well as the book she's read the most times — George Eliot's "Middlemarch."

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Book Club: Let's Talk About "The Talented Mr. Ripley," by Patricia Highsmith

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 16:54:28 +0000

Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley” follows a young, down-on-his-luck scammer, Tom Ripley, who is looking to reverse his fortunes. When he receives a job offer to go to Italy and retrieve Dickie Greenleaf, a rich socialite on an endless holiday, Tom finds the perfect opportunity to work his way into the upper crust. But as he becomes more and more obsessed with Dickie and Dickie’s life, the breezy getaway turns into something much more sinister, sending them down a dangerous path.

In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Tina Jordan, Sadie Stein and Sarah Lyall, our thrillers columnist. Caution: Spoilers abound.

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21st Century Books Special Edition: Colson Whitehead on 'The Underground Railroad'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 16:39:47 +0000

As part of its recent "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss his 2016 novel.

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What It's Like to Write a King Arthur Tale

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 17:26:17 +0000

Lev Grossman, author of fantasy novel "The Magicians" and its two sequels, joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about writing his version of Camelot in "The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur."

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The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 17:39:37 +0000

This week The New York Times Book Review rolled out the results of an ambitious survey it conducted to determine the best books of the 21st century so far. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz chats with fellow editors Tina Jordan, Scott Heller and Joumana Khatib about the results of that survey and about the project itself, including the willingness of some participants to let us share their ballots with the public.

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Book Club: 'Headshot,' by Rita Bullwinkel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 17:32:47 +0000

Rita Bullwinkel’s impressive debut novel, “Headshot,” follows eight teenagers fighting in the Daughters of America Cup, a youth women’s boxing tournament staged in a dilapidated gym in Reno. Each chapter details a match between fighters, bout after bout, until finally a champion is declared.

We are thrown into the high-octane theater of each fight, as the boxers work to defeat their opponents. But we also explore each girl’s life, with flashes into the past and the future and into the girls’ minds as they reckon with their intense desires to make something of themselves.

In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Lauren Christensen. Caution: Spoilers abound.

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Griffin Dunne on His Joyful and Tragic Family Memoir

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 17:28:32 +0000

Every family has its stories, and every family has its drama — and some families, like the one the actor and director Griffin Dunne was born into, have an excess of both. His uncle was the writer John Gregory Dunne, his aunt was Joan Didion and his father was Dominick Dunne, who became famous for his Vanity Fair dispatches from the trial of the man who killed his daughter (and Griffin’s sister) Dominique.

On this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, Dunne talks about his book, “The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir.” Of waiting to write it until his father, uncle and aunt had died, Dunne said he needed the distance: “I had the perspective on just how remarkable those three were as writers, what an influence they had on my life.”

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10 Books to Check Out This Summer

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 18:46:48 +0000

Summer is upon us and you're going to need a few books to read. Book Review editors Elisabeth Egan and Joumana Khatib join host Gilbert Cruz to talk through a few titles they're looking forward to over the next several months.

Books discussed in this episode:

"Farewell, Amethystine," by Walter Mosley

"The Cliffs," by J. Courtney Sullivan

"Horror Movie," by Paul Tremblay

"Liars," by Sarah Manguso

"The God of the Woods," by Liz Moore

"The Bright Sword," by Lev Grossman

"Pearl," by Sian Hughes

"Sandwich," by Catherine Newman

"The Future Was Now," by Christopher Nashawaty

"An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work," by Charlotte Shane

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Elin Hilderbrand on Her Final Nantucket Summer Book

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Jun 2024 19:10:03 +0000

For many years now, Elin Hilderbrand has published a novel every summer set on the island of Nantucket. With her 30th book, 'Swan Song,' the bestselling author says she will step off that hamster wheel and try something new.

On this week's episode, she and host Gilbert Cruz talk about her career, what she's reading, and what's next.

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Let's Talk About Percival Everett's 'James'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 31 May 2024 19:01:58 +0000

In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Gregory Cowles. Caution: Spoilers abound.

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Writing About NASA's Most Shocking Moment

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 May 2024 20:10:48 +0000

The year 1986 was notable for two big disasters, both of them attributable to human error and bureaucratic negligence at competing super powers: the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in the United States.

The journalist Adam Higginbotham wrote about Chernobyl in his 2019 book, “Midnight in Chernobyl.” Now he’s back, with a look at the American side of the ledger, in his new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space.” On this week’s episode, Higginbotham tells host Gilbert Cruz why he was drawn to both disasters, and what the Challenger explosion revealed about weaknesses in America’s space program.

“There was certainly a lot of hubris and complacency that led into this accident,” Higginbotham says. “In complex decision-making processes like those leading to the Chernobyl accident and the Challenger disaster, those concerned with making the decisions start off with a series of extremely carefully governed and defined practices for what constitutes acceptable risk and normal behavior. And then gradually over time, they subtly and almost unconsciously expand what they deem to be acceptable without even realizing it."

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Fantasy Superstar Leigh Bardugo on Her New Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 May 2024 20:28:52 +0000

In the world of fantasy fiction, Leigh Bardugo is royalty: Her Grishaverse novels are mainstays on the young adult best-seller list, her “Shadow and Bone” trilogy has been adapted for a Netflix series and her adult novels “Ninth House” and “Hell Bent” established her as a force to reckon with in the subgenre known as dark academia.

Now Bardugo is back with a new fantasy novel, “The Familiar,” and it’s also her first work of historical fiction: Set during the Inquisition in 16th-century Spain, it deals with literal royalty (King Philip II of Spain) through the story of a young scullery maid who happens to possess some magical abilities. This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks with Bardugo about her career, her writing process and her decision to write a historical novel

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Colm Toibin on His Sequel to 'Brooklyn'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 May 2024 19:24:27 +0000

Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel “Brooklyn” told the story of a meek young Irishwoman, Eilis Lacey, who emigrates to New York in the 1950s out of a sense of familial obligation and slowly, diligently begins building a new life for herself. A New York Times best seller, the book was also adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Saoirse Ronan — and now, 15 years after its publication, Tóibín has surprised himself by writing a sequel.

“Long Island,” his new novel, finds Eilis relocated to the suburbs and, in the opening scene, confronting a sudden crisis in her marriage. On this week’s podcast, Tóibín talks to Sarah Lyall about the book and how he came to write it.

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Book Club: Dolly Alderton's 'Good Material'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 19:52:15 +0000

“Good Material” tells the story of a down-on-his-luck stand-up comic dealing with a broken heart, and it has won Alderton enthusiastic fans in America. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Emily Eakin and Leah Greenblatt.

Caution: Spoilers abound!

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100 Years of Simon & Schuster

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:40:01 +0000

Simon & Schuster is not growing old quietly.

The venerable publishing house — one of the industry’s so-called Big 5 — is celebrating its 100th birthday this month after a period of tumult that saw it put up for sale by its previous owner, pursued by its rival Penguin Random House in an acquisition bid that fell apart after the Justice Department won an antitrust suit, then bought for $1.62 billion last fall by the private equity firm KKR.

With conditions seemingly stabilized since then, the company is turning 100 at an auspicious time to celebrate its roots and look to its future. On this week’s episode, Gilbert is joined by Simon & Schuster’s publisher and chief executive, Jonathan Karp, to talk about the centennial and what it means.

“It was a startup 100 years ago,” Karp says. “It was two guys in their 20s. Richard Simon and Max Schuster. They were just a couple of guys who loved books. And they made a decision that they wanted to read every book they published. … The first book was a crossword puzzle book. It was a monster success. They’d actually raised $50,000 from their friends and family. They didn’t need it. They returned the money. And the company was up and running.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Looking Back at 50 Years of Stephen King

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Apr 2024 20:56:21 +0000

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie.” In the decades since, King has experimented with length, genre and style, but has always maintained his position as one of America’s most famous writers.

On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks to the novelist Grady Hendrix, who read and re-read many of King’s books over several years, writing an essay on each as well as King superfan Damon Lindelof, the TV showrunner behind shows such as “Lost” and “The Leftovers.”

Some of the books discussed in this episode: "Carrie," "Cujo," "Duma Key," "From a Buick 8," "The Tommyknockers," "The Stand," and "The Long Walk."

Some of the articles referenced:

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Books That Make Our Critics Laugh

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 17:04:13 +0000

Earlier this month, the Book Review’s staff critics — Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai — released a list of 22 novels they have found reliably funny since Joseph Heller’s landmark comic novel “Catch-22” came out in 1961. On this week’s episode, they tell Gilbert Cruz why “Catch-22” was their starting point, and explain a bit about their process: how they think about humor, how they made their choices, what books they left off and what books led to fights along the way. (“American Psycho” turns out to be as contentious now as it was when it was first published.)

“There are only a very few number of books in my lifetime that have made me laugh out loud,” Jacobs says. “And some of them no longer make me laugh out loud, because the thing about humor is it’s like this giant shifting cloud, this shape-shifting thing that changes over the course of our lives and also the life of the culture.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Talking to Tana French About Her New Series

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 13:07:08 +0000

If you're familiar with Tana French, it's likely for her Dublin Murder Squad series of crime novels that kicked off in 2007 with "In the Woods." But her new book, "The Hunter," a sequel to 2020's "The Searcher," takes place outside of that series.

In this episode of the podcast, speaking to Sarah Lyall about her shift to new characters, French said, "I wasn't comfortable with sticking to the detective's perspective anymore. I think from the perspective of a detective, a murder investigation is a very specific thing. It's a source of power and control. It's a way that you can retrieve order after the disruption that murder has caused. But I kept thinking there are so many other perspectives within that investigation for whom this investigation is not a source of power or control or truth and justice. It's the opposite. It's something that just barrels into your life and upends it and can cause permanent damage."

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Talking ‘Dune’: Book and Movies

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 17:45:43 +0000

Frank Herbert’s epic novel “Dune” and its successors have been entrenched in the science fiction and fantasy canon for almost six decades, a rite of passage for proudly nerdy readers across the generations. But “Dune” is experiencing a broader cultural resurgence at the moment thanks to Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptations starring Timothée Chalamet. (Part 2 is in theaters now.)

This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks to The Times’s critic Alissa Wilkinson, who covers movies, culture and religion, about Herbert’s novel, Villeneuve’s films and the enduring hold of Fremen lore on the audience’s imagination.

“There’s a couple things that I think are really unsettling in ‘Dune,’” Wilkinson says. “One is, the vision of Frank Herbert was, I believe, to basically write a book that questioned authoritarians and hero mythology genuinely, across the board. Any kind of a hero figure he is proposing will always have things and people come up alongside that hero figure that distort their influence. Even if they intend well, if they’re benevolent, there’s still all of this really awful stuff that comes along with it. So Paul is a messiah figure — we believe he wants good things for most of the book — and then he turns on a dime or it feels like he might be turning on a dime. You can never quite tell where anyone stands in this book. And I think that is unsettling, especially because so many of the other kinds of things that we watch — the superhero movies, “Star Wars,” whatever — there’s a clear-cut good and evil fight going on. Good and evil don’t really exist in ‘Dune.’”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘Erasure,’ by Percival Everett

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Mar 2024 18:37:52 +0000

It’s not often that the Academy Awards give the publishing world any gristle to chew on. But at this year’s Oscars ceremony — taking place on Sunday evening — one of the Best Picture contenders is all about book publishing: Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” is adapted from the 2001 novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, and it amounts to a scathing, satirical indictment of publishers, readers and the insidious biases that the marketplace can impose in determining who tells what stories.

Obviously, we recommend the movie. But even more, we recommend Everett’s novel. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib, also from the Book Review, and Reggie Ugwu, a pop culture reporter at The Times. Caution: Spoilers abound for both the book and the movie.

Have you read “Erasure” or seen “American Fiction,” or both? We’d love to know what you thought. Share your reactions in the comments and we’ll try to join the conversation.

We’ll get you started:

Joumana Khatib: “I’d read Percival Everett before. I love watching his mind on the page. He’s funny, he's irreverent, he’s sarcastic. There’s nobody that writes like him. And I have to tell you that ‘Erasure’ totally blew me away, just because of the sheer number of textures in this book. … It’s obviously a parodical novel. It’s obviously unbelievably satirical and it’s just outrageous enough that it keeps the momentum without feeling schlocky or shticky.” …

Reggie Ugwu: “He has a great sense of pace, like he never wastes time. … You can tell that it’s the work of a very sophisticated and mature writer who knows exactly what to leave on the page and exactly what he can cut. There are some moments where I marveled when he would just leap the plot forward in a few lines.”

Send your feedback about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general, to books@nytimes.com.

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Tommy Orange on His "There There" Sequel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Mar 2024 19:01:56 +0000

Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “There There” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018 — centered on a group of characters who all converge on an Indigenous powwow in modern-day Oakland, Calif. His follow-up, “Wandering Stars,” is both a prequel and a sequel to that book, focusing specifically on the character Orvil Red Feather and tracing several generations of his family through the decades before and after the events of “There There.”

This week, Orange visits the podcast to discuss “Wandering Stars” as well as the book he has read most in his life, Clarice Lispector's "The Hour of the Star."

Orange explained how he decided to write a historical novel while sticking with the characters and story line from his earlier book.

“I got drawn in by this part of history because it was so specific to my tribe,” Orange says. “I don’t necessarily love reading historical fiction, but if it’s driven from the interior and it’s character driven, it’s compelling to me. So figuring out the types of humans they might have been or things they might have thought or felt, that was a way for me to try to figure out how to make them real. and that’s sometimes on a sentence level and sometimes on a, like, what are their motivations or what are they doing in their day-to-day lives? What do they want?”

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The Rise and Fall of The Village Voice

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 17:36:45 +0000

Tricia Romano’s new book, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” is an oral history of New York’s late, great alternative weekly newspaper The Village Voice, where she worked for eight years as the nightlife columnist. Our critic Dwight Garner reviewed the book recently — he loved it — and he visits the podcast this week to chat with Gilbert Cruz about oral histories in general and the gritty glamour of The Village Voice in particular.

“You would pick it up and it was so prickly,” Garner says. “The whole thing just felt like this production that someone had really thought through, from the great cartoons to the great photographs to the crazy hard news in the front to the different voices in back. It all came together into a package. And there are still great writers out there, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore. No one has really taken over, to my point of view. ... There’s no one-stop shopping to find the great listings at every club and every major theater, just a great rundown of what one might be interested in doing.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Let's Talk About 'Demon Copperhead'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 20:01:20 +0000

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “Demon Copperhead,” a riff on “David Copperfield” that moves Charles Dickens’s story to contemporary Appalachia and grapples engagingly with topics from poverty to ambition to opioid addiction, was one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2022. And — unlike an actual copperhead — “Demon Copperhead” has legs: Many readers have told us it was their favorite book in 2023 as well.

In this week’s spoiler-filled episode, MJ Franklin talks with Elisabeth Egan (an editor at the Book Review) and Anna Dubenko, the Times’s newsroom audience director, about their reactions to Kingsolver’s novel and why it has exerted such a lasting appeal.

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4 Early-Year Book Recommendations

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Feb 2024 17:36:26 +0000

The early part of a year can mean new books to read, or it can mean catching up on older ones we haven’t gotten to yet. This week, Gilbert Cruz chats with the Book Review’s Sarah Lyall and Sadie Stein about titles from both categories that have held their interest lately, including a 2022 biography of John Donne, a book about female artists who nurtured an interest in the supernatural, and the history of a Jim Crow-era mental asylum, along with a gripping new novel by Janice Hallett.

“It’s just so deft,” Stein says of Hallett’s new thriller, “The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels.” “It’s so funny. It seems like she’s having a lot of fun. One thing I would say, and I don’t think this is spoiling it, is, if there comes a moment when you think you might want to stop, keep going and trust her. I think it’s rare to be able to say that with that level of confidence.”

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” by Katherine Rundell

“The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World,” by Jennifer Higgie

“The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels,” by Janice Hallett

“Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum,” by Antonia Hylton

(Briefly mentioned: "You Dreamed of Empires," by Álvaro Enrigue, "Beautyland," by Marie-Helene Bertino, and "Martyr!" by Kaveh Akbar.)

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'Killers of the Flower Moon': Book and Movie Discussion

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Feb 2024 17:56:55 +0000

Former New York Times film critic A.O. Scott joins to talk both David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon," which continues to sit near the top of the bestseller list, and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated film adaptation.

Spoilers abound for both versions. (Also, for history.)

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Talking the Joys and Rules of Open Marriage

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 18:04:25 +0000

Molly Roden Winter and her husband, Stewart, have been married for 24 years. But since 2008, by mutual agreement, they have also dated other people — an arrangement that Winter details in her new memoir, “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage.”

In this week’s episode, The Times’s Sarah Lyall chats with Winter about her book, her marriage and why she decided to go public.

“I didn’t see any representations of either people who were still successfully married after having opened it up or people who were honest about how hard it was,” Winter says. “The stories that were coming out were either, ‘Oh, we tried it. It didn’t work,’ or ‘We’re born polyamorous and it’s just the best and I just feel love pouring out of me 24/7.’ Neither of those things was true for me. I felt like I had learned something really profound through this journey of opening my marriage, and I wanted to share it."

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Our Early 2024 Book Preview

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 18:08:46 +0000

It's gonna be a busy spring! On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Tina Jordan and Joumana Khatib about some of the upcoming books they’re anticipating most keenly over the next several months.

Books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Knife,” by Salman Rushdie

“James,” by Percival Everett

“The Book of Love,” by Kelly Link

“Martyr,” by Kaveh Akbar

“The Demon of Unrest,” by Erik Larson

“The Hunter,” by Tana French

“Wandering Stars,” by Tommy Orange

“Anita de Monte Laughs Last,” by Xochitl Gonzalez

“Splinters,” by Leslie Jamison

“Neighbors and Other Stories,” by Diane Oliver

“Funny Story,” by Emily Henry

“Table for Two,” by Amor Towles

“Grief Is for People,” by Sloane Crosley

“One Way Back: A Memoir,” by Christine Blasey Ford

“The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir,” by RuPaul

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Steven Soderbergh on His Year in Reading

books@nytimes.com (Hosted by Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 17:34:17 +0000

Every January on his website Extension765.com, the prolific director Steven Soderbergh looks back at the previous year and posts a day-by-day account of every movie and TV series watched, every play attended and every book read. In 2023, Soderbergh tackled more than 80 (!) books, and on this week's episode, he and the host Gilbert Cruz talk about some of his highlights.

Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode:

"How to Live: A Life of Montaigne," by Sarah Bakewell

"Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining,'" by Lee Unkrich and J.W. Rinzler

"Cocktails with George and Martha," by Philip Gefter

The work of Donald E. Westlake

"Americanah," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Pictures From an Institution," by Randall Jarrell

"Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," by Robert M. Sapolsky

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Book Club: 'The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 14:14:12 +0000

James McBride’s novel “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” was one of the most celebrated books of 2023 — a critical darling and a New York Times best seller. In their piece for the Book Review, Danez Smith called it “a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel” and praised its “precision, magnitude and necessary messiness.”

On this week’s episode, the Book Review editors MJ Franklin, Joumana Khatib and Elisabeth Egan convene for a discussion about the book, McBride, and what you might want to read next.

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How to Tell the Story of a Giant Wildfire

books@nytimes.com (Hosted by Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 18:53:44 +0000

John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” takes readers to the petroleum boomtown of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in May 2016, when a wildfire that started in the surrounding boreal forest grew faster than expected and tore through the city, destroying entire neighborhoods in a rampage that lasted for days.

On this week’s episode, Vaillant (whose book was one of our 10 Best for 2023) calls it a “bellwether,” and tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he decided to put the fire itself at the center of his story rather than choosing a human character to lead his audience through the narrative.

“It was a bit of a leap," he says. "It was a risk. But it also felt like, given the role that fire is increasingly playing in our world now, it really deserved to be focused on, on its own merit, from its own point of view, if you will.”

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Our Critics' Year in Reading

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Dec 2023 19:11:02 +0000

The Times’s staff book critics — Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — do a lot of reading over the course of any given year, but not everything they read stays with them equally. On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz chats with the critics about the books that did: the novels and story collections and works of nonfiction that made an impression in 2023 and defined their year in reading, including one that Garner says caught him by surprise.

“Eleanor Catton’s ‘Birnam Wood’ is in some ways my novel of the year,” Garner says. “And it’s not really my kind of book. This is going to sound stupid or snobby, but I’m not the biggest plot reader. I’m just not. I like sort of thorny, funny, earthy fiction, and if there’s no plot I’m fine with that. But this has a plot like a dream. It just takes right off. And she’s such a funny, generous writer that I was just happy from the first time I picked it up.”

Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode:

“Be Mine,” by Richard Ford

“Onlookers,” by Ann Beattie

“I Am Homeless if This Ia Not My Home,” by Lorrie Moore

“People Collide,” by Isle McElroy

“Birnam Wood,” by Eleanor Catton

“Biography of X,” by Catherine Lacey

“Madonna: A Rebel Life,” by Mary Gabriel

“The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune,” by Alexander Stille

“The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions,” by Jonathan Rosen

“Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State,” by Kerry Howley

“The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight,” by Andrew Leland

“Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets,” by Burkhard Bilger

“King: A Life,” Jonathan Eig

“Larry McMurtry: A Life,” Tracy Daugherty

“Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey,” by Robert “Mack” McCormick

“Roald Dahl, Teller of the Unexpected: A Biography,” by Matthew Dennison

“The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” by William Egginton

“Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” by Naomi Klein

“The Notebooks and Diaries of Edmund Wilson”

“Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair,” by Christian Wiman

“Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” by Oliver Burkeman

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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10 Best Books of 2023

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 15:39:34 +0000

It’s that time of year: After months of reading, arguing and (sometimes) happily agreeing, the Book Review’s editors have come up with their picks for the 10 Best Books of 2023. On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz reveals the chosen titles — five fiction, five nonfiction — and talks with some of the editors who participated in the process.

Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode:

“The Bee Sting,” by Paul Murray

“Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

“Eastbound,” by Maylis de Kerangal

“The Fraud,” by Zadie Smith

“North Woods,” by Daniel Mason

“The Best Minds,” by Jonathan Rosen

“Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” by Kerry Howley

“Fire Weather,” by John Vaillant

“Master Slave Husband Wife,” by Ilyon Woo

“Some People Need Killing,” by Patricia Evangelista

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Talking Barbra Streisand and Rebecca Yarros

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 17:55:05 +0000

Book Review reporter Alexandra Alter discusses two of her recent pieces. The first is about Georgette Heyer, the "queen of Regency romance," and recent attempts to posthumously revise one of her most famous works in order to remove stereotypical language. The second looks at Rebecca Yarros, author of one of this year's most surprising and persistent bestsellers: the "romantasy" novel "Fourth Wing."

Then, staff critic Alexandra Jacobs joins Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz to discuss her review of Barbra Streisand's epic memoir, "My Name is Barbra."

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Why is Shakespeare's First Folio So Important?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Nov 2023 13:55:00 +0000

In 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare died, two of his friends and fellow actors led an effort to publish a single volume containing 36 of the plays he had written, half of which had never been officially published before. Now known as the First Folio, that volume has become a lodestone of Shakespeare scholarship over the centuries, offering the most definitive versions of his work along with clues to his process and plenty of disputes about authorship and intention.

In honor of its 400th anniversary, the British Library recently released a facsimile version of the First Folio. On this week’s episode, The Times’s critic at large Sarah Lyall talks with Adrian Edwards, head of the library’s Printed Heritage Collections, about Shakespeare’s work, the library’s holdings and the cultural significance of that original volume.

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Happy Halloween: Scary Book Recommendations

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 14:21:51 +0000

You don’t need Halloween to justify reading scary books, any more than you need sand to justify reading a beach novel. But the holiday does give editors here a handy excuse to talk about some of their favorite spooky reads. On this week’s episode, the host Gilbert Cruz talks with his colleagues Tina Jordan and Sadie Stein about the enduring appeal of ghost stories, Gothic novels and other scary books.

Titles discussed:

“Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death,” by Deborah Blum

“Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by Ray Bradbury

“Rebecca,” by Daphne du Maurier

“Don’t Look Now: And Other Stories,” by Daphne du Maurier

“The Exorcist,” by William Peter Blatty

“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” by Alvin Schwartz

“Ghosts,” by Edith Wharton

“Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of Ghost Stories,” by various

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” by M.R. James

“The Hunger,” by Alma Katsu

“The Terror,” by Dan Simmons

“The Little Stranger,” by Sarah Waters

“Affinity,” by Sarah Waters

“The Paying Guests,” by Sarah Waters

“The Haunting of Hill House,” by Shirley Jackson

“Hell House,” by Richard Matheson

“House of Leaves,” by Mark Z. Danielewski

“A Haunting on the Hill,” by Elizabeth Hand

“The Virago Book of Ghost Stories,” edited by Richard Dalby

“The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James

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How Did Marvel Become the Biggest Name in Movies?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 16:10:40 +0000

In 2008 — the same year that Robert Downey Jr. appeared in the action comedy “Tropic Thunder,” for which he would earn his second Oscar nomination — he also appeared as the billionaire inventor and unlikely superhero Tony Stark in “Iron Man,” the debut feature from the upstart Marvel Studios.

Downey lost the Oscar (to Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”), but Marvel won the day. In the 15 years since “Iron Man” came out, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has expanded to 32 films that have earned a staggering $26 billion and changed the world of moviemaking for a generation.

In a new book, “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” the writers Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards explore the company’s scrappy beginnings, phenomenal success and uncertain hold on the future, with lots of dish along the way.

On this week’s episode, Gonzales and Robinson join the host Gilbert Cruz to talk all things Marvel.

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What Big Books Have Yet to Come Out in 2023?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 17:14:20 +0000

On this week’s episode, a look at the rest of the year in books — new fiction from Alice McDermott and this year’s Nobel laureate, Jon Fosse, a journalist’s investigation of state-sanctioned killings in the Philippines, and a trio of celebrity memoirs.

Discussed in this week’s episode:

“The Vulnerables,” by Sigrid Nunez

“Day,” by Michael Cunningham

“Absolution,” by Alice McDermott

“A Shining,” by Jon Fosse

“Romney: A Reckoniung,” by McKay Coppins

“Class,” by Stephanie Land

“Some People Need Killing,” by Patricia Evangelista

“The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” by Tim Alberta

“My Name is Barbra,” by Barbra Streisand

“The Woman in Me,” by Britney Spears

“Worthy,” by Jada Pinkett Smith

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What It's Like to Write a Madonna Biography

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Oct 2023 15:58:59 +0000

Madonna released her first single in 1982, and in one guise or another she has been with us ever since — ubiquitous but also astonishing, when you consider the usual fleeting arc of pop stardom. How has she done it, and how have her various personae shaped or reflected the culture she inhabits? These are among the questions the renowned biographer Mary Gabriel takes up in her latest book, “Madonna: A Rebel Life,” which casts new light on its subject’s life and career.

On this week’s episode, the host Gilbert Cruz chats with Gabriel about all things Madonna, and revisits the context of the 1980s’ music industry that she conquered.

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Audiobooks are the Best

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 18:12:58 +0000

You love books. You love podcasts. Ergo, we assume you love audiobooks the way we do — we hope you do, anyway, because this week we’ve devoted our entire episode to the form, as Gilbert Cruz is joined by a couple of editors from the Book Review, Lauren Christensen and Tina Jordan, to discuss everything from favorite narrators to regional accents to the ideal listening speed and the way audiobooks have to compete with other kinds of media.

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Zadie Smith on Her New Historical Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 16:45:18 +0000

Zadie Smith’s new novel, “The Fraud,” is set in 19th-century England, and introduces a teeming cast of characters at the periphery of a trial in which the central figure claimed to be a long-lost nobleman entitled to a fortune. Smith discusses her new novel with Sarah Lyall.

Also on this week’s episode, the Times reporters Alexandra Alter and Julia Jacobs discuss a recent controversy involving the National Book Awards and their decision to drop Drew Barrymore as this year’s master of ceremonies in solidarity with the Hollywood writers’ strike.

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Elon Musk's Biography and Profiling Naomi Klein

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 18:40:48 +0000

Elon Musk, the billionaire South Africa-born entrepreneur whose business interests include the electric car company Tesla, the private rocket company SpaceX and the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), is the richest person in the world — and the subject of an expansive new biography by Walter Isaacson, whose earlier subjects famously include the Apple founder Steve Jobs. Our critic Jennifer Szalai discusses her review of the Musk biography.

Szalai also discusses her recent Times Magazine profile of the writer and activist Naomi Klein, whose new book, “Doppelganger,” examines the “mirror world” of online conspiracy theories and paranoia and its effect on real-world politics.

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Talking to Stephen King and September Books to Check Out

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Sep 2023 19:22:41 +0000

Stephen King’s new novel, “Holly,” is his sixth book to feature the private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her debut as a mousy side character in the 2014 novel “Mr. Mercedes” and has become more complicated and interesting with each subsequent appearance. King appears on the podcast this week to tell the host Gilbert Cruz about Holly’s hold on his imagination and the ways she overlaps with parts of his own personality. Along the way, he also tells a dad joke, remembers his friend Peter Straub, and discusses his views on writing and life.

Also on this episode, Cruz talks with Joumana Khatib about some of the month’s most anticipated new titles. Here are the books discussed in this week’s September preview:

“The Fraud,” by Zadie Smith

“Elon Musk,” by Walter Isaacson

“The Iliad,” by Homer. Translated by Emily Wilson

“Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier,” by Marisa Meltzer

“Land of Milk and Honey,” by C. Pam Zhang

“American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15,” by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson

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Amor Towles Sees Dead People

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 17:51:51 +0000

The novelist Amor Towles, whose best-selling books include “Rules of Civility,” “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway,” contributed an essay to the Book Review recently in which he discussed the evolving role the cadaver has played in detective fiction and what it says about the genre’s writers and readers.

Towles visits the podcast this week to chat with the host Gilbert Cruz about that essay, as well as his path to becoming a novelist after an early career in finance.

Also on this week’s episode, Sarah Lyall, a writer at large for The Times, interviews the actor Richard E. Grant about his new memoir, “A Pocketful of Happiness,” and about his abiding love for the book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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What to Read in August

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 17:04:52 +0000

Sarah Lyall discusses a new thriller in which a scuba diver gets swallowed by a sperm whale and Joumana Khatib gives recommendations for five August titles.

Books discussed on this week's episode:

“Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World,” by Yepoka Yeebo

“The Bee Sting,” by Paul Murray

“The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times,” by Wolfram Eilenberger

“Pet,” by Catherine Chidgey

“Happiness Falls,” by Angie Kim

“Whalefall,” by Daniel Kraus

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Ann Patchett on Her Summery New Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Aug 2023 13:26:41 +0000

Ann Patchett returns to the podcast to talk about her new novel, "Tom Lake," waxes poetic on Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" (which plays a big part in her book), and talks about the joys of owning an independent bookstore.

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It's Getting Hot Out There

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 13:29:44 +0000

The author Jeff Goodell joins to talk about his book “The Heat Will Kill You First,” about the consequences of a warming planet. Times critic Jennifer Szalai also discusses three books about the natural world.

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Colson Whitehead and His Crime Novel Sequel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 15:06:11 +0000

Gilbert Cruz is joined by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, who talks about his novel "Crook Manifesto" and Harlem in the '70s. He also reflects on his famous post-9/11 essay about New York City.

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Great Books from The First Half of 2023

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 19:14:42 +0000

Gilbert Cruz is joined by fellow editors from the Book Review to revisit some of the most popular and most acclaimed books of 2023 to date. First up, Tina Jordan and Elisabeth Egan discuss the year’s biggest books, from “Spare” to “Birnam Wood.” Then Joumana Khatib, MJ Franklin and Sadie Stein recommend their personal favorites of the year so far.

Books discussed on this week’s episode:

“Spare,” by Prince Harry

“I Have Some Questions for You,” by Rebecca Makkai

“Pineapple Street,” by Jenny Jackson

“Romantic Comedy,” by Curtis Sittenfeld

“You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” by Maggie Smith

“The Wager,” by David Grann

“Master, Slave, Husband, Wife,” by Ilyon Woo

“King: A Life,” by Jonathan Eig

“Birnam Wood,” by Eleanor Catton

“Hello Beautiful,” by Ann Napolitano

“Enter Ghost,” by Isabella Hammad

“Y/N,” by Esther Yi

“The Sullivanians,” by Alexander Stille

“My Search for Warren Harding,” by Robert Plunket

“In Memoriam,” by Alice Winn

“Don’t Look at Me Like That,” by Diana Athill

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The Magic of Literary Translation and 'Bridget Jones' at 25

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Jul 2023 20:01:49 +0000

The editors of The Book Review talk about the nitty gritty of literary translation. And then, a conversation about the legacy of the novel “Bridget Jones’s Diary."

What makes translation an art? How does a translator’s personality affect their work? Why do we see so many translations from some countries and almost none from others? These are just some of the questions addressed in a recent translation issue of the Book Review, which Gilbert Cruz breaks down with the editors Juliana Barbassa and Gregory Cowles.

Also on this week’s episode, Elisabeth Egan and Tina Jordan discuss “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” published in the U.S. 25 years ago this summer. “I discovered, looking back at back into Bridget’s life on the eve of my 50th birthday, she was not as funny to me as she used to be,” says Egan, who wrote an essay about the novel called “Bridget Jones Deserved Better. We All Did.”

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Remembering Cormac McCarthy and Robert Gottlieb

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 22:03:54 +0000

Recently, two giants of modern American literature died within a single day of each other. Gilbert Cruz talks with Dwight Garner about the work of Cormac McCarthy’s work, and with Pamela Paul and Emily Eakin about the life and legacy of Robert Gottlieb.

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What It’s Like to Write an MLK Jr. Biography

books@nytimes.com (Jonathan Eig, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 17:41:15 +0000

Jonathan Eig’s book “King: A Life” is the first comprehensive biography in decades of Martin Luther King Jr., drawing on reams of interviews and newly uncovered archival materials to paint a fuller picture of the civil rights leader than we have received before. On this week’s podcast, Eig describes the process of researching and writing the book, and tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he tracked down resources that were unavailable to earlier biographers.

“I was a newspaper reporter for a long, long time — and you know, working on daily stories, if you got five days to work on a story, it was a luxury. Now I’ve got five, six years to work on a story, and I take full advantage of that," Eig says. "It took me two years to find, even though I knew it was out there, this unpublished autobiography that Martin Luther King’s father wrote. Nobody had ever quoted from it. ... Stuff like that just gets me really, really pumped up.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Summer Book Preview and 9 Thrillers to Read

books@nytimes.com (Sarah Lyall, Gilbert Cruz, Joumana Khatib) — Fri, 9 Jun 2023 19:49:36 +0000

There’s no rule that says you have to read thrillers in the summer — some people gobble them up them year round, while others avoid them entirely and read Kafka on the shore — but on a long, lazy vacation day it’s undeniably satisfying to grab onto a galloping narrative and see where it pulls you. This week, Gilbert Cruz talks to our thrillers columnist Sarah Lyall about some classics of the genre, as well as more recent titles she recommends.

Also on this week’s episode, Joumana Khatib offers a preview of some of the biggest books to watch for in the coming season.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Rebecca,” by Daphne du Maurier

“Presumed Innocent,” by Scott Turow

“The Secret History,” by Donna Tartt

“Going Zero,” by Anthony McCarten

“What Lies in the Woods,” by Kate Alice Marshall

“My Murder,” by Katie Williams

“The Quiet Tenant,” by Clémence Michallon

“All the Sinners Bleed,” by S.A. Cosby

“Crook Manifesto,” by Colson Whitehead

“Nothing Special,” by Nicole Flattery

“Daughter of the Dragon,” by Yunte Huang

“The Sullivanians,” by Aledxander Stille

“The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” by James McBride

“Silver Nitrate,” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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On Reading ‘Beloved’ Over and Over Again

books@nytimes.com (Salamishah Tillet, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 2 Jun 2023 17:18:40 +0000

For readers, a book’s meaning can change with every encounter, depending on the circumstances and experiences they bring to it each time. On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks to Salamishah Tillet, a Pulitzer-winning contributing critic at large for The Times, about her abiding love for Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved” — in which a mother chooses to kill her own daughter rather than let her live in slavery — and about the ways that Tillet’s personal experiences have affected her view of the book.

“I was sexually assaulted on a study abroad program in Kenya.” Tillet says. “And when I came back to the United States, I entered an experimental program that helped people who were sexual assault survivors, who were suffering from PTSD. Part of the process was like, you had to tell your story over and over again, because the idea was that the memory of the trauma is almost as visceral as the moment of the trauma. And so … looking at what Morrison does in her novel, she’s dealing with trauma and she’s moving, going back and forth in time. So I actually experienced this on a personal level.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Remembering Martin Amis

books@nytimes.com (Jason Zinoman, Dwight Garner, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 26 May 2023 17:29:09 +0000

The writer Martin Amis, who died last week at the age of 73, was a towering figure of English literature who for half a century produced a body of work distinguished by its raucous wit, cutting intelligence and virtuosic prose.

On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks with The Times’s critics Dwight Garner (who wrote Amis’s obituary for the paper) and Jason Zinoman (who co-hosts a podcast devoted to Amis’s career, “The Martin Chronicles”) about the life and death of a remarkable figure who was, as Garner puts it, “arguably the most slashing, articulate, devastatingly clear, pungent writer of the last 25 years of the past century and the first almost 25 of this century.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Essential Neil Gaiman and A.I. Book Freakout

books@nytimes.com (J.D. Biersdorfer, Dwight Garner, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 19 May 2023 19:43:02 +0000

Are you ready to dive in to the work of the prolific and inventive fantasy writer Neil Gaiman? On this week’s episode, the longtime Gaiman fan J.D. Biersdorfer, an editor at the Book Review, talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about Gaiman’s work, which she recently wrote about for our continuing “Essentials” series.

Also this week, Cruz talks with the Times critic Dwight Garner about “The Death of the Author,” a murder mystery that the novelist Stephen Marche wrote with the assistance of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs. Is A.I. in fact a harbinger of doom for creative writers?

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“American Gods,” by Neil Gaiman

“Good Omens,” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

“Stardust,” by Neil Gaiman

“Coraline,” by Neil Gaiman

“The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” by Neil Gaiman

“The Sandman,” by Neil Gaiman

“The Hyphenated Family,” by Hermann Hagedorn

“Monsters,” by Claire Dederer

“The Death of the Novel,” by Aidan Marchine

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Pulitzer Winners

books@nytimes.com (Hua Hsu, Hernan Diaz, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 12 May 2023 20:21:10 +0000

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, bestowing one of America’s most prestigious awards in journalism and the arts on writers across a range of categories. Among the winners were three authors who had also appeared on the Book Review’s list of the 10 Best Books of 2022: the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, for his memoir “Stay True,” and two novelists who (in a first for the Pulitzers) shared the prize in fiction, Barbara Kingsolver for “Demon Copperhead” and Hernan Diaz for “Trust.”

On this week’s episode, Hsu and Diaz chat with the host Gilbert Cruz about their books and what it’s like to win a Pulitzer.

“I wish I had a more articulate thing to say, but it was just truly weird,” Hsu tells Cruz about learning he was the inaugural winner in the memoir category. (Before this year, memoirs were judged alongside biographies.) “It was a thrill, but it was also just truly a weird out-of-body experience.”

For Diaz, the Pulitzer announcement came while he was at a fried chicken and waffle restaurant in South Carolina, where he was on tour to promote his book’s paperback release. “I totally lost it,” he says. “I had to go out and, I’m a little bit embarrassed to confess it but I was weeping sitting on the curb. And these three lovely older ladies come by and they ask me, Oh sweetheart, honey, are you OK? I’m not exactly sure what I said, but I shared the good news with them and suddenly all four of us were hugging in the middle of the street. So it was a good moment.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Book Bans and What to Read in May

Fri, 5 May 2023 18:44:39 +0000

Book-banning efforts remain one of the biggest stories in the publishing industry, and on this week’s episode of the podcast, our publishing reporters Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris chat with the host Gilbert Cruz about the current state of such attempted bans and how they differ from similar efforts in the past.

“It is amazing to see both the upward trend in book bans but also the ways that the process of getting bans has evolved,” Alter says. “This has happened really quickly. … We’ve seen a lot of the book bans that have taken place in the last couple of years coming from either organized groups or from new legislation, which is a big shift from what librarians had tracked in the past, where they would see usually just a couple hundred attempts to ban books each year. And most of those were from concerned parents who had seen what their kid was reading in class or what their kid brought home from the public library. And usually those disputes were resolved quietly. Now you have people standing up in school board meetings reading explicit passages aloud.”

Also on this week’s episode, Joumana Khatib takes a look at some of the biggest new books to watch for this month.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

“King: A Life,” by Jonathan Eig

“Quietly Hostile,” by Samantha Irby

“Yellowface,” by R.F. Kuang

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Eleanor Catton on ‘Birnam Wood’

books@nytimes.com (Eleanor Catton, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 20:03:51 +0000

Eleanor Catton’s new novel, “Birnam Wood,” is a rollicking eco-thriller that juggles a lot of heady themes with a big plot and a heedless sense of play — no surprise, really, from a writer who won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for her previous novel, “The Luminaries,” and promptly established herself as a leading light in New Zealand’s literary community.

On this week’s podcast, Catton tells the host Gilbert Cruz how that early success affected her writing life (not much) as well as her life outside of writing (her marriage made local headlines, for one thing). She also discusses her aims for the new book and grapples with the slippery nature of New Zealand’s national identity.

“You very often hear New Zealanders defining their country in the negative rather than in the positive,” she says. “If you ask somebody about New Zealand culture, they’ll begin by describing something overseas and then they’ll just say, Oh, well, we’re just not like that. … I think that that’s solidified over time into this kind of very odd sense of supremacy, actually. It’s born out of an inferiority complex, but like many inferiority complexes, it manifests as a superiority complex.”

A word of warning, for listeners who care about plot spoilers: Toward the end of their conversation, Catton and Cruz talk about the novel’s climactic scene and some of the questions it raises. So if you’re a reader who prefers to be taken by surprise, you may want to finish “Birnam Wood” before you finish this episode.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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David Grann on the Wreck of the H.M.S. Wager

books@nytimes.com (David Grann, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 19:59:20 +0000

David Grann is one of the top narrative nonfiction writers at work today; a staff writer at The New Yorker, he has previously combined a flair for adventure writing with deep historical research in acclaimed books including “The Lost City of Z” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” His latest, “The Wager,” applies those talents to a seafaring tale of mutiny and murder, reconstructing the fate of a lost British man-of-war that foundered on an island off the coast of Patagonia in the 18th century. On this week’s podcast, Grann tells the host Gilbert Cruz that one of the things that most drew him to the subject was the role that storytelling itself played in the tragedy’s aftermath.

“The thing that really fascinated me, that really caused me to do the book,” Grann says, “was not only what happened on the island, but what happened after several of these survivors make it back to England. They have just waged a war against virtually every element, from scurvy to typhoons, to tidal waves, to shipwreck, to starvation, to the violence of their own shipmates. Now they get back to England after everything they’ve been through, and they are summoned to face a court marshal for their alleged crimes on the island. And if they don’t tell a convincing tale, they’re going to get hanged. I always think of that lovely line from Joan Didion, where she said we all tell ourselves stories in order to live — but in their case, it was quite literally true.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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The Enduring Appeal of Judy Blume and Gabriel García Márquez

books@nytimes.com (Elisabeth Egan, Miguel Salazar, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 19:48:40 +0000

It’s been more than 50 years since the publication of Judy Blume’s middle-grade novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” a coming-of-age tale that has become a classic for its frank discussion of everything from puberty to religious identity to life in the New Jersey suburbs. Despite its grip on generations of readers, though, the book has never been adapted for film — until now, in a screenplay written by the director Kelly Fremon Craig and opening for wide release on April 28. To mark the occasion, our editor Elisabeth Egan appears on this week’s podcast and talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about the novel’s importance to her own 1980s New Jersey girlhood.

“For me, Judy Blume was one of those writers — and I know that all readers have them — who just explained the world and talked about things that we did not talk about in my family,” Egan says. “I loved her constant theme of moving to New Jersey, as my family did when I was 6 years old. Most of all, I really loved her books for young adolescents, especially ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.’ It’s one of those books that I remember where I was sitting when I read it, and it kind of had a profound effect on my life.”

Also on this week’s episode, Miguel Salazar talks about the Nobel-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, and offers his list of essential books for readers who are eager to approach García Márquez’s work but unsure where to start.

“He is a mammoth figure, not just across Colombia but across Latin America. He was the face of the boom in literature in Latin America in the mid- and late 20th century,” Salazar says. “García Márquez still today remains today kind of the point of reference for American readers, and a lot of readers across Latin America, to understand their region. I think he’s most people’s first author when they turn to the region to understand it through literature.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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What We're Reading

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Apr 2023 16:18:42 +0000

As you might guess, the folks who work at the Book Review are always reading — and many of them like to juggle three or four books at once. In this episode, Gilbert Cruz talks to the editors Tina Jordan and Greg Cowles about what they’ve been reading and enjoying, and then, in honor of National Poetry Month, interviews Cowles — who, in addition to about a million other things, edits the Book Review's poetry coverage — about how he came to love it.

“I’ve always loved good sentences and surprising language,” Cowles says. “A novel has room — and is even required — to have some slack language in it. If every sentence was perfectly chiseled and honed and used surprising metaphors, you wouldn’t have the patience to stick with it. But poetry, because it’s so distilled, requires that; any slack language stands out and would ruin a poem.”

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Victor LaValle Talks About Horror and ‘Lone Women’

books@nytimes.com (Victor LaValle, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 21:10:35 +0000

After a spate of more or less contemporary horror novels set in and around New York, Victor LaValle’s latest book, “Lone Women,” opens in 1915 as its heroine, Adelaide Henry, is burning down her family’s Southern California farmhouse with her dead parents inside, then follows her to Montana, where she moves to become a homesteader with a mysteriously locked steamer trunk in tow.

“Nothing in this genre-melding book is as it seems,” Chanelle Benz writes in her review. “The combination of LaValle’s agile prose, the velocity of the narrative and the pleasure of upended expectations makes this book almost impossible to put down.”

LaValle visits the podcast this week to discuss “Lone Women,” and tells the host Gilbert Cruz that writing the novel required putting himself into a Western state of mind.

“There was the Cormac McCarthy kind of writing, which is more Southern," he says, “but certainly has that feeling of the mythic and the grand. But I also got into writers like Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner, even though that’s California: the feeling of the grand but also spare nature of the prose. So it was less about reading, say, the old Western writers — well, they were Western writers but not writing westerns, if that makes sense. And then, if I’m honest, I also was very steeped in, my uncle used to make me watch John Wayne films with him when I was a kid. And so I felt like that was another kind of well that I was dipping into, in part for what I might do but also what I might not do.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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What We're Reading

books@nytimes.com (Jennifer Szalai, Sadie Stein, Joumana Khatib, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:35:05 +0000

It should come as no surprise that writers and editors at the Book Review do a lot of outside reading — and, even among ourselves, we like to discuss the books that are on our minds. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks to the critic Jennifer Szalai and the editors Sadie Stein and Joumana Khatib about what they’ve been reading (and in some cases listening to) recently.

For Szalai, that includes a novel she’s revisiting some two decades after she first read it: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” which she’s listening to this time around as an audiobook. “It has been wonderful,” she says. “The narration is great and it’s told in the first person, which I think is actually an ideal feature — at least for me, when I’m listening to an audiobook. It feels a bit like a conversation or a story, a personal story, that’s being related to me. And it’s been so long since I read the book that there are certain details that I hadn’t remembered that keep coming up. And so it’s been a nice experience. I’m going through it slowly. I sort of listen to it in little snatches here and there.”

Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode:

“The Remains of the Day,” by Kazuo Ishiguro

“Look at Me,” by Anita Brookner

“The Pigeon Tunnel,” by John le Carré

“Run Towards the Danger,” by Sarah Polley

“The Color of Water,” by James McBride

“The Dirty Tricks Department,” by John Lisle

“Spare,” by Prince Harry

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Books About the Oscars

books@nytimes.com (Alexandra Jacobs, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 19:06:19 +0000

The 95th Academy Awards will be presented on Sunday evening in Hollywood, with top contenders including “Tár,” “Women Talking” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” For readers, it’s a perfect excuse to revisit two recent books about the Oscars.

On this week’s episode, the host Gilbert Cruz talks to our critic Alexandra Jacobs about “The Academy and the Award,” by Bruce Davis, a former executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and “Oscar Wars,” by the journalist Michael Schulman, which she recently wrote about for the paper.

“We like to think that this is a ceremony, a process about merit. But I think that has been proven wrong time and time again,” Cruz says.

“It’s like a political election,” Jacobs says, “or a sports contest that turns on a single play or call. These books really reveal that. It’s just interesting how many times Oscar — as one of these books puts it — gets it wrong. Like, the movie that won isn’t the one that you remember, or isn’t the one that time judges as the best one. That’s fascinating to see. … You might ask, What does this ceremony matter if it’s not even adjudicating properly? But I think it matters because — look, it’s the electronic hearth around which we gather. I think it matters because people crave communal entertainment experiences.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Revisiting 'Wisconsin Death Trip,' 50 Years Later

books@nytimes.com (Dwight Garner, Gilbert Cruz) — Fri, 3 Mar 2023 20:59:27 +0000

It's been 50 years since Michael Lesy's influential cult classic "Wisconsin Death Trip" was published. A documentary text of found material, the book gathered prosaic historical photos of Wisconsin residents from the turn of the 20th century and paired them to haunting effect with fragmentary newspaper archives from the same time period reporting on often garish deaths — what our critic Dwight Garner, evaluating the book for its anniversary, called "horrific local news items that point, page by page, toward spiritual catastrophe. Nearly every person in it looks as if they are about to be struck by lightning."

Garner appears on the podcast this week to talk with the host Gilbert Cruz about "Wisconsin Death Trip" and the resonance it still holds in the culture.

"It evokes what long nights felt like in America," he says, "before there was electricity and radio, and before — if your child was very sick, there were no antibiotics. And maybe your child was dying. And anxiety of course could not be treated then by antidepressants or other kinds of pills. And people quote-unquote went mad more often than we'd like to think. And there were bankruptcies, people threw themselves in front of trains. There are all kinds of suicides in this book. And it just makes you wonder what was happening, what kind of spiritual crisis was going on in Wisconsin in the 1890s."

Garner is a fan of unusual documentary literature, he tells Cruz, and in "Wisconsin Death Trip" he sees not only a portrait of a vanished small-town America but also a portrait of vanished journalism. "Newspapers in America have been gutted out," he says. "You don't have small-town papers like this in many places anymore that have real staffs who report on this stuff. There's a kind of reporting in this book that is sort of the 'crazy death' that we don't read about anymore: the person at the sawmill who gets tangled up. Maybe you'll read about it somewhere. But it was more of a staple of small-town news reporting then. Even papers like The New York Times did a lot of that ... But in general what Lesy is after is stuff that almost suggests, as I said before, a kind of spiritual crisis. So many people having breakdowns. And it just makes you realize that our nostalgia for the good old American heartland, there's a real dark shadow there. And in many ways it's false nostalgia. And this book is one of those correctives that puts you in touch with the night side of life in this way that few books of documentary that I've read actually do."

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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On Reading "A Wrinkle in Time"

books@nytimes.com (Gilbert Cruz, Sarah Lyall) — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 15:45:15 +0000

Some books find us at the right age and in the right frame of mind to lodge an enduring hold on our imagination; these are the books we turn to again and again, which become the cherished classics of our personal canon.

On this week's episode, the Book Review's thriller columnist and writer at large Sarah Lyall talks to the host Gilbert Cruz about Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel "A Wrinkle in Time," in which the protagonist and her younger brother set out to rescue their father from the supernatural embodiment of evil that is holding him captive. Lyall first read the book when she was 9 years old and returned to it repeatedly throughout her childhood.

"I used to write my name in it every time I read the book," Lyall says. "I probably had 10 signatures there. And I could watch my signature change, I could try new types of signature. I tried cursive and I tried capitals, and I put a little flourish next to it."

Lyall says that what first drew her to "A Wrinkle in Time" was the book's "fantastic heroine," Meg: "She's really smart, but sort of unkempt. She has messy hair, she has glasses, she has braces, people think she's weird. ... But what really happens in the book that I think resonated with me, that I realize now, is that it's a book about two children who've lost their father. And I read the book quite soon after my father died. He died when I was 8. And it was a really lost time. And I think what mostly appealed to me about the book was the notion that you actually could get your father back. And that you as the girl, as the girl who felt so clueless, actually had means within yourself to pull yourself together and be brave enough to do it."

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Public Libraries, and Profiling Paul Harding

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 17:29:37 +0000

At a time when public libraries and librarians are facing budget headwinds and sometimes intense political scrutiny for the roles they play in their communities, the Times photo editor Erica Ackerberg last fall dispatched photographers to seven libraries in cities, suburbs and rural areas across the country to document what daily life in those public institutions really looks like in today's world. The resulting photographs, published this week with an accompanying essay by the Book Review editor Elisabeth Egan, revealed libraries to be essential community centers and far more than the hushed and beloved book depositories you may remember from your childhood. On this week's podcast, Egan and Ackerberg talk to the host Gilbert Cruz about how their article came together, and what libraries mean in their lives and in society at large.

"Books are what draw you to the library, but there are so many other things happening there that have nothing to do with books," Egan says. "The modern library encompasses 20 other things based on the needs of its community. ... What the library needs shows you what the community it's in is all about."

Ackerberg says: "I was actually thinking about one of the libraries, the Northtown Library in Chicago — they call themselves an 'intergenerational community hub,' and I felt like that kind of sums up all these libraries. Every generation, and everybody from all communities are welcome there, and hang out there, and spend time there. It's a warm place to be."

Also this week, MJ Franklin, an editor at the Book Review, talks to Cruz about his recent profile of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Paul Harding, whose new book is "This Other Eden."

"What I was interested in was, What is Paul Harding up to now?" Franklin says. "What is his writing process? He has such a distinctive and singular voice, that I wanted to get closer to that."

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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"Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages"

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 20:41:50 +0000

Admit it: It's fun to look at other people's marriages — and all the more fun if those marriages are messy. In a new group biography, "Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages," the author Carmela Ciuraru peers into some relationships that are very messy indeed: the tumultuous marriages of Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy; Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal; Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard; Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge; and Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. As Ciuraru's title suggests, the book focuses especially on the role — and toll — of being a wife, stifling one's own creative impulses for the sake of a temperamental artist.

On this week's podcast, Sadie Stein — an editor at the Book Review, who commissioned the literary critic Hermione Hoby to write about Ciuraru's book for us — talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about "Lives of the Wives."

"They're all complicated people," Stein says. "I don't want to oversimplify it. Everyone knows you can't see inside anyone else's marriage. But these couples, you can see a little more. And in some cases, a little more than maybe you want to."

"It's a very gossipy book," Cruz says. "And I, to my own embarrassment, was not as up on 20th-century European literary gossip as maybe I should have been. So a lot of this stuff came as a total surprise, total shock to me. ... It's so juicy, but it also made me feel bad in a certain way."

And that, we can all agree, is good.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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A Look Ahead at the Season's Big Books

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Feb 2023 16:08:26 +0000

How do you define a "big book"? It might be a new offering from a beloved author or a deep dive into a timely subject or a story that has generated unusual enthusiasm among editors and other early readers: One way or another, these are the books that build "buzz" and create momentum in the weeks and months before their publication. On this week's podcast, the Book Review's editor, Gilbert Cruz, talks with Tina Jordan, the deputy editor, about the books they're most looking forward to this season, including new fiction from Salman Rushdie, Eleanor Catton and Victor LaValle, and nonfiction from Matthew Desmond, Claire Dederer and David Grann.

Among other things, Cruz and Jordan discuss cancel culture, spoilers from "Macbeth" and the concept of what's known in publishing circles as a "make book."

"A 'make book' is a book a publisher has usually, although not always, spent a great deal of money for and earmarked a lot of money for a marketing campaign," Jordan says. "In other words, they are going to get the news out about this book. You are going to hear about it."

The books discussed on this week's podcast are:

"Victory City," by Salman Rushdie

"Birnam Wood," by Eleanor Catton

"Pineapple Street," by Jenny Jackson

"Poverty by America," by Matthew Desmond

"Lone Women," by Victor LaValle

"Monsters," by Claire Dederer

"The Wager," by David Grann

"The Covenant of Water," by Abraham Verghese

"Oscar Wars," by Michael Schulman

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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The Critics’ Picks: A Year in Reading

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Dec 2022 19:55:26 +0000

Last week’s podcast featured members of The New York Times’s Books staff discussing the Book Review’s picks for the best books of 2022. The paper’s staff book critics participated in that selection process — but as readers inevitably do, they also cherished a more personal and idiosyncratic set of books, the ones that spoke to them on account of great characters or great writing, surprising information or heartfelt vulnerability or sheer entertainment value. On this week’s podcast, our critics Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs discuss the books that stayed with them throughout 2022.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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The 10 Best Books of 2022

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Dec 2022 21:48:30 +0000

Heads up! The Book Review podcast returns with a new episode this week, recorded Tuesday during a live event in which several of our editors and critics discussed the Book Review’s list of the year’s 10 Best Books. (If you haven’t seen the list yet and don’t want spoilers before listening, the choices are revealed one by one on the podcast.)

In addition to the 10 Best Books, the editors discuss on this episode some of their favorite works from the year that didn’t make the list. Here are those additional books the editors discuss:

The Passenger and Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

Avalon, by Nell Zink

If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Bringing Down Harvey Weinstein

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 02:26:41 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

In their best-selling book “She Said” — the basis for the Maria Schrader-directed film of the same title, currently in theaters — the Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey recount how they broke the Harvey Weinstein story, work that earned them the Pulitzer Prize, led to Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crimes and helped solidify #MeToo as an ongoing national movement.

When the book was published in 2019, Twohey and Kantor were guests on the podcast and discussed the difficulties they had faced in getting women to speak on the record about Weinstein’s predation. They also said that their coverage of workplace sexual harassment would not end with Weinstein: “Our attitude is that you can’t solve a problem you can’t see,” Kantor told the host Pamela Paul. “Megan and I can’t adjudicate all of the controversies around #MeToo, but what we can continue to do is bring information to light in a responsible way and uncover this secret history that so many of us are still trying to understand.”

Also this week, we revisit Neal Gabler’s 2020 podcast appearance, in which he talked about “Catching the Wind,” the first volume of his Ted Kennedy biography. (The second and concluding volume, “Against the Wind,” has just been published.) “I approached this book as a biography of Edward Kennedy, but also, equally, a biography of American liberalism,” he said at the time.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner Discusses “Fleishman Is in Trouble”

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 18:16:57 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2019 and 2017, respectively.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner's debut novel, “Fleishman Is in Trouble” — a best seller when it was published in 2019 — is back in the public eye, as the source material for Hulu’s new mini-series of the same name. The show, like the novel, follows a man’s life as his marriage of 14 years crumbles.

Brodesser-Akner visited the podcast when her book came out, and told the host Pamela Paul that her time writing celebrity profiles for The New York Times Magazine and other outlets had helped her investigate the psychologies of her fictional characters: “What all the profiles taught me about is not people who want to be known, but what people say when they want you to know a version of themselves that isn’t the truth,” she said. “It taught me a lot about how people talk about themselves, and about how deluded we all are.”

Also this week, we resurface Neil Gaiman’s 2017 podcast appearance, in which he talked about his book “Norse Mythology,” a reimagining of the traditional northern stories about Thor, Odin, Loki and company.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Mark Harris on His Biography of Mike Nichols

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 17:03:11 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2021 and 2019, respectively.

In his first two books, “Pictures at a Revolution” and “Five Came Back,” the entertainment journalist Mark Harris offered an ensemble look at Hollywood history, focusing first on five seminal movies and then on five wartime directors. But for his third book, in 2021, Harris trained his spotlight on a single individual: “Mike Nichols: A Life” is a biography of the renowned writer, director and performer whose many credits included “The Graduate” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“He was remarkably open,” Harris said of Nichols on the podcast last year. “There are few bigger success stories for a director to look back on than ‘The Graduate,’ and I was asking Mike about it 40 years and probably 40,000 questions after it happened. But I was so impressed by his willingness to come at it from new angles, to re-examine things that he hadn’t thought about for a while, to tell stories that were frankly not flattering to him. I’ve never heard harsher stories about Mike’s behavior over the years than I heard from Mike himself. He was an extraordinary interview subject.”

Also this week, we revisit Adam Higginbotham’s 2019 appearance, in which he discussed his book “Midnight in Chernobyl,” about the nuclear disaster in that city. Higginbotham visited the site enough times “to lose count,” he told the host Pamela Paul. “And I never really stopped being afraid of it.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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N.K. Jemisin on Multiverses, Revolution and the ‘Soul’ of Cities

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Nov 2022 16:11:51 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the archives. This week we turn the mic over to our sibling podcast “The Ezra Klein Show,” for a discussion that aired last month between Klein and the novelist N.K. Jemisin.

The novelist and former Book Review columnist N.K. Jemisin is one of the most celebrated science-fiction and fantasy writers at work today: The winner of multiple Hugo Awards — including an unprecedented three in a row for her remarkable “Broken Earth” trilogy — she is renowned for her ability to build fictional worlds that reflect the complex social and political dynamics of our own. Her latest novel, “The World We Make,” is a sequel to “The City We Became,” and like that book it examines the ways cities come to take on their own personalities and characters, and how they respond to the forces threatening those identities. Jemisin visited “The Ezra Klein” show in October to discuss the books and the real world that informed them. “I felt like writing about our world,” she told the host Ezra Klein. “And if I’m going to do that, then I would do the world a disservice by treating it as some fantasy land. I don’t want to depict New York, as much as I love it, as all joy and all light and all happiness.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Jason Zinoman Talks About David Letterman

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 17:51:11 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

The longtime New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman is the first person ever to hold that position at the paper, and he’s a natural fit for it: In 2017, when his biography of the late-night host David Letterman was published, he explained on the podcast that his early love of Letterman had shaped not only his love of comedy but to some extent his outlook on the world: “I worshiped David Letterman as a kid,” Zinoman told the host Pamela Paul. “He is one of these people who I loved before I thought like a critic. And I do believe that you love things as a kid in a deep way that you don’t love things as an adult. And to a large degree I think my sense of humor was defined by David Letterman. When I was a kid I talked like him. I smiled like him. My sense of sarcasm came from him. Even as an adult I can sort of see traces of it.”

Also this week, we revisit our 2018 conversation with the New York Times Magazine writer Sam Anderson, who talked about basketball, Oklahoma City and his book “Boom Town.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee Talks About ‘The Gene’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 14:18:01 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2016 and 2018, respectively.

Since winning the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for his first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” in 2011, the physician and professor Siddhartha Mukherjee has gone on to write two more sweeping studies of medical and scientific subjects: “The Song of the Cell,” which will be released next week, and “The Gene: An Intimate History,” which came out in 2016. Mukherjee was a guest on the podcast when “The Gene” was published, and he told the host Pamela Paul that his earlier book about cancer had led him naturally to the topic of genetics and heredity. “The more I thought about disease, illness, the more I came back to the question of inheritance: What do we inherit, what do our families give to us? How much of it is genetic, how much of it is environmental?” he said.

Also this week, we revisit Kate Atkinson’s podcast appearance from 2018, when she discussed her World War II spy novel “Transcription” and its heroine, who starts out as “a very clever girl who’s slightly out of order.” Atkinson’s latest novel, “Shrines of Gaiety,” was published last month.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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George Saunders on ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 17:31:41 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2017 and 2019, respectively.

The writer George Saunders has long been acclaimed for his short stories, which he has collected into five books since 1996 (including this year’s “Liberation Day”). But in 2017 he showed he was comfortable with longer narratives as well when he released his first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” invoking multiple voices and ghostly spirits to portray President Lincoln’s grief at the death of his young son even as the Civil War raged. Saunders visited the podcast that year to talk about the novel, and how the process of writing it was different for him from story writing. “It seemed like something that was going to have to be approached pretty earnestly, and I wasn’t sure I had the chops to do that,” he told the host Pamela Paul. “I kind of had this little talk with myself: Dude, you’re 50-whatever-I-was ... This is something you’ve been wanting to write your whole life. You’ve now been through many of the major milestones of life. You know, I’m old, I have beautiful kids, everything. Why is this material too earnest for you, or too whatever? So I made a little contract with myself that I would do three months of trying, just to see if it caught fire.”

Also this week, we revisit Paul’s 2019 conversation with the journalist Patrick Radden Keefe about his book “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” which looked at the Troubles in Northern Ireland through the lens of one young widow’s disappearance in 1972. “I’m drafting on an incredibly brave effort by her children, starting in the 1990s, to come out and break the code of silence in Ireland, and say: ‘We need to know what happened,’” said Keefe, whose book went on to be named one of our 10 Best Books of 2019.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Revisiting Baldwin vs. Buckley

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Oct 2022 14:40:59 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

In 1965, James Baldwin, by then internationally famous, faced off against William F. Buckley Jr., one of the leading voices of American conservatism, in a debate hosted by the Cambridge Union in England (and currently being dramatized as a stage show at the Public Theater in New York). The debate proposition before the house was: “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

Nicholas Buccola’s 2019 book “The Fire Is Upon Us” tells the story of that intellectual prizefight as well as the larger story of Buckley’s and Baldwin’s lives.

“Although the union had existed for 150 years prior to this night,” Buccola said on the podcast in 2019, “I’m pretty sure that there was never a speech quite like the speech that Baldwin delivered that night, because a lot of formal debate is this combination of intellectual exercise and performance art — you know, a lot of humor injected and that sort of thing. But Baldwin arrives that night and he delivers a sermon; he delivers a jeremiad. He is there to say things that people don’t want to hear.”

Also this week, we revisit Lydia Millet’s podcast appearance from 2020, when she discussed her novel “The Children’s Bible,” which went on to be named one of our 10 Best Books of the year. The book was inspired, she told the host Pamela Paul, by younger people who are increasingly alarmed by the future they will inherit: “This generation is starting to notice and get angry, and I think the rage is long overdue, and I think it’s the only rational response to the threats we face.” Millet’s new novel, “Dinosaurs,” will be published next week.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Celeste Ng on Race, Class and Suburbia

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 19:43:32 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2017 and 2015, respectively.

Before “Little Fires Everywhere” was a hit series streaming on Hulu, it was a best-selling novel by Celeste Ng, who is also the author of the novels “Everything I Never Told You” and, most recently, the dystopian “Our Missing Hearts.” Ng came on the podcast in 2017 to talk about “Little Fires Everywhere,” which addressed themes of race, class and privilege in a fictionalized version of Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she grew up. “There’s a real difference between the surface of things and what the true state of things is,” Ng told the host Pamela Paul during her appearance. “That’s sort of a theme throughout — everyone in here, there’s a difference between the surface of who they appear to be and who they actually are inside.”

Also this week, we revisit Paul’s 2015 conversation with the esteemed children’s book author Judy Blume, who visited the podcast to discuss the recent publication of one of her adult novels, “In the Unlikely Event.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 17:40:18 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2017 and 2019, respectively.

Jann Wenner, the co-founder and longtime editor of Rolling Stone magazine, has a new memoir out — but it’s not the first book to tell his life story: In 2017, the journalist Joe Hagan published a biography, “Sticky Fingers,” that Wenner authorized and then repudiated after it included unflattering details. Hagan was a guest on the podcast in 2017, and explained his approach to the book’s most noteworthy revelations: “I made a decision, really at the outset, that I was going to be honest with him and always be frank with him,” he told Pamela Paul and John Williams. “And if I came across difficult material, I was just going to address it with him. So in that way, it kind of let some of the pressure off. And by the end, we reached a point where I really tried to present him with the most radioactive material and make him aware of what I knew, so he wouldn’t be surprised.”

Also this week, we revisit a 2019 conversation among Williams and The Times’s staff book critics Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Parul Sehgal about their list ranking the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years. No. 1: “Fierce Attachments,” by Vivian Gornick.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Andrew Sean Greer on Writing ‘Less’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 16:32:33 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2017 and 2015, respectively.

Andrew Sean Greer won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his comic novel “Less,” about a down-on-his-luck novelist named Arthur Less who embarks on a round-the-world trip to forget his sorrows. (Greer’s new novel, “Less Is Lost,” continues Less’s adventures in the same comic vein, this time setting him loose across America.) When “Less” was published, in 2017, Greer visited the podcast and told the host Pamela Paul why he had decided to write comic fiction after five well-received but much more serious novels: “I found funny things happening all the time, and they were always my fault,” he said. “Because I was the thing out of place, with terrible misperceptions about what was supposed to happen.”

Also this week, we revisit the New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan’s 2015 podcast appearance, in which he discussed his memoir “Barbarian Days,” about his lifelong love of surfing. “It’s all about this experience of beauty,” he told Paul. “You know, this certain kind of drenched experience and beauty — and the physical risks are very much footnotes.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Jennifer Egan and the Goon Squad

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 12:09:32 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2010 and 2020, respectively.

Jennifer Egan’s latest novel, “The Candy House,” is a follow-up to her Pulitzer-winning novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which came out in 2010. That year she appeared on the podcast and told the host Sam Tanenhaus how she had gone about organizing the book’s centrifugal structure: “What I was really interested in was trying to move through time and work with the difference between private and public. We see people and they seem to be easily categorizable — sometimes they seem like types. And I loved then taking that person that we had seen peripherally and showing us that person’s inner life in a really immediate way,” she says. “It happened very organically. … I just followed the trail of my own curiosity.”

Also this week, we revisit the actor and writer Stephen Fry’s 2020 conversation with the host Pamela Paul, in which he discussed topics including Oscar Wilde, Fry’s own love of language and his book “Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined.” “It’s a miraculous thing about Greek mythology that there is a timeline and a chronology,” Fry says. “It’s probably reverse-engineered by Hesiod and Homer and the later poets, obviously. But nonetheless, it has a shape, a beginning and an end, which other mythic structures don’t seem to have. And they’re so deep in the — I hesitate to use such a cliché, but I can’t avoid it — in the DNA of our own culture and art that it’s part of who we are.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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David Sedaris’s Diaries

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Sep 2022 13:26:48 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This one was originally published on June 2, 2017.

The essayist and humorist David Sedaris started keeping diaries nearly half a century ago, and in 2017 he published a broad selection of entries from them in his book “Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002).” On the podcast, he talked about how the diaries evolved, the kinds of details and eccentricities that tend to catch his eye, and the process of combing through thousands of pages to produce this 500-page book.

“I have a hundred and, I believe, 64 volumes of my diary, and each one is thicker than this book,” he says. “And a lot of it is crazy person — tiny letters, front and back page. So this is just a tiny fraction of my diary. … I tried to detach myself, and think, Would this be of interest to anyone? I mean, a lot of it wasn’t even interesting to me. Or, it was just interesting for, you know, nostalgic reasons. So I was just looking for things that might possibly interest someone who I don’t know.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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John Lithgow on “Drama” and Maggie O'Farrell on “Hamnet”

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 19:13:13 +0000

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2011 and 2021, respectively.

The actor John Lithgow has been nominated for 13 Emmy Awards and has won six times, for roles as varied as the British prime minister Winston Churchill (on “The Crown”) and the extraterrestrial high commander Dick Solomon (on “3rd Rock From the Sun”). In 2011 he talked to Sam Tanenhaus, the Book Review’s editor at the time, about his memoir “Drama” and his education as an actor. “The more that an actor can accommodate himself to the truth that he will eventually be forgotten, the better off he is,” he says.

Also this week, the writer Maggie O’Farrell discusses her acclaimed novel “Hamnet,” which imagines the life of William Shakespeare, his wife, Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, and the couple’s son Hamnet, who died at 11 years old in 1596. In her 2021 podcast appearance, O’Farrell told the host Pamela Paul that she hoped to capture a sense of the young boy at its center. “I think he’s been consigned to a literary footnote,” she says. “And I believe, quite strongly, that without him — without his tragically short life — we wouldn’t have the play ‘Hamlet.’ We probably wouldn’t have ‘Twelfth Night.’ As an audience, we are enormously in debt to him.”

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Robert Caro on His Career

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 19:54:04 +0000

For the next few months, we're sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast's archives. This one was originally published on April 19, 2019.

Eagerly awaiting the fifth volume in Robert A. Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson? You’re part of a big club. In the meantime, Caro published “Working,” a collection of pieces about how he writes his prizewinning books.

On the podcast, Caro talked about his methods and about some of his experiences with imposing people, including the time he spoke to Lady Bird Johnson about a long and significant relationship her husband had with another woman. “That’s the only interview I ever had in my life where I couldn’t bring myself to look at the person I was interviewing,” he says.

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Roaring Through Paris With ‘Kiki Man Ray’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 20:10:13 +0000

Mark Braude’s new biography, “Kiki Man Ray,” visits a place of perennial interest — Left Bank Paris in the 1920s — through the life of the singer, model, memoirist and muse. On this week’s podcast, Braude says that his subject thoroughly captured the spirit of her age, “a mix of deep pain and a very deep love of life” that emerged after the First World War.

We’re used to reading about this age, Braude says, through the eyes of Americans in Paris, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Kiki “represents something that sometimes gets overlooked,” he says, which is “the French contribution to this scene and to this moment. People like Kiki were part of the reason why expats found France and Paris so exciting.” She was “living on a completely different rhythm and in a completely different way. She was just undeniably herself, and wasn’t putting on airs. And just loved life; she just wanted to do everything and meet everyone and go everywhere, and she did.”

Also on this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and Elisabeth Egan talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“River of Mountains” by Peter Lourie

“Colony” by Anne Rivers Siddons

“The Emperor’s Tomb” by Joseph Roth

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Poems in Practice and in Theory

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Aug 2022 18:29:15 +0000

Elisa Gabbert, the Book Review's On Poetry columnist, visits the podcast this week to discuss writing about poetry and her own forthcoming collection of poems, her fourth, “Normal Distance.”

“When I’m writing what I would call nonfiction or an essay or just pure prose, I’m really trying to be accurate,” Gabbert says. “I’m not lying, I’m really telling you what I think. There’s very minimal distance between my persona on the page and who I really am. And then when I’m writing poetry, that persona really takes on more weight. I’m definitely creating more distance, and it really feels more like fiction or even more like theater, I might say. I’m really more creating a character that’s going to be speaking this monologue I’m writing.”

Ian Johnson visits the podcast to talk about his review of “Golden Age,” a novel by Wang Xiaobo recently translated by Yan Yan. The novel, set against Mao’s Cultural Revolution, made waves in China when it was originally published there in the 1990s.

“It was controversial primarily because of sex, there’s a lot of sex in the novel,” Johnson says. “The sex is not really described in graphic detail; this isn’t Henry Miller or something like that. It’s more like they’re having sex to make a point: that they’re independent people and they’re not going to be trampled by the state. And it’s very humorous — he talks about sex using all kinds of euphemisms, like ‘commit great friendship,’ stuff like that. It’s meant to be a sort of parody, a somewhat absurd version of a romance.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elisabeth Egan and Dave Kim talk about what people are reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Time Shelter” by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel

“The Displacements” by Bruce Holsinger

“The Annotated Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Chaos Among Spies After the Berlin Wall Crumbles

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 17:56:21 +0000

Dan Fesperman’s 13th thriller, “Winter Work,” is set just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Stasi, East Germany’s brutal Cold War intelligence service, was busy destroying evidence. The C.I.A. was just as busy trying to learn the enemy organization’s secrets.

“The C.I.A., initially, had people calling ex-Stasi agents,” Fesperman says on this week’s podcast. “They got a hold of a directory with home phone numbers of some of these Stasi foreign intelligence people. And they started cold-calling them — like salesmen, like these irritating calls we get at home, except for the Stasi it was the C.I.A. calling. ‘Hey, would you like to share your secrets with us? We can pay you.’ They were getting mostly hang-ups, a lot of angry lectures. And when that quickly didn’t work out, they then began visiting them door to door, which didn’t work a whole lot better.”

Isaac Fitzgerald visits the podcast to talk about his new memoir, “Dirtbag, Massachusetts,” which recalls his troubled childhood and his eventual coming to terms with those responsible for it.

“I was able to give my parents a little more grace in this book,” Fitzgerald says. “And part of that was recognizing that my story didn’t start with my birth; my story starts with the things that happened to them.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner and Molly Young talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Memoirs” by Robert Lowell

“Yoga” by Emmanuel Carrère

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Diana Goetsch on ‘This Body I Wore’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 20:20:00 +0000

The acclaimed poet Diana Goetsch has now published “This Body I Wore,” which our reviewer, Manuel Betancourt, called an “achingly beautiful memoir” about “a trans woman’s often vexed relationship with her own body.” On this week’s podcast, Goetsch talks about her approach to writing.

“My assumption always, as a poet and as a writer, is — I’m a generalist. And I just think the most idiosyncratic thing about ourselves also happens to be the most universal, if we can get to it and present it in the right way,” she says. “It was never my primary objective to give information about a transition, even if somebody’s initial attraction is prurient. They can now get that on Wikipedia or something. I particularly love artists who have what I call the common touch — Bruce Springsteen has the common touch. my old mentor William Zinsser has the common touch; the ability to say something very well, but also not exclude anyone from it at the same time.”

CJ Hauser visits the podcast to talk about her new essay collection, “The Crane Wife,” the title essay of which became an online phenomenon after The Paris Review published it in 2019. She describes her attempt to overcome the idea that love needs to have a grand narrative attached to it.

“In my family, we love stories. We’re sort of Don Quixote people. We’ve read so many stories and we self-mythologize and we tell stories,” Hauser says. “By the end of the book, I come out into a place of telling a kind of static love story or slow-growing love story. What does it mean to not conflate drama with love, and does love need to be dramatic? Because I think that’s a thing that I inherited.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter discusses new novels about race and racism that find freedom in satire; and Lauren Christensen and Joumana Khatib talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin

“Mating” by Norman Rush

“Norwood” by Charles Portis

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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‘Son of Elsewhere’ Recounts Life as a Young Immigrant

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 16:02:41 +0000

In “Son of Elsewhere,” Elamin Abdelmahmoud writes about growing up in Canada after moving there from Sudan when he was 12. On this week’s podcast, he talks about that experience, including his first interactions with his new peers.

“This is not a story of bigotry, this is not a story of a classic playground bully,” Abdelmahmoud says. “Most of the demons I was wrestling with in this book were actually returning to the feelings of me needing to put certain parts of my identity on the shelf. Because sometimes you don’t really have to wait for other people to reduce you, you can do that to yourself. So I came to Canada and as I was trying to fit in, for me one of the things that became obvious fairly quickly was: I don’t want to stand out. I don’t want the attention of being the new kid, the immigrant kid. I don’t want to be different.”

The investigative journalist and author Sally Denton visits the podcast to discuss her new book, “The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land,” which takes readers across the border to a Mormon sect in Mexico. Denton says the idea for the book came to her in 2019, after she saw news of gunmen opening fire on a caravan of three cars from a Mormon community, killing three women and six children.

“When I learned of this incident, it just struck me immediately as: There was more to this story,” Denton says. “This was not a case of mistaken identity, it wasn’t a case of people being at the wrong place at the wrong time. This was a group of women and children intentionally targeted in the most brutal and heinous way. And I was initially really moved by the tragedy, and thought it would be really important to figure out what was going on. And my main impetus was really: Why were these women and children traveling alone on one of the most dangerous roads in the world. Where were the men? Why were they unarmed, why were they unescorted?”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter talks about the growing number of independent bookstores and their increased diversity; and Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Why We Did It” by Tim Miller

“Hollywood Ending” by Ken Auletta

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Alice Elliott Dark on ‘Fellowship Point’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 9 Jul 2022 01:54:53 +0000

In Alice Elliott Dark’s second novel, “Fellowship Point,” Agnes Lee and Polly Wister have been friends for about 80 years. Their intertwined families own homes on a Maine peninsula, and some of the book’s drama stems from their efforts to preserve the land and keep it out of the hands of developers.

“The issue of land, land ownership, land conservation has always been of deep interest to me,” Dark says on this week’s podcast. “I came to that pretty quickly as I was developing this story. I decided I wanted to write something like a 19th-century-style novel, and I wanted to have it be modern. Women didn’t own land in the 19th century. They didn’t make decisions about land, even if they did own it, and having women landowners dealing with these issues seemed to me a modern version of a big, older, 19th-century-type novel.”

Katherine Chen visits the podcast to discuss her new novel, “Joan,” which imagines Joan of Arc as a born fighter who becomes an avenging warrior.

“I think the central image that keeps us fascinated with Joan of Arc all these years later is the mental image of a woman in armor on horseback going to war,” Chen says. “I think that image keeps us enthralled to this day because it’s as startling and surprising as it is empowering.” We also remain captivated, Chen says, by the “sheer improbability” of Joan’s story.

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news about librarians caught in the culture war over banned books; and Elisabeth Egan and MJ Franklin talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Everything I Need I Get From You” by Kaitlyn Tiffany

“Thank You For Listening” by Julia Whelan

“A Word Child” by Iris Murdoch

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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A Novel About Brilliant Young Game Designers

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Jul 2022 17:28:37 +0000

Gabrielle Zevin’s new novel, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” is set in the world of video game design, and follows two friends named Sadie and Sam as they collaborate on what becomes a very successful game.

“A friend of mine described the book as being what it’s like to co-parent something that’s not a child,” Zevin says on this week’s podcast. “Sam and Sadie, they are more intimate with each other than anyone else in their lives. Yet they aren’t spouses, and he’s not her child, and yet this is the most important relationship that both of them have. So I wanted to write about that: What if the most important person in your life was really your colleague and your friend?”

Morgan Talty visits the podcast to discuss his debut story collection, “Night of the Living Rez,” which is set on the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation in Maine, where Talty was raised.

“I was very much aware that Indigenous fiction tries to perform for a white readership, or a largely white readership, and there are instances in books that I’ve admired by Native writers that I could see this. And I always wanted to shy away from it, because I didn’t want to keep feeding into that type of storytelling,” Talty says. “Throughout the book there’s less association with Indigeneity in the characters, so it’s the characters who are front and center, it’s their human nature that’s front and center, as opposed to maybe something cultural.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris talks about how #BookTok has become a dominant driver of fiction sales; and Dwight Garner and Alexandra Jacobs talk about what people are reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“I Used to Live Here Once” by Miranda Seymour

“The Last Resort” by Sarah Stodola

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Sensing the World Anew Through Other Species

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 01:12:18 +0000

Ed Yong’s new book, “An Immense World,” urges readers to break outside their “sensory bubble” to consider the unique ways that dogs, dolphins, mice and other animals experience their surroundings.

“I’ve often said that my beat is everything that is or was once alive, which covers billions of species, across basically the entirety of the planet’s history,” Yong says on this week’s podcast. “One thing I like about this particular topic — the sensory worlds of other animals — is that it, itself, though a singular, cohesive topic, is also the gateway to thousands of small wonders. There’s so much to learn about just in this one corner of biology.”

Terry Alford visits the podcast to talk about his new book, “In the Houses of Their Dead,” an investigation of how Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth and their families were influenced by spiritualism.

Alford says of Lincoln: “There’s a struggle, as best I see it, in him between the rational side and the side that desires to be comforted and to be in contact with someone you loved who’s not there anymore. He really wanted that, and he said he wanted that to a number of people. But he just felt, at the end of the day, that séance-type contact with the dead was really delusional.”

Also on this week’s episode, Lauren Christensen and Joumana Khatib talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt

“Blood Orange Night” by Melissa Bond

“The Hack” by Wilfrid Sheed

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Jackie, Before Marrying Jack

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 16:00:07 +0000

Elisabeth Egan, an editor at the Book Review, curates our Group Text column — a monthly choice of a book that she feels is particularly well suited to book clubs and their discussions. On this week’s podcast, she talks about her latest pick: “Jackie & Me,” by Louis Bayard, which imagines the friendship between Jacqueline Bouvier and Lem Billings, a close friend of the Kennedys.

“This is rooted in reality,” Egan says, “but Bayard runs with it and imagines conversations between Lem and Jackie, and just shows this, on one hand, fabulous life of parties and museums and fun they had together, but also sets up this ticking clock where you come to understand what Jackie really has at stake, and has to lose by committing to this life with the Kennedys.”

Matthew Schneier visits the podcast to discuss Paula Byrne’s new biography, “The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym.” Pym, a British writer, began publishing novels in the 1950s.

“She published six novels in pretty quick succession, and they’re great,” Schneier says of the first decade or so of her career. “Very clever, very witty, she was often compared to Jane Austen — which was a writer that she loved and appreciated, but also a kind of very easy comparison, whereas Pym’s ironies can be a little bit darker than some of Austen’s. And there’s a sense in her work that she is spotlighting characters who are not the Emma Woodhouses, who are beautiful and rich and effervescent. They’re what she ended up calling ‘excellent women,’ which is the title of I think her best starter novel. These women who are well brought up and very proper, a little bit pious, but can also be a little dowdy, a little dreary, a little bit easier to overlook.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter talks about the filmmaker Werner Herzog and his first novel, “The Twilight World”; and Jennifer Szalai and Molly Young talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“The Facemaker” by Lindsey Fitzharris

“Meet Me by the Fountain” by Alexandra Lange

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Tom Perrotta on the Return of Tracy Flick

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 18:59:13 +0000

Few fictional characters in recent decades have been as intensely discussed as Tracy Flick. The ambitious teenage protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s novel “Election” (1998) and the ensuing film adaptation, starring Reese Witherspoon, has been reconsidered in recent years as misunderstood and unfairly maligned. On this week’s podcast, Perrotta talks about Tracy’s return in his new novel, “Tracy Flick Can’t Win.”

“I think most people, when they think about Tracy Flick — I say this in all sad modesty — they’re thinking about Tracy in the movie,” Perrotta says. “‘Election’ as a book didn’t make a huge splash, and Reese Witherspoon’s performance was so powerful that I think the debate is really around Tracy in the film. And maybe to some degree me writing this book was an attempt to reclaim my own version of Tracy.”

Ann Leary visits the podcast to discuss her new novel, “The Foundling,” which was inspired by the real-life story of Leary’s grandmother, who worked, in the 1930s, at a public asylum that sequestered “unfit” women. Leary did a great deal of research for the book, and felt freedom in being able to bring it to bear in a work of fiction rather than history.

“I really wanted a story,” Leary says. “I could write about the widespread practice of eugenics, but I would have to kind of stick it to the place where my grandmother worked. And what I did in my novel was read about many other asylums, because there were many others. And I was able to make a fictitious place where I used things that I’d learned from the various different institutions.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and Elizabeth Harris talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“frank: sonnets” by Diane Seuss

“Life Between the Tides” by Adam Nicolson

“Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” by Alan Sillitoe

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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One Island, Two Men and Lots of Big Questions

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Jun 2022 22:21:25 +0000

Karen Jennings’s novel “An Island,” which was on the longlist for the Booker Prize in 2021, is set on a fictional unnamed island off the coast of Africa, where a man named Samuel has worked as a lighthouse keeper for more than 20 years. When a refugee washes up on shore one day, barely alive, Samuel navigates life around this stranger and flashes back to his own past, including his role in a political uprising and years that he spent in prison. On this week’s podcast, Jennings says that the book’s somewhat fable-like tone was very intentional.

“I knew that if I were to write about any one specific country, then I would have to make it about that country: that country’s political events, that country’s culture,” Jennings says. “My plan was to make it more universal, and attempt to understand something greater, something more complex. And the only way that I could see to do that was to do it in this very pared-down, focused way, reducing most of the action to this fictional island and then to these brief moments — I guess kind of like highlights — from Samuel’s past.”

Phil Klay, the Marine Corps veteran and acclaimed fiction writer, visits the podcast this week to talk about a new collection of his nonfiction writing, “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.”

“There’s a huge problem when we’re regularly sending troops to kill people and sending troops at risk and the president is not forced on a regular basis to go before Congress to explain what the mission is, how it’s in the national interest, what it’s going to cost, what we’re trying to achieve,” Klay says. “I think that war is the most morally fraught thing we can do as a nation, and it demands more democratic accountability.”

Also on this week’s episode, Dwight Garner and Alexandra Jacobs talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“Phil” by Alan Shipnuck

“Here’s the Deal” by Kellyanne Conway

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Remembering the ‘Great Stewardess Rebellion’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 May 2022 14:51:54 +0000

With current-day labor movements at Amazon, Starbucks and other big employers in the news, Nell McShane Wulfhart is on the podcast this week to discuss her new book about a vivid moment in labor history, “The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet.” That revolution was launched in the face of working conditions that included contracts with onerous demands about every corner of a woman’s life.

“The age restrictions and the marriage restrictions and the pregnancy restrictions — obviously that was a big no-no — they had been part of the contracts for many years, I think for as long as stewardesses had been working,” Wulfhart says. “These restrictions were obviously designed to keep the work force as young as possible, as svelte as possible and as pliable as possible, because when you’re only working for a few years, you’re not that invested in getting better benefits or establishing a pension plan or fighting for your rights.”

James Kirchick visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.” The sweeping story, from the days of the New Deal up through Bill Clinton’s presidency, considers the toll of homophobia in the nation’s capital.

“It’s incalculable,” Kirchick says. “The governmental resources that were expended in this, the hundreds of thousands of man hours that went into rooting out, discovering and firing patriotic civil servants. The deep wells of knowledge that were denied this country based upon fear of gay people. We don’t know those numbers. And then there’s of course the impact that it had on individual gay people.”

Also on this week’s episode, Lauren Christensen and Gregory Cowles talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Truth and Beauty” by Ann Patchett

“Fierce Attachments” by Vivian Gornick

“Role Models” by John Waters

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Brian Morton on ‘Tasha: A Son’s Memoir’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 May 2022 20:04:29 +0000

Brian Morton, an accomplished novelist, has turned to nonfiction for the first time in his new book, “Tasha: A Son’s Memoir.” On this week’s podcast, he discusses his mother’s life, the difficulties in taking care of her toward the end of her life and what led him to write a memoir.

“I started writing a few pages about her, and I relished the freedom to write directly, to write without having to invent any characters,” Morton says. “I love to write about fictional characters, that’s my favorite part of writing. But it takes me a very long time to sort of give birth to them. And here was my mother, perhaps the most colorful character I’ve ever written about, who was right there to be written about.”

Rachel Careau visits the podcast to discuss her new translation of Colette’s “Chéri” and its sequel, “The End of Chéri.”

“One of the problems with her spare style is that the sentences can lack some of the words that usually oil a sentence,” Careau says of the task of translating the books. “So they can sound a little bit bare, sometimes a little syncopated. And the sound was very important to me, and I really let the sound guide me. But it’s difficult to make that bone-on-bone style flow.”

Also on this week’s episode, Lauren Christensen and Joumana Khatib talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Four Treasures of the Sky” by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

“The Last Samurai” by Helen DeWitt

“Independent People” by Halldor Laxness

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

John Waters Talks About His First Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 May 2022 17:24:43 +0000

The filmmaker, artist, author and general cultural icon John Waters visits the podcast this week to talk about his first novel, “Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance.” The book features three generations of women in the Sprinkle family, and their very complicated (and antagonistic) relationships with one another. The first of them we meet is Marsha, an unrepentant thief and overall misanthrope; but Waters says he still wants us to root for her.

“She’s so crazy and so terrible that you can’t believe it at first,” Waters says. “And she’s quite serious about herself, as all fanatics are. No one in this book has much of a sense of humor about themselves, which, I think, can be played funny — the same way that when I made a movie, the main thing I told every actor was, ‘Never wink at the audience. Say it like you believe every single word.’”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris discusses the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes; and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“Tacky” by Rax King

“The Last Days of Roger Federer” by Geoff Dyer

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Hernan Diaz on ‘Trust’ and Money in Fiction

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 7 May 2022 13:13:07 +0000

Hernan Diaz’s second novel, “Trust,” is four books in one. Our reviewer, Michael Gorra, calls it “intricate, cunning and consistently surprising.” It starts with a novel inside the novel, about a man named Benjamin Rask, who builds and maintains a fortune in New York City as the 19th century gives way to the 20th. Diaz describes writing the uniquely structured book on this week’s podcast, and the ideas at its core.

“Although wealth and money are so essential in the American narrative about itself as a nation, and occupy this almost transcendental place in our culture, I was rather surprised to see that there are precious few novels that deal with money itself,” Diaz says. “Sure, there are many novels that deal with class — we were talking about Henry James and Edith Wharton a moment ago — or with exploitation or with excess and luxury and privilege. Many examples of that, but very few examples of novels dealing with money and the process of the accumulation of a great fortune.”

Paul Fischer visits the podcast to discuss “The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures,” which is about Louis Le Prince, who made what is now widely acknowledged to be the first known moving picture, and the story of his mysterious disappearance as well.

“What was fascinating about Le Prince — and what I really loved as a film nerd myself — is that he seems to have been the first one of that generation to really have a vision for what the medium could be,” Fischer says. “There were a lot of people, like Thomas Edison or the Lumière brothers, who were working on moving-image projects as a kind of novelty toy. Their idea was, this can make a little bit of money, at least for a while, and then it will fade away. And there were people, like Eadweard Muybridge or the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey, who were scientists and really thought moving images would be a way to deconstruct the way our bodies work, the way things move, the way nature worked. And Le Prince was really the first to write in his notebooks and speak to his family about this medium as something that would change the way we related to reality.”

Also on this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and Elisabeth Egan talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Music, Late and Soon” by Robyn Sarah

“French Braid” by Anne Tyler

“Poguemahone” by Patrick McCabe

“The Butcher Boy” by Patrick McCabe

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jennifer Egan Talks About 'The Candy House'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 20:10:08 +0000

Jennifer Egan’s new novel, “The Candy House,” is a follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” A few characters appear in both books, but the novels are also united by Egan’s structural approach — an inventive one that, in “Goon Squad,” included a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation, and in “The Candy House,” a chapter written as a long series of terse directives to a spy.

On this week’s podcast, Egan talks about the new book, and about why she enjoys experimenting with form.

“To my mind, the novel was invented to be a hungry, greedy form that could pull into itself all other kinds of discourse,” Egan says. “So in the earliest novels: graphic images, letters, legal documents. As a fiction writer, one of the fun things about working with the novel is that anything is up for grabs. If I can bend it to fiction, I will, and I’m looking around me for those opportunities all the time. It’s not easy to do it, because the danger is that you just look like you’re using gimmickry. And what I find is that the only time any kind of radical structural form works is if I can find a story that can only be told that way. It involves a lot of waiting, and a lot of trial and error.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter discusses the work of the Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin; and Alexandra Jacobs and Molly Young talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“The Palace Papers” by Tina Brown

“Liarmouth” by John Waters

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Liana Finck Reimagines the Story of Genesis

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 23 Apr 2022 01:31:55 +0000

The cartoonist Liana Finck’s new book, “Let There Be Light,” recasts the story of Genesis with a female God who is a neurotic artist.

“At the very beginning of this book, she’s existing in a void and she just decides to make something,” Finck says. “And it’s all fun and games until she starts to feel some self-doubt and realizes that she hasn’t done well enough. She’s really kind of a self-portrait of me at that point. She’s well-intentioned, she’s happy and she’s very hard on herself.”

Jonathan Van Ness of “Queer Eye” fame visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “Love That Story.” He talks to Lauren Christensen, an editor at the Book Review.

“As a queer person, we are told very early on what spaces you are able to thrive in. Beauty is often one of those spaces. There are just a lot of spaces that you can be directed to. And I love hairdressing and I love beauty and I love what I get to do on ‘Queer Eye,’” Van Ness says. “So I am eternally grateful to that. But also, I think that queer people who are feminine and who are flamboyant — as I’ve been called my entire life — are not also allowed to be information gatherers, are also not allowed to be seen as credible.” He continues: “Obviously I didn’t go to journalism school. I didn’t graduate college. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn and share my experiences with others.”

Also on this week’s episode, Joumana Khatib and Dave Kim talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“In the Country of Others” by Leïla Slimani

“Phenotypes” by Paulo Scott

“Tamarisk Row” by Gerald Murnane

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elizabeth Alexander on 'The Trayvon Generation'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 19:16:47 +0000

Elizabeth Alexander’s new book, “The Trayvon Generation,” grew out of a widely discussed essay of the same name that she wrote for The New Yorker in 2020. The book explores themes of race, class and justice and their intersections with art. On this week’s podcast, Alexander discusses the effects of video technology on our exposure to and understanding of violence and vulnerability, and contrasts the way her generation was brought up with the lives of younger people today.

“If you think about some of the language of the civil rights movement: ‘We shall overcome’ is hopeful,” Alexander says. “And if you stop there and take that literally, I would say that’s what my childhood was about. But after that comes ‘someday.’ Well, I think what we’re seeing now is that we have not yet arrived at that day.”

Lucasta Miller visits the podcast to discuss her new biography, “Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph.”

“I think the popular vision is of him as this rather sort of ethereal creature, a sort of delicate flower, the embodiment of loveliness, a spiritualized essence,” Miller says. “What I really wanted to do was to get back something of the real flesh-and-blood Keats, as a real complicated human being. I’m not trying to undermine him in any way. I’m just trying to make him more complex. And I love him all the same — I love him even more, as a result.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful” by Jack Lowery

“Private Notebooks: 1914-1916” by Ludwig Wittgenstein

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fiction About Lives in Ukraine

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Apr 2022 19:48:33 +0000

While a steady stream of disturbing news continues to come from Ukraine, new works of fiction highlight the ways in which lives there have been transformed by conflict. On this week’s podcast, the critic Jennifer Wilson talks about two books, including the story collection “Lucky Breaks,” by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky.

“Belorusets has been compared to Gogol in these stories,” Wilson says. “There’s a certain kind of supernatural quality to them. I think anyone looking to these books for a play-by-play of the conflict is going to be disappointed for that reason, but I think delighted in other ways.”

Ben McGrath visits the podcast to talk about his new book, “Riverman: An American Odyssey,” which tells the story of Dick Conant, a troubled and charismatic man who disappeared while on a canoe trip from New York to Florida. Conant was in his 60s when McGrath met him, and had spent many years questing on various waterways.

“What he learned was that there wasn’t really anything he was going to find out about himself that was going to improve things, and that the secret to finding happiness was to turn his lens outward,” McGrath says. “Rather than, in the Thoreauvian model, retreating to Walden Pond and staring into his reflection, he decided to go out into the world and to keep seeing new places and meeting new people; and by doing that, keep himself sufficiently occupied that he didn’t have to struggle too much with worrying about who he was and what his own problems were.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the literary world; and Lauren Christensen and MJ Franklin talk about what they’ve been reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Young Mungo” by Douglas Stuart

“Heartstopper: Volume One,” by Alice Oseman

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, read by Hillary Huber

“Catholics” by Brian Moore

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Life in an E.R. During Covid

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 2 Apr 2022 00:08:34 +0000

Thomas Fisher’s new book, “The Emergency,” details his life as an emergency physician at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he’s worked for 20 years. It provides an up-close look at a hospital during the pandemic, and also zooms out to address the systemic issues that afflict American health care.

“This book was conceptualized prior to Covid,” Fisher says on this week’s podcast. “But Covid laid bare so much of what I intended to discuss from the beginning. So in some ways it was weirdly fortuitous. It gave the opportunity to discuss many of the details in much more vivid relief because we had this pandemic laying out all the things that have been a problem for so long.”

The critic and essayist Maud Newton’s first book, “Ancestor Trouble,” details her investigations into her family’s fascinating and sometimes discomfiting history, and reflects on our culture’s increased obsession with genealogy.

“Allowing ourselves to really imagine our ancestors, in all of their fullness — the difficult and bad things that they did, and of course the wonderful things that they did — can just be a really transformative experience,” Newton says. “I’ve come to find that the line between imagination and spirituality has become a lot more porous over the course of writing this book.”

Also on this week’s episode, Dwight Garner and Molly Young talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. John Williams is the host.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A Personal Tour of Modern Irish History

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 20:27:55 +0000

Fintan O’Toole was born in Dublin in 1958, the same year that T.K. Whitaker, a member of the Irish government, published an influential report suggesting that Ireland open its doors economically and culturally to the rest of the world. O’Toole’s new book, “We Don’t Know Ourselves,” weaves memoir with history to tell the story of modern Ireland.

“There’s a lot of dark stuff in the book,” he says, “there’s a lot of violence and repression and hypocrisy and abuse. But there’s also the story of a people coming to terms with itself. One of the reasons why we’re still dealing with darkness is at least we’re dealing with it. There’s a kind of confrontation with the past going on in Ireland which I think is very healthy. It’s not easy.” He continues: “One of the hopeful things about the Irish story is that it shows you that you can transform a nation — you can make it in many ways an awful lot better than it was, you can open it up to the world, you can develop much more complex, ambivalent, nonbinary senses of who you are — and yet you can still feel very much attached to a place and an identity.”

Julie Otsuka visits the podcast to discuss her third novel, “The Swimmers,” which begins with a large group of characters at a public pool before becoming the powerful story of one particular woman, Alice, who is suffering from dementia.

Alice is “actually there from the very beginning,” Otsuka says. “She’s there at the end of the very first paragraph. But I did not want the reader to be too aware of her. I want her to be there very peripherally, just as one of many. I want the reader to realize, as the story is going on, that it is Alice’s story, but I don’t want that to be so apparent in the beginning. I really wanted to paint the world that she had thrived in before she enters the second half of the book.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and Dave Kim talk about what people are reading. John Williams is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Lucky Breaks” by Yevgenia Belorusets

“2666” by Roberto Bolaño

“Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont” by Elizabeth Taylor

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Science Behind Mental Afflictions

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 17:18:49 +0000

In “A Molecule Away From Madness,” the neurologist Sara Manning Peskin writes about the errant molecular activity that underlies many serious mental afflictions. Peskin’s book, reminiscent of the work of Oliver Sacks, conveys its scientific information through narrative.

“I wanted to capture how this actually unfolds in real time,” she says on this week’s podcast. “For a lot of us, we go to doctors and you get a diagnosis and it’s as if that diagnosis has always existed. But in fact, the diagnosis was invented by someone who discovered something. And the history behind these diseases is often lost.”

J. Kenji López-Alt visits the podcast to discuss his latest book, “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.” López-Alt comes from a family of scientists, and is known for his science-based approach to home cooking.

“I was cooking for a number of years in restaurants, and all through that time I had a lot of questions,” he says. “For me, it’s natural to ask why we do something, why is this working the way it does? And in restaurants, just by the nature of how a restaurant works and the goal of a restaurant, which is more speed and consistency, you don’t have a lot of time to really focus on thinking about those types of questions or experimenting with them. So I had this backlog of questions built up in my head that eventually I started to get to explore.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“I Was Better Last Night” by Harvey Fierstein

Books about shame

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How People First Arrived in the Americas

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 21:59:56 +0000

Scholars have long believed that the first Americans arrived via land bridge some 13,000 years ago, when retreating glaciers created an inland corridor from Siberia. Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas, tells a different story in “Origin.” According to Raff, the path to the Americas was coastal rather than inland, and what we’ve thought of as a bridge was a homeland inhabited for millenniums. Raff talks about the book on this week’s podcast.

“In recent years, the ability to obtain complete genomes from ancient ancestors has really given us new insights — extraordinary new insights — into the histories not only of individuals and populations but also of our ancestors globally,” Raff says. “We can now identify the populations who originally gave rise to the ancestors of Native Americans. And we can identify extremely important evolutionary events in that process going back, starting about 26,000 years ago. So we can use genetics to identify biological histories, to characterize biological histories, and even identify populations which we had no idea existed based on archaeology alone.’

Ira Rutkow visits the podcast to talk about “Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery.” Rutkow says the idea for the book evolved over the course of 50 years, and that he wrote it for the general public and surgeons alike.

“I was dismayed, over the course of my surgical practice, at how little patients understood about the whys and wherefores of what a surgeon did, or how a surgeon becomes a surgeon,” he says. And he was “shocked” when he would ask colleagues historical questions — “When did anesthesia come about? When did Lister discover antisepsis?” — and “they would have no idea.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world, and Elisabeth Egan and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“The Days of Afrekete” by Asali Solomon

“A Word Child” by Iris Murdoch

“The Examined Life” by Stephen Grosz

“The True American” by Anand Giridharadas

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Two New Memoirs About Affliction

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Mar 2022 20:40:30 +0000

In 2017, Frank Bruni suffered a stroke while sleeping in the middle of the night, an event that led to blindness in his right eye. His new memoir, “The Beauty of Dusk,” examines not only his physical condition but the emotional and spiritual counsel he sought from others in order to deal with it. On this week’s podcast, he discusses the experience, including his initial reaction to it.

“I woke up one October morning and I felt like I had some sort of smear — some gunk or something — in my eye, because the right side of my field of vision had this dappled fog over it,” Bruni says. “I think like a lot of boomers, I had this sense of invincibility. When I was diagnosed, at one point, with mild gout, I took Allopurinol every day and that was solved. When my cholesterol was un-ideal, I took a statin, and that was solved. I kind of thought modern medicine solves everything and we boomers, with our gym workouts, et cetera, are indestructible. So for hours I thought, ‘This is just an oddity.’ I took a shower and washed my eye, but the fog didn’t go away. I thought, ‘Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee.’ I thought, ‘Maybe I had too much wine last night.’ It was a good 12 to 24 hours later before I accepted, something is really wrong here.”

Meghan O’Rourke visits the podcast to talk about her latest book, “The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness,” which is also about personal pain and the larger context around it. O’Rourke spent many years experiencing symptoms that were misdiagnosed or dismissed.

“I just kept getting sicker and sicker, but it took so long to realize, OK, something is quite wrong.” She attributes some of this delayed realization to the “problem of subjectivity,” especially when younger. “None of us know what others are experiencing, so I thought, ‘OK, maybe pain is normal. Maybe brain fog is normal. Maybe I just should never eat dessert. It really did take maturing into my 30s and getting really sick to cross that line where it became unignorable.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world, and Dwight Garner and Alexandra Jacobs talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“Black Cloud Rising” by David Wright Faladé

“The Founders” by Jimmy Soni

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Invention of the Index

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 22:39:03 +0000

You probably take the index for granted. It might be hard to remember that the handy list of subjects at the back of a book, with the corresponding page numbers on which each subject is discussed, had to be invented. This happened in the early 13th century, and on this week’s podcast, Dennis Duncan talks about his new book, “Index, a History of the,” and about the earliest examples of the form.

“What’s really interesting is, it’s invented twice at the same time,” Duncan says. “So it’s one of those inventions, like the light bulb or like mathematical calculus — the moment is so ripe for it that two people in separate places invent it. So the index gets invented once in Paris, and at the same time in Oxford. and there are very slight differences between what these inventions look like.”

Brendan Slocumb visits the podcast to talk about his debut novel, “The Violin Conspiracy.” Slocumb is himself an accomplished violinist, and the book — both a mystery and a musical-coming-of-age story — was inspired, in part, by an experience he had as a teenager.

“When I was a senior in high school, we came home from a family trip, and my violin — I actually make reference to it in the novel — my 1953 Eugene Lehman violin was stolen, along with a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t care about,” Slocumb says. “If your instrument is taken, as a musician, it’s like a part of you is missing. I felt like I was missing a limb. It was right before I was supposed to go to college. It was supposed to take me through school, and I had nothing. It was a devastating experience.”

Also on this week’s episode, Lauren Christensen and MJ Franklin talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“The Chiffon Trenches” by André Leon Talley

“Recitatif” by Toni Morrison

“How to Be Perfect” by Michael Schur

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Jennifer Haigh on 'Mercy Street'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 20:09:49 +0000

Jennifer Haigh’s new novel, “Mercy Street” — which Richard Russo calls “extraordinary” in his review — is about a woman named Claudia who works at a women’s clinic in Boston. It’s also about the protesters outside. On this week’s podcast, Haigh says the novel was inspired in part by her own time working on a clinic’s hotline.

“Obviously I am strongly pro-choice or I wouldn’t have been volunteering at this clinic,” Haigh says. “But until this experience, I knew very little about what abortion actually means in a person’s life. And I think that’s true for many people who have strong convictions about abortions. Most people don’t know very much about it. It’s ironic when you consider, this is such a common experience, right? We know that about one in four American women will at some point have an abortion. And yet there’s such a climate of secrecy around this procedure that most of them don’t feel free to talk about it honestly. And many never tell anyone that they’ve done this. The result being that the average person knows very, very little about this experience.”

Megan Walsh visits the podcast to talk about her new book, “The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters.”

And why does it matter? “We tend to think about China in quite binary terms these days, as friend or foe,” Walsh says. “If we do properly pay attention to what people are genuinely trying to process and think about in China — which is peculiar, diverse, strange, innovative, some of it’s terrible, some of it’s amazing — I feel like we get an alternative way of understanding the complexities at the heart of a country which we are defining ourselves against, and we have an opportunity to also understand without seeing it as a sort of monolith.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world, and Jennifer Szalai and Molly Young talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“The Power Law” by Sebastian Mallaby

“Eating to Extinction” by Dan Saladino

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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A Spiritual, Dangerous Quest in the Himalayas

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 22:18:37 +0000

Harley Rustad’s new book, “Lost in the Valley of Death,” is about an American adventurer named Justin Alexander Shetler, who went on a quest in the Himalayas that ended in his disappearance. One of Shetler’s heroes was Christopher McCandless, whose story was told in Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild.” On this week’s podcast, Rustad discusses Shetler’s life, including his use of social media and how that dovetailed — and didn’t — with his spiritual journey.

“He was a very good-looking guy. He’s somebody that could be potentially quite easy to roll your eyes at and write off. There are a fair amount of shirtless selfies on his Instagram account,” Rustad says. But that curated image, the author says, doesn’t necessarily reflect the full truth. Rustad continues: “I think there was something that he was deeply trying to search for. And his social media accounts, while they gave him a platform to potentially inspire people — something that he really, really longed for and struggled with was solitude. And right now it’s almost impossible to achieve that true solitude in this world of deep, profound connectivity. And so as much as he validated and found value in that platform, it also was impossible; it created this barrier for him to achieve something pure.”

Jessamine Chan visits the podcast to discuss her debut novel, “The School for Good Mothers,” which imagines a future where parents (mostly women) get sent to government-run reform school.

“The standards in the book are purposefully set up to be impossible,” Chan says, “to draw attention to the way that our culture and society and government sets up such punishing standards for moms. So if the moms do succeed, it’s really by chance.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world, and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Mercy Street” by Jennifer Haigh

“After Me Comes the Flood” by Sarah Perry

“Our Mutual Friend” by Charles Dickens

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Ruta Sepetys Talks About 'I Must Betray You'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Feb 2022 16:11:00 +0000

Ruta Sepetys writes Y.A. historical fiction that draws plenty of adult readers as well. Her new novel, “I Must Betray You,” is about a Romanian teenager who is blackmailed to become an informer for a Communist regime. On this week’s podcast, Sepetys talks about why she turned her focus to the epochal events of 1989, and about what she wants readers to see in them.

“What I want to get across is the strength and fortitude of the Romanian people, particularly the young people,” Sepetys says. “Oftentimes what we don’t think about is that these authoritarian regimes or totalitarian regimes, they often are disassembled from within. And that’s what happened here. And it was the young people, on Dec. 21, who took to the streets, completely unarmed, and in some cases were attacking tanks with their bare hands. They put themselves in harm’s way. The courage, it blows my mind. And the leader gunned them down, until the military switched sides and sided with the people.”

The novelist Jami Attenberg visits the podcast to talk about her first memoir, “I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home.” Having written about fictional characters for so long, Attenberg says it was initially a challenge to make herself the central figure.

“It was really hard at first because I couldn’t see myself in that way,” she says. “At some point I did have to make a decision of which version of myself I was going to show to the world, because there are so many versions that are possible.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world, and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“The Black Prince” by Iris Murdoch

“Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk

“Death Be Not Proud” by John Gunther

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Imani Perry Talks About 'South to America'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 21:30:52 +0000

Imani Perry’s new book, “South to America,” joins a tradition of books that travel the South to find keys to the United States: its foundations, its changes and its tensions. Perry, who was born in Alabama, approaches the task from a variety of angles, and discusses some of them on this week’s podcast.

“It includes personal stories,” Perry says. “It is a book about encounters. It is a book about the encounter with history but also with human beings. And as part of it, self-discovery, to try to understand why a Southern identity is so centrally important to me, and why it’s so centrally important to the formation of this country.”

Oliver Roeder visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “Seven Games,” a history of checkers, backgammon, chess, Go, poker, Scrabble and bridge that also asks why we play.

“The simplest answer is, they’re fun,” Roeder says. “We enjoy playing them as a pastime. Another answer is, they’re practice. Games are very simplified, distilled models of the real world in which we live. So for example, a game like poker allows us to practice dealing with uncertainty and hidden information. We don’t know our opponents’ cards. And of course, we see situations like that in real life all the time.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world, and Dwight Garner and Alexandra Jacobs talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“The Betrayal of Anne Frank” by Rosemary Sullivan

“Devil House” by John Darnielle

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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The Chinese Language Revolution

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 21:02:40 +0000

Jing Tsu’s new book, “Kingdom of Characters,” is about the long and concerted efforts of linguists, activists and others to adapt Chinese writing to the modern world, so that it could be used in everything from typewriters and telegraphs to artificial intelligence and automation. On this week’s podcast, Tsu talks about that revolution, from its roots to the present day.

“The story of the Chinese script revolution and how it came to modernize is really a story about China and the west,” she says. “Because without the Jesuit missionaries first coming to China in the 16th century, and trying to understand what the Chinese language was — the Chinese didn’t really see their language any differently than the way they’ve always seen it. So what happened was, as these Western technologies came in, along with imperialism and colonial dominance, China had to confront that it had to either play the game or be completely shut out. So this was a long process, an arduous process, of how to get itself into the infrastructure of global communication technology.”

Kathryn Schulz visits the podcast to talk about “Lost and Found,” her new memoir about losing her father and falling in love.

“It is, I think, the closest I could come to the book I wanted to write,” Schulz says. “The gap between what you want to do and what you are able to do is always enormous, and the struggle for writers is to close it to the best of your abilities. But kind of unusually for me, I did have a very clear sense of this book from the beginning.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Small Things Like These” by Claire Keegan

“2666” by Roberto Bolaño

“The Anomaly” by Hervé Le Tellier

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Robert Gottlieb on ‘Garbo’ and ‘Babbitt’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 17:13:26 +0000

The writer and editor Robert Gottlieb does double duty on this week’s podcast. He talks about the life and career of Sinclair Lewis, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of “Babbitt,” Lewis’s best-selling novel about the narrow-mindedness and conformity of middle-class America in the first half of the 20th century. But first, he talks about his own new book, “Garbo,” a biography of the movie star Greta Garbo, whose impact on the culture was matched by the sense of mystery that surrounded her.

“I understood the power of the impact, but I didn’t really understand — because I hadn’t been seeing her movies, I was too young — I didn’t really understand what she was on the screen and how she got to the screen in the first place. So as usual, it was curiosity that led me to write about her,” Gottlieb says. “No one had ever seemed like her before, and no one has ever seemed like her since. So to trace what those qualities were became the subject of the book.

Carl Bernstein visits the podcast to discuss his new memoir, “Chasing History.” The book is about a time before Bernstein and Bob Woodward became household names for their Watergate reporting. Subtitled “A Kid in the Newsroom,” Bernstein’s memoir focuses on the years 1960 to 1965, when he worked at The Evening Star in Washington, then the chief rival of The Washington Post. He was first hired as a copyboy when he was only 16.

“I was spending a lot of time at the pool hall,” Bernstein says of his life before he got the job. “I was getting terrible grades in school. I was working Saturdays at a low-rent department store in a bad part of town.” At the newspaper, he saw a clearer future. “The greatest reporters of their time, many of them were in this newsroom. And I saw what they were doing, and I studied what they were doing and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Jennifer Szalai and Molly Young talk about the books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

Books about Stoicism

“How Civil Wars Start” by Barbara F. Walter

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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The Second Annual Listeners’ Questions Episode

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Jan 2022 16:19:51 +0000

Throughout the year, we hear from many of you, and are always glad when we do. From time to time, we try to answer some of your questions on the podcast. This week, for the second time, we dedicate an entire episode to doing just that. Some of the many questions addressed this week:

Who are literature’s one-hit wonders?
What are some of our favorite biographies?
What are empowering novels about women in midlife?
How do we assign books to reviewers?
Who are writers that deserve more attention?
How does the practice of discounted books work?

Providing the answers are the book critic Dwight Garner, the editors Lauren Christensen, MJ Franklin and John Williams, and the reporters Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris. Pamela Paul is the host.

We mention many more books than usual on this episode. Here’s a list for reference:

“A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole

“Gilead,” by Marilynne Robinson

“The Master and Margarita,” by Mikhail Bulgakov

“The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt

“The Secret History,” by Donna Tartt

“Natural Opium,” by Diane Johnson

“In Trouble Again,” by Redmond O’Hanlon

“Into the Heart of Borneo,” by Redmond O’Hanlon

“Venice,” by Jan Morris

“On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac

“Minor Characters,” by Joyce Johnson

“The Life of Samuel Johnson,” by James Boswell

“William James,” by Robert D. Richardson

“Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley,” by Peter Guralnick

“Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley,” by Peter Guralnick

“Samuel Pepys,” by Claire Tomalin

“No One Here Gets Out Alive,” by Jerry Hopkins

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” by Paul Elie

“Virginia Woolf,” by Hermione Lee

“The Stone Angel,” by Margaret Laurence

“Memento Mori,” by Muriel Spark

“The Friend,” by Sigrid Nunez

“What Are You Going Through,” by Sigrid Nunez

“The Journals of John Cheever”

“A Manual for Cleaning Women,” by Lucia Berlin

“The Blood of the Lamb,” by Peter De Vries

“Go Tell It on the Mountain,” by James Baldwin

“Sula,” by Toni Morrison

“Lot,” by Bryan Washington

“Little Fires Everywhere,” by Celeste Ng

“The Yellow House,” by Sarah M. Broom

“Sing, Unburied, Sing,” by Jesmyn Ward

“The Topeka School,” by Ben Lerner

“Modern Lovers,” by Emma Straub

The fiction of Randall Kenan

“Popisho,” by Leone Ross

“Detransition, Baby” by Torrey Peters

“The Magician,” by Colm Toibin

“When We Cease to Understand the World,” by Benjamín Labatut

“Say Nothing,” by Patrick Radden Keefe

“Empire of Pain,” by Patrick Radden Keefe

“Bad Blood,” by John Carreyrou

The poetry of Emily Dickinson

The poetry of Ada Limón

“Piranesi,” by Susanna Clarke

“Klara and the Sun,” by Kazuo Ishiguro

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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David Sedaris’s Diaries and Paul McCartney’s Songs

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 19:43:08 +0000

David Sedaris’s second volume of diaries, “A Carnival of Snackery,” covers the years 2003 to 2020. On this week's podcast, he talks about the diaries, and about being on the road again — we caught him in Montana, a stop on his sprawling reading and signing tour.

“I’ve been surprised by what people are willing to — ‘You want us to show proof of vaccination? OK, we’ll do it. You want us to wear a mask the entire time? OK, we’ll do it,’” Sedaris says. “And then the book signings have lasted as long as they always did, so people are still willing to wait in line. I’ve really been touched by that. And I’m willing to make whatever sacrifices I need to.” He added: “I’m just so grateful to be out again.”

The poet Paul Muldoon visits the podcast to talk about his work editing Paul McCartney’s two-volume collection “The Lyrics.” He says becoming involved with the project was an easy choice.

“Through his career, as a Beatle, of course, and then with Wings and his solo career, he’s been a force in my life and certainly in the lives of many people who were even vaguely sentient through the 1960s and since,” Muldoon says of McCartney. “What’s fascinating about his career with the Beatles is that they were, of course, very much of their moment, they were defined by their moment — including, at the risk of sounding a bit banal — the optimism that was associated in the U.K. with the postwar period. But of course, extraordinarily, they went on to influence their moment also; they came to define their moment, and to define the rest of us, actually. It was a very interesting phenomenon. So yeah, I was thrilled to be involved, and continue to be thrilled to be involved.”

Muldoon also talks about, and reads from, his new poetry collection, “Howdie-Skelp.”

Also on this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Middlemarch” by George Eliot

“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer

“The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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The Life of a Jazz Age Madam

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 18:29:15 +0000

In 2007, Debby Applegate won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Most Famous Man in America,” her biography of the 19th-century preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. Applegate’s new book, “Madam,” is another biography, of a very different subject: Polly Adler, who ran a brothel and had many famous friends during the Jazz Age in New York City. On this week’s podcast, Applegate describes the challenges of running a business in the underworld.

“You have to depend on your reputation,” Applegate says. “You can’t advertise, you can’t sell your product in a normal market square. So you have to cultivate your own kind of word of mouth and your own kind of notoriety. Polly worked out of small but luxurious apartments that were hidden away and constantly moving, so she could stay one step ahead of the cops or other crooks. What Polly did was use that small town but big city of Manhattan, which was really thriving in those years between World War I and World War II, and she became a critical player — a ‘big shot,’ as the gossip columnists called her.”

Matthew Pearl visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “The Taking of Jemima Boone,” about the kidnapping of Daniel Boone’s daughter in 1776. Pearl is well known as a novelist, and he says that this work of nonfiction has many of the elements he looks for in any good story.

“Jemima is such a strong and incredible character to work with,” he says. She was one of the Boones’ 10 children, though “not all of them survived into childhood or adulthood, and Jemima was one who was very close with her father, in particular, and she had really her father’s spirit of persistence and independence.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world, and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails”

“Accidental Gods” by Anna Della Subin

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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A New Oral History of HBO

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 19:23:45 +0000

James Andrew Miller has written a series of oral histories about some our biggest cultural institutions: “Saturday Night Live,” Creative Artists Agency and ESPN. His new book, “Tinderbox,” follows HBO from its start in 1972 through its transformative “Sopranos” years and up to the present day.

“One of the things that struck me was just how emotional people were,” Miller says on this week’s podcast. “First of all, HBO was a place that people didn’t date, they married. There were people that were there for 20 years, 25 years, 30, 35 years. They stayed there for their careers, and they were very, very wedded to it. I’m not bragging about this, but there were at least — more than — a dozen people who cried during interviews, who called me back the next day and said, ‘Now I have PTSD revisiting some of what I went through.’” He says he learned that “this was not just a place that people checked in on a time clock and left; it was like a tsunami that washed over their lives.”

Mayukh Sen visits the podcast to talk about his new book, “Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America.”

“Five of the seven women whom I focus on in this book are no longer with us,” Sen says, “and in the absence of their presence I really wanted to understand how they spoke and how they wanted to present themselves to the world. And I really wanted to find them speaking in their own words. So the way I sought that out was to find their memoirs, or cookbooks with memoiristic passages or any interviews they gave throughout their lifetime that really presented them speaking without that kind of filter.”

Also on this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Now Beacon, Now Sea” by Christopher Sorrentino

“A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles

“Ghost Light” by Frank Rich

“Fairyland” by Alysia Abbott

“Life Inside” by Mindy Lewis

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Talking About the 10 Best Books of 2021

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Dec 2021 17:03:42 +0000

Earlier this week, several editors at The New York Times got together (virtually) for a live taping of the podcast to discuss the Book Review’s list of the year’s 10 Best Books. (If you haven’t seen the list yet and don’t want spoilers before listening, the choices are revealed one by one on the podcast.)

In addition to the 10 Best Books, the editors discuss on this episode some of their favorite works from the year that didn’t make the list. Here are those additional books the editors discuss:

“The Magician” by Thomas Mann

“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro

“Razorblade Tears” by S.A. Cosby

“Wayward” by Dana Spiotta

“Dirty Work” by Eyal Press

“Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney

“The Life of the Mind” by Christine Smallwood

“Crossroads” by Jonathan Franzen

“The Prophets” by Robert Jones Jr.

“Our Country Friends” by Gary Shteyngart

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Ann Patchett on ‘These Precious Days’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 16:19:24 +0000

The novelist and Nashville bookstore owner Ann Patchett’s latest book is a collection of essays, “These Precious Days.” It’s anchored by the long title piece, which originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine, about her intimate friendship with a woman who moved to Nashville for cancer treatment just as the coronavirus pandemic started. On this week’s podcast, Patchett talks about the collection, and about where writing essays fits into her creative life.

“I write essays while I’m writing novels too sometimes, but it’s wonderful to have something you can finish,” she says. “I can start a novel and it will take me three years sometimes to finish it, and no one reads it as I’m writing it. So if I write an essay, it’s almost like sending up a flare saying: I’m still here, I’m still alive. I’m a very project-oriented person, and somehow writing an essay feels closer to, say, making Thanksgiving dinner than it does writing a novel. It’s like, I’m going to do this and it’s going to take me a couple of days. But it’s not going to take me years.”

Corey Brettschneider, a professor of political science at Brown University, visits the podcast to talk about the Penguin Liberty series, a group of books he’s editing about modern issues in liberty and constitutional rights. He says he wants the project to be used in schools, but also hopes it will find a much broader audience as well.

“I certainly would hope that professors would use this, but really I think if we’re going to continue on as a democracy — and I don’t think that, as we learn about Jan. 6, that this is hyperbole, I think that we are under threat when it comes to a very different idea of what government is supposed to look like that’s prevailing in much of the public right now. And how are we to combat it?” he says. “I think in order to really take seriously the idea that we’re going to defend liberty in any defensible, robust sense, we have to know what it is, and that means that citizens have to think about these things.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner and Alexandra Jacobs talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941-1995” edited by Anna von Planta

“On Consolation” by Michael Ignatieff

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Ross Douthat on Dealing With Lyme Disease

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 19:52:01 +0000

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is used to writing about politics and ideas at play in the broader world, but with his new book, “The Deep Places,” he has written a memoir about his own harrowing experience with Lyme disease. Given the mysteries surrounding the disease, Douthat’s story is also very much about his interactions with — and outside of — the medical establishment.

“I was relatively open-minded at an intellectual level to the possibility that there are diseases that existing medical science doesn’t know how to treat,” Douthat says on this week’s podcast. “What I was not prepared for was actually just how bad these diseases could be, and also just how extreme, when you have something like this, you can be willing to get. Eventually I followed what is the outsider medical approach to treating chronic Lyme.”

Elisabeth Egan, an editor at the Book Review, visits the podcast to discuss her latest pick for our Group Text, “O Beautiful,” by Jung Yun. The novel is about a Korean American woman who has traded a modeling career for journalism. She inherits an assignment in the oil fields of North Dakota from a former teacher and love interest.

“She gets there and quickly discovers that what Richard, her professor, has set up for her isn’t really the story that she wants to tell,” Egan says. “And she starts to unravel her own story, and it becomes a novel about insiders and outsiders, and about this town that’s completely ill equipped for this influx of somewhat desperate people who are there to work and live in really, really unpleasant and sometimes dangerous conditions.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and Andrew Lavallee talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Resuscitation of a Hanged Man” by Denis Johnson

“Our Country Friends” by Gary Shteyngart

“The Overstory” by Richard Powers

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Alan Cumming Talks About ‘Baggage’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 17:52:39 +0000

The actor and author Alan Cumming was happily surprised that his best-selling first memoir, “Not My Father’s Son,” inspired many readers who had suffered their own childhood traumas. But he was disappointed, he says on this week’s podcast, when people characterized him as having “triumphed” or “overcome” his adversity. “I haven’t, I haven’t, I absolutely haven’t,” he says. And he stresses that point in his new memoir, “Baggage.”

“We all have baggage, we all have trauma, we all have something,” he says. “But the worst thing to do is to pretend it hasn’t happened. to deny it or to think that you’re over it. And that’s what I felt was in danger of happening with the way that my first book was reacted to. So in this I’m trying to say: You never get over it, it’s with you all the time.” He adds: “You have to be very vigilant about your trauma. If you deny it, it will come back and bite you in the bum.”

Allen C. Guelzo visits the podcast to discuss “Robert E. Lee: A Life,” his new biography of the Confederate leader.

“Since it had been at least 25 years since another serious biography of Lee had been published — this was by Emory Thomas, in 1995 — it seemed to me that the time was right to begin a re-evaluation of Lee, and especially to ask questions about Lee from someone like myself coming from what was, quite frankly, a Northern perspective,” Guelzo says. “After all, all the books I’ve written up to this point have been about Abraham Lincoln and the Union cause in the war, and I thought it might be productive to look at Robert E. Lee through the other end of the telescope.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Alexandra Jacobs and Molly Young talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“Our Country Friends” by Gary Shteyngart

“Solid Ivory” by James Ivory

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Huma Abedin Talks About 'Both/And'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Nov 2021 17:20:40 +0000

In her new memoir, “Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds,” Huma Abedin writes about her Muslim faith, her years working alongside Hillary Clinton and, of course, her relationship with her estranged husband, the former Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner. On this week’s podcast, Abedin says that writing the book was “the most therapeutic thing I could have possibly done,” and that writing about her marriage and its time in the tabloids gave her perspective.

“Now that I am on the other side, I can say with confidence: I don’t think what I went through is all that singular,” she says. “What’s different is that I had to go through it on the front page of the news. So I know there is a sisterhood and brotherhood of people out there in the world that have had to endure betrayal and have had to figure out how to move on with their lives. And these are the conversations that I still am called into; the people who stop me on the street and ask me a simple question: ‘When does it stop hurting?’ ‘Should I stay?’ ‘When do I leave?’”

Gary Shteyngart visits the podcast to discuss his new novel, “Our Country Friends,” about seven friends (and one nemesis) spending time together in one Hudson Valley property during the early months of the pandemic. The novel’s drama, Shteyngart says, comes from people confronting their “deepest selves,” as Chekhov’s characters did when they left Moscow for rural surroundings.

“When you’re stuck in the countryside, no matter where you are, life just goes so much slower than it does in the city, and you’re able to really begin to think about your place in the world,” Shteyngart says. “There’s definitely a feeling of time slowing down and you’re able to ascertain your true relationships. If you love someone, you love them more in the country. If you hate them, you hate them more in the country. Everything is turned up to 11.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Dave Kim and Sarah Lyall talk about what they’re reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Man in the Holocene” by Max Frisch

“A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle

“Perfect Little Children” by Sophie Hannah

“The Flight Attendant” by Chris Bohjalian

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Katie Couric Talks About 'Going There'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 18:56:36 +0000

In her new memoir, “Going There,” Katie Couric writes about her career as a host of “Today and the first woman to anchor the “CBS Evening News” solo. She also, as the title suggests, writes about difficult personal subjects, including the deaths of her father and of her first husband. On this week’s podcast, she says the most difficult part of the book to write was about her former “Today” colleague Matt Lauer and his downfall over allegations of sexual misconduct.

“My feelings were so complicated, and they definitely evolved over time,” Couric says. “I felt like I was almost doing my own therapy sessions. I did original reporting — which sounds so pretentious — but I actually revisited some people who were affected by his behavior, and it was really, really helpful. And I talked to a lot of experts about this. I reached out to people who had written extensively about men in power. This was at the time it happened, because I was really trying to make sense of it in my head. I talked to gender studies people, I talked to lawyers who have represented victims. It was a real mission for me, and a lot of soul-searching honestly.”

John McWhorter visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

“I think that there is a certain kind of woke person who is caught in a frame of mind where the idea is that how you show that you’re a good person is by showing that you are woke — that you’re aware, for example, that racism exists, and it’s not just the N-word and people burning crosses on people’s lawns,” McWhorter says. “You want to show that you’re aware of this. But it’s narrowed to the point where a certain kind of person thinks that showing one’s awareness of that is the key, regardless of what you prescribe’s effects upon actual Black people. So although it’s the last thing these people would suspect about themselves, They do not think of Black people as more important than their own showing that they are not racist. That is a woke racist, as far as I’m concerned.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed this week by The Times’s critics:

“The End of Bias” by Jessica Nordell

“Colorization” by Wil Haygood

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One Factory and the Bigger Story It Tells

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 19:23:12 +0000

In “American Made,” Farah Stockman writes about the downfall of manufacturing employment in the United States by focusing on the lives of workers at one Indianapolis factory that was relocated to Mexico. Stockman, a member of The New York Times editorial board, talks about the book on this week’s podcast.

“I really think we’ve seen unions in a death spiral,” she says. “And part of the reason is globalization. You had so many people who fought for these manufacturing jobs to be good-paying jobs, and decent jobs that you could raise a family on. They didn’t used to be, but they were after the labor movement had a long struggle and a long fight. And as soon as we start seeing pensions and health care and decent wages, and as soon as Blacks and women start getting that stuff, now factories can move away. They can go to other countries. And it really undercut unions’ ability to demand things and to strike. And you saw a lot less appetite among workers for asking for stuff like that, because now everybody just has to beg those factories to stay.”

Benjamín Labatut visits the podcast to discuss his book “When We Cease to Understand the World,” a combination of fact and fiction about some of the most ground-shifting discoveries in physics. Labatut explains why he gave himself license to imagine the lives and thoughts of some of the scientists featured — Einstein, Schrödinger and Heisenberg among them.

“What I’m trying to do is for people to understand just how mad these ideas seemed at the time to the very people who discovered them,” Labatut says. “And I had to use these characters for people to get a sense of how brutal the beauty was that these men were seeing for the first time.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Gal Beckerman and Lauren Christensen talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Dirty Work” by Eyal Press

“Invisible Child” by Andrea Elliott

“Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney

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Thomas Mallon on the Career of Jonathan Franzen

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 17:55:39 +0000

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Crossroads,” has generated a lot of discussion, as his work tends to do. The novelist and critic Thomas Mallon, who reviewed “Crossroads” for us, is on the podcast this week to talk about the book and to place it in the context of Franzen’s entire career.

“He is fundamentally a social novelist, and his basic unit of society is the family,” Mallon says. “Always families are important in Franzen, and we move outward from the family into the business, into the town, into whatever the larger units are. His novels are likely to remain as indicators of what the world was like at the time he was writing. This new novel is a little bit different in that he’s going back 50 years. The Nixon era is now, definitely, historical novel material.”

Joshua Ferris visits the podcast to talk about his new novel, “A Calling for Charlie Barnes.”

“It’s basically about a guy who has floundered all his life until the moment that he gets pancreatic cancer,” Ferris says. “His diagnosis is a little back and forth, he’s not really being honest with too many people in his life about what’s going on. But eventually this rather thundering and life-changing disease happens to him. He’s got to deal with it, he’s got to get an operation and go through chemo and all the rest of it. And he changes his life. That’s sort of the plot of the book, I suppose. But it’s narrated by a tricky fellow who is related to him and determines the narrative as much as Charlie himself.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and our new book critics, Molly Young and Alexandra Jacobs, introduce themselves and talk about their approaches to literary criticism. Pamela Paul is the host.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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Andrea Elliott on ‘Invisible Child’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Oct 2021 20:29:19 +0000

In 2013, the front page of The New York Times devoted five straight days to the story of Dasani, an 11-year-old Black girl who lived in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Now, Andrea Elliott, the reporter of that series, has published her first book, “Invisible Child,” which tells the full story of Dasani and her family up to the present day. On this week’s podcast, Elliott discusses how she came to focus her reporting on Dasani.

“I’ve always believed as a journalist that the story shows itself to you, and you just have to do the work of being there and being present for as long as possible until it becomes more clear,” Elliott says. “In the very beginning, I had three families I was following at that shelter. And I had this approach that a lot of journalists take, that you need to capture three different families to give a sense of the spectrum of experience. But what I think becomes more important to the reader is to be able to identify deeply with one story, one protagonist, and follow that person.” Dasani became that person, in part, Elliott says, because “she was somebody who, at a very young age, could articulate in a moving and profound way her experience. And that’s a rare trait even in adults.”

The stand-up comedian, actress, producer and publisher Phoebe Robinson visits the podcast to discuss her new book of essays, “Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes.”

“Book writing is a completely different style of writing than stand-up,” Robinson says. “Stand-up, there’s a rhythm and you’re aware of the laughs and how they’re hitting. With a book you can really have more flavor with it; you can be vulnerable, you can slow it down, have some down beats, you could be really funny. I wouldn’t say it’s difficult to write stand-up versus book writing. They both have their challenges.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“The Diary of a Country Priest” by Georges Bernanos

“The Magician” by Colm Toibin

“The Outlaw Ocean” by Ian Urbina

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Richard Powers on ‘Bewilderment’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Oct 2021 18:28:54 +0000

In “Bewilderment,” Richard Powers’s first novel since he won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Overstory,” an astrobiologist named Theo Byrne looks for life on other planets while struggling to raise his highly sensitive 9-year-old son, Robin. On this week’s podcast, Powers compares Theo’s work in the galaxy with his relationship on the ground.

“If there are all of these millions of exoplanets out there are and they are all subject to radically different conditions, what would life look like in these conditions that are so very different from Earth?” Power says that a similar question “is also the preoccupation of most literature. Books themselves are empathy machines and travels to other planets. They’re ways that we have of participating in sensibilities that are not ours. So when Robin asks this question — which is bigger, outer space or inner? — that question of where are we going, who are we, why are we the way we are, gets turned inward, to this question of how do I understand someone who’s so profoundly different from myself? And in that way, travel to other planets always becomes travel to other people.”

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers visits the podcast to discuss her best-selling debut novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Among other subjects, Jeffers talks about why the book’s main character, Ailey Pearl Garfield, who comes from a long family line of physicians, becomes a historian herself.

“It’s a gesture to the way that I grew up learning about African American history,” she says. “I’m an English professor, a creative writing professor, but when I was a little girl I would sit up underneath the old people. I never really was a child that liked to play with other children. I would sort of scoot into a corner so I wouldn’t be noticed and I would listen to the old people talk about the way they grew up, growing up in segregation, growing up in Jim Crow, and then some of the stories that they remembered from the old people who had been born into slavery, like my great grandma Mandy Napier, so it had a great impact on me, and I think that’s why I made Ailey an eventual historian.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamín Labatut

“On Juneteenth” by Annette Gordon-Reed

“Congratulations, by the Way” by George Saunders

“A Motor-Flight Through France” by Edith Wharton

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Randall Kennedy on 'Say It Loud!'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 17:26:51 +0000

The Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy’s new book, “Say It Loud!,” collects 29 of his essays. Kennedy’s opinions about the subjects listed in the book’s subtitle — race, law, history and culture — tend to be complex, and he’s not afraid to change his mind. He says on the podcast that there’s “no shame” in admitting you’re wrong, and that he does just that in the book when he finds it appropriate.

“I thought that the United States was much further down the road to racial decency than it is,” Kennedy says. “Donald Trump obviously trafficked in racial resentment, racial prejudice in a way that I thought was securely locked in the past. This has had a big influence on me. I used to be a quite confident racial optimist. I am not any longer. I’m still in the optimistic camp — I do think that we shall overcome — but I’m uneasy. I’m uneasy in a way that was simply not the case, let’s say, 10 years ago.”

Mary Roach visits the podcast to discuss her new book, “Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.” It’s impossible to choose just one moment to highlight from this interview, which includes but is not limited to the following subjects: caterpillars called into court, moose crash test dummies, and how to distinguish (and why you would want to) between a real and fake tiger penis.

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Jennifer Szalai and John Williams talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the critics this week:

“The Contrarian” by Max Chafkin

“Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa

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Colson Whitehead on 'Harlem Shuffle'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 18:39:28 +0000

Colson Whitehead’s new novel, “Harlem Shuffle,” revolves around Ray Carney, a furniture retailer in Harlem in the 1960s with a sideline in crime. It’s a relatively lighthearted novel, certainly compared to “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” Whitehead’s two previous novels, each of which won the Pulitzer Prize.

“I usually do a lighter book, then a heavier book, but I felt compelled to write ‘The Nickel Boys’ at the time that I did,” Whitehead says on this week’s podcast. “I knew that in the crime genre, there’s more room for jokes. There’s just a lot more room for play. So I could exercise my humor muscle again. And then immediately, Carney … I wanted him to win, as soon as he appeared on the page. He was someone who was not as determined by circumstances — slavery, Jim Crow — as the characters in those previous two novels. And he pulls off some capers. And I think we — or at least I was rooting for him. So immediately the tone was different, and I gave myself to it.”

Colm Toibin visits the podcast to talk about his new novel, “The Magician,” based on the life of the great German writer Thomas Mann. Toibin says that the book is not an attempt to “inhabit” Mann, or to fully understand him, which is impossible with such a complex person.

“It’s not an attempt to pin him down, so that by the end of the book you really know him,” Toibin says. “I’m as interested in his unknowability as I am in attempting to draw a very clear portrait of him. I think it’s an important question. I often hear novelists saying, ‘I felt I really knew my character.’ And I often feel the opposite. I often feel my character has become even more evasive the further attempts I have made to enter their spirit.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“A Time of Gifts” by Patrick Leigh Fermor

“Latecomers” by Anita Brookner

“The Makioka Sisters” by Junichiro Tanizaki

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Brandon Taylor on the Sally Rooney Phenomenon

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 18:57:31 +0000

The novelist Brandon Taylor, who has generated his own buzz with his debut novel, “Real Life,” and a collection of stories, “Filthy Animals,” visits the podcast to discuss the much-discussed work of Sally Rooney. Taylor recently reviewed her third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” On the podcast, he describes Rooney’s writing as an “intense, melancholic tractor beam.”

“She has this really great, tactile metaphorical sense, but it’s never overworked,” he says. “Her style is so clean. That is the word I come to most often in describing her style. It is so clean, so pristine.” Like her two previous books, this one is fueled by the vexations of intimate relationships. “Ultimately, if you’re a Sally Rooney fan, I think you’ll love this novel,” Taylor says. “And if you’re a Sally Rooney skeptic, I think she will acknowledge your concerns but maybe not answer them in full.”

Another Rooney, David Rooney, visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks.”

“There’s something about clocks and watches,” he says.” They have more meaning to many people than other artifacts. I wasn’t quite sure why. I was trying to get behind the faces of clocks and watches, to understand not so much how they work — although that’s fascinating — but what they mean, and what they’ve always meant, through history, across cultures.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Jennifer Szalai and John Williams talk about books that have been recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“The Failed Promise” by Robert S. Levine

“The War for Gloria” by Atticus Lish

“The Magician” by Colm Toibin

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Andrew Sullivan on Being ‘Out on a Limb’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Sep 2021 21:40:37 +0000

“Out on a Limb” is a selection of Andrew Sullivan’s essays from the past 32 years of American history. On this week’s podcast, Sullivan talks about the book and his feelings about some of the very contentious public arguments in which he’s been involved.

“You’re never at a moment of finality in politics or intellectual life. You’re always just about to be proven wrong again,” Sullivan says. “I have developed a very thick skin. You have to. I was very controversial in the gay rights movement very early on. The case for marriage equality was bitterly opposed by some gay activists, and I was targeted and picketed by gay people sometimes, for my first book. So I’ve always accepted that that’s part of the price. I am a sensitive person and it does hurt my feelings, obviously, but I think my answer is that it doesn’t matter what they say about you as long as it isn’t true. And if it’s true, hear it, take it in, try and figure out what insight they have about you and change. If it isn’t, forget it.”

Leila Slimani’s new novel, “In the Country of Others,” is the first installment of a planned trilogy loosely based on the lives of the author’s grandparents. On this episode of the podcast, Slimani talks about why she’s writing the autobiographical material as fiction.

“Imagination is a great power that we have,” she says. “Even if my family is interesting in certain ways, it’s not as interesting as I wanted. So I need to add other things, and I need to feel completely free. I don’t really want to tell about reality but about what fascinates me.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Lauren Christensen, Andrew Lavallee and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Intimacies” by Katie Kitamura

“A Visitation of Spirits” by Randall Kenan

“Loop” by Brenda Lozano

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A.O. Scott Talks About William Maxwell

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 16:59:32 +0000

A.O. Scott, The Times’s co-chief film critic, returns to the Book Review’s podcast this week to discuss the work of William Maxwell, the latest subject in Scott’s essay series The Americans, about writers who give a sense of the country’s complex identity. In his novels and stories, Maxwell frequently returned to small-town Illinois, and to, as Scott describes it, the “particular civilization and culture and society that he knew growing up.”

“In so many of these books,” Scott says, “he was trying in a sense to figure out himself by figuring how where he had come from. It was inexhaustible. The thing that’s really remarkable about his revisiting his family, his family’s story and the town where they lived is just how many layers are there. In what seems like a simple, small, provincial place, just how much depth and complexity and comedy and pathos live there.”

Eyal Press visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “Dirty Work,” about the lives of workers in slaughterhouses, correctional facilities and other morally fraught places. Press says that the people who do this work make inequality one of the book’s primary themes.

“One of the messages of the book is that it’s very rarely the privileged and the powerful,” Press says. “It’s more likely to be people at the bottom of the social ladder, people with fewer choices and opportunities, who are thrust into these ethically troubling roles that they carry out in a sense on society’s behalf and in our name.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai discuss books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman

“Playlist for the Apocalypse” by Rita Dove

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Life at Seven Miles Below the Sea

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 19:06:47 +0000

In her new book, “The Brilliant Abyss,” Helen Scales writes about the largely unseen realm of the deepest parts of the ocean. On this week’s podcast, she talks about the life down there — and how long it took us to realize there was any at all.

“It wasn’t so long ago, maybe 200 years ago, that most people — scientists, the brightest minds we had — assumed that life only went down as far as sunlight reaches, so the first 600 feet or so,” Scales says. “But what’s so fascinating is that life does go all the way to the very, very bottom; down to seven miles, which is the deepest point, just about. And there are ways in which life has found adaptations to all of these crazy, extreme conditions in the deep, and that’s what we’re really doing a lot of the time, as marine biologists working in the deepest, is finding that stuff and asking the question: ‘How are you here?’”

Rebecca Donner visits the podcast to discuss her new book, “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days,” which recounts the story of Mildred Harnack, Donner’s great-great-aunt, an American woman executed in 1943 for being a member of the German resistance to the Nazis during World War II.

“She most definitely saw herself as a resistance fighter, and she certainly did not see herself as a spy,” Donner says. “She engaged in acts of espionage in order to undermine the Nazi regime, but she never met with a control officer, she never accepted money. She worked in an unofficial capacity.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Gal Beckerman and John Williams talk about what they’re reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman

“Ghettoside” by Jill Leovy

“Last Best Hope” by George Packer

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Dana Spiotta Talks About ‘Wayward’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 16:16:57 +0000

In Dana Spiotta’s new novel, “Wayward,” a woman named Sam buys a dilapidated house in a neglected neighborhood in Syracuse, leaving her husband and her daughter in order to face down big midlife questions.

“She is what we used to call a housewife, a stay-at-home mom,” Spiotta says on this week’s podcast, describing her protagonist. “She has one daughter, she’s married to a lawyer. It’s not an unhappy marriage. I wanted to avoid a lot of clichés with her. I didn’t want it to be an unhappy marriage that was the problem. And I didn’t want him to leave her for a younger woman. I didn’t want her to be worried about her looks. She never thinks about wrinkles or her looks very much in the book. She doesn’t even look in the mirror anymore. She’s not concerned about that.”

What she’s concerned about is living a more honest and purposeful life, and the novel follows her efforts to do that.

Ash Davidson visits the podcast to discuss her debut novel, “Damnation Spring,” set in a tightknit logging community in Northern California in the late 1970s. Davidson describes how the book was partly inspired by her parents’ memories of living in the area.

“I grew up listening to my parents’ stories of this place, and it is the most beautiful place they have ever lived, and that beauty is also the source of its own destruction,” she says. “So those stories became almost like a mythology of my childhood, and I think I always kept a folder of them in my head, where I was filing them away. I used a lot of them as scaffolding for the novel, in the early years of writing it. Gradually, as time went on and the story got strong enough to stand on its own, I was able to strip away that scaffolding of their stories and let the fictional narrative shine through.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Elisabeth Egan and John Williams talk about what they’re reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Emerson” by Robert D. Richardson Jr.

“Transcendent Kingdom” by Yaa Gyasi

“The Post-Birthday World” by Lionel Shriver

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Katie Kitamura Talks About ‘Intimacies’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Aug 2021 18:34:42 +0000

The slightly directionless, unnamed narrator of Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel, “Intimacies,” takes a job as a translator at an international criminal court. On this week’s podcast, Kitamura talks about the novel, including her realization about the book’s title.

“‘Intimacy’ as a word is something that we think of as desirable, and something that we seek out, in our relationships in particular, but also in our friendships and in all the people that we care about,” Kitamura says. “But I think it’s a plural for a reason, which is that there’s a lot of different kinds of intimacies in the novel, and a lot of them are not desired, they’re imposed on the narrator. It was only when I finished writing the novel that I realized that there are multiple incidents of sexual harassment, sexual intimidation in it, sprinkled throughout. Afterward, I understood it, because a novel is really about power, and sexual harassment is of course about power, rather than desire. So it made sense that there would be these little negotiations and these trespasses and these forced forms of intimacy.”

The acclaimed writer and director James Lapine visits the podcast to talk about “Putting It Together,” his new mix of memoir and oral history about his first collaboration Stephen Sondheim, creating the musical “Sunday in the Park With George.”

“Part of the pleasure in writing the book was rediscovering who I was at the time, because you’re so involved in something — you’re not outside of it — and maybe it takes 35 years to look back at it to realize what was actually going on,” Lapine says. Writing the book was “an excavation of sorts, both of the show and the creative process and what it’s like for someone in my position, as a writer and a director, to do his first Broadway show.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“Until Proven Safe” by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley

“Afterparties” by Anthony Veasna So

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Echoes of a Fairy Tale in a Devastating Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 19:52:10 +0000

Omar El Akkad’s new novel, “What Strange Paradise,” uses some fablelike techniques to comment on the migrant crisis caused by war in the Middle East. El Akkad explains that he thinks of the novel as a reinterpretation of the story of Peter Pan, told as the story of a contemporary child refugee.

“There’s this thing Borges once said about how all literature is tricks, and no matter how clever your tricks are, they eventually get discovered,” El Akkad says. “My tricks are not particularly clever. I lean very hard on inversion. I wanted to take a comforting story that Westerners have been telling their kids for the last hundred years, and I wanted to invert it, to tell a different kind of story.” He continues: “At its core, it’s a book about dueling fantasies: the fantasies of people who want to come to the West because they think it’s a cure for all ills, and the fantasies of people who exist in the West and think of those people as barbarians at the gate. The book takes place at the collision of those two fantasies.”

Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, two reporters at The Times, visit the podcast this week to discuss their new book, “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination,” including how the company makes many of its strategic decisions.

“A lot of people think that a company like this, that’s so sophisticated, that has so many people who have come in with such incredible pedigrees, that they have a plan in mind,” Kang says. “They’re actually, in many cases, doing this on the fly. They’re making a lot of ad hoc decisions.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Emily Eakin and MJ Franklin talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“How the Word Is Passed” by Clint Smith

“Red Comet” by Heather Clark

“Lenin” by Victor Sebestyen

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A Heartbreaking Novel About Mothers, Daughters and Secrets

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 16:22:16 +0000

The latest pick for Group Text, our monthly column for readers and book clubs, is Esther Freud's “I Couldn’t Love You More,” a novel about three generations of women grappling with secrets, shame and an inexorable bond. Elisabeth Egan, an editor at the Book Review and the brains behind Group Text, talks about the novel on this week’s podcast.

“It’s this incredibly powerful story about mothers and daughters,” Egan says, “and also an interesting and really heartbreaking look at what was happening in Ireland at the time that really went on for about 100 years, where the Catholic church ran the — they were like prisons — for women who were in trouble in some way. They forced the women to change their names and to give up their babies.”

Philip D’Anieri visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “The Appalachian Trail: A Biography,” including what drew him to the sprawling subject.

“It’s a place that gives us an opportunity to examine the intersection of the built and the natural,” D’Anieri says. “It’s a place that we think of as natural — it’s the outdoors, you can hike, you can connect with the natural world — but it also had to be built: It needed shelters built, a route had to be determined, the land has to be owned. That tension is something that has always interested me.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and Lauren Christensen talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe

“Intimacies” by Katie Kitamura

“Razorblade Tears” by S.A. Cosby

“The Plot” by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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S.A. Cosby on 'Razorblade Tears'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 15:50:38 +0000

On this week’s podcast, S.A. Cosby says that a writer friend once told him: “I think you’re like the bard of broken men.” In Cosby’s new novel, “Razorblade Tears,” the fathers of two married gay men who have just been murdered team up to track down the killers. Cosby says that the fathers — Ike, who’s Black, and Buddy Lee, who’s white — are familiar to him.

“I grew up with men like Ike and Buddy Lee,” he says. “Maybe not necessarily violent men, but men who were emotionally closed off, who were unable to articulate or communicate their frailties, their feelings. I grew up in an environment where masculinity was all about presentation, was about being ‘tough,’ whatever that means. So when I started out writing the book, I started with these two characters, because the people that I think need to read the book the most are the people like that that I know, the people like that who surround me every day. But even more than that, I fell in love with Ike and Buddy Lee because if these two men can change, then change is possible for anyone.”

Dean Jobb visits the podcast to talk about his new book, “The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer.” The book recounts the crimes of Thomas Neill Cream, a Canadian obstetrician who killed an unknown number of people between the 1870s and 1892, most of them women from marginalized backgrounds.

“There was a lot of madness in what he did, but also some calculating method,” Jobb says. “He never claimed insanity at any of his trials, so there was never any professional assessment of him. He almost seems to have bought into the idea, as one of his medical instructors said, that doctors are godlike; they stand between the living and the dead. And he just seems to have decided that his godlike powers, given to him as a doctor, would be used to decide who would live and who would die.”

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“Dear Miss Metropolitan” by Carolyn Ferrell

“Democracy Rules” by Jan-Werner Müller

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The Lives of Flies

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Jul 2021 18:18:36 +0000

The subtitle of Jonathan Balcombe’s new book, “Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects” leads to the first question on this week’s podcast. Why “successful”?

“Their diversity, for one,” Balcombe says. “There’s over 160,000 described species — and it’s important to add that qualifier, ‘described,’ because it’s estimated there may be about five times that many that are undescribed. Insects make up 80 percent of all animal species on the planet, so that says something right there about how incredibly successful they are, and flies are arguably the most species-rich subset of insects. It’s estimated there’s about 20 million flies on earth at any moment for every human who’s on the earth. And they occupy all seven continents.”

Marjorie Ingall visits the podcast this week to discuss her essay about why she finds it troubling that children’s literature focuses so relentlessly on the Holocaust.

“Just as Black kids deserve more than books about slavery and suffering — they deserve books about Black joy and Black excellence — so too do Jewish kids deserve books that reflect the incredible diversity and often happiness of their lives,” Ingall says. “And I think sometimes we push the Holocaust because we want to tell kids: ‘Look where you come from; look how important it is to be Jewish; look how people died because they were Jewish.’ When we’re talking about children’s books, that is not a way to make kids feel a connection.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; and Elisabeth Egan and Joumana Khatib talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“A Tale for the Time Being” by Ruth Ozeki

“The Lost Child of Philomena Lee” by Martin Sixsmith

“My Family and Other Animals” by Gerald Durrell

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An Outsider Finds Suspense in Hollywood

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Jul 2021 19:42:50 +0000

The actress and thriller writer Catherine Steadman visits the podcast this week to talk about “The Disappearing Act,” her new suspense novel about the absurdities of Hollywood. Steadman was drawn to the idea of setting a story during pilot season, when actors from all over the world descend on Los Angeles once a year and compete for lead roles in new TV series.

“It’s a sort of competitive world where friendships are made really quickly, and people will find their nemesis — someone who looks just like them who keeps snatching away parts from them,” she says. “It’s a very strange atmosphere but it’s very fun. It’s kind of like the Vegas of the acting world. You go there, you cash your chips and you have a roll on the table and see what happens. There’s all these strangers with the same desires and goals, in the same environment, and they really are up against each other. It’s kind of a ‘Hunger Games’ situation.”

Michael Dobbs visits the podcast to talk about his new book, “King Richard,” which finds fresh things to say about President Richard Nixon and Watergate. Dobbs discusses writing about a story that’s been told many times, all in the shadow of perhaps the best-known Watergate book, “All the President’s Men,” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

“That’s the story of two reporters pursing this scandal into the White House and trying to figure out what was going on in the White House,” Dobbs says. “And now 50 years later — because we have access to these extraordinary materials, particularly Nixon’s own tape-recorded conversations — one can tell the story from the inside rather than the outside. We’re never again going to get such an intimate look at a president facing an existential crisis, as it’s possible to get with Richard Nixon.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world, and Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“Wayward” by Dana Spiotta

“Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History” by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta

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Clint Smith on ‘How the Word Is Passed’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 20:12:19 +0000

Clint Smith’s “How the Word Is Passed” is about how places in the United States reckon with — or fail to reckon with — their relationship to the history of slavery. On this week’s podcast, Smith says that one thing that inspired the book was his realization that “there were more homages to enslavers than to enslaved people” in New Orleans, where he grew up.

“Symbols and names and iconography aren’t just symbols, they’re reflective of stories that people tell, and those stories shape the narratives that societies carry, and those narratives shape public policy, and public policy shapes the material conditions of people’s lives,” Smith says. “Which isn’t to say that taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee is going to erase the racial wealth gap, but it is to say that it’s part of a larger ecosystem of stories and ideas that shape how we understand what has happened to communities and what communities need or deserve.”

Julian Rubinstein visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “The Holly,” an extensively reported look at the social and historical forces that led to a 2013 shooting in Denver.

“It’s a multigenerational story, and in many ways I think it’s a story of activism and thwarted activism over the decades,” Rubinstein says, “including the connections between gangs and activism, which goes all the way back to the civil rights movement.”

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick”

“Early Work” by Andrew Martin

“The Copenhagen Trilogy” by Tove Ditlevsen

“No One Is Talking About This” by Patricia Lockwood

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George Packer on Our Divided America

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:57:11 +0000

In his new book, “Last Best Hope,” George Packer describes “Four Americas,” and the tensions that exist between these different visions of the country. He calls them “Free America” (essentially libertarian), “Real America” (personified by Sarah Palin), “Smart America” (the professional class) and “Just America” (identity politics). On this week’s podcast, Packer says that though he was raised and lives in “Smart America,” he thinks no one of the four paints the whole picture.

“I see the appeal and the persuasiveness of all of them,” he says. “I don’t accept any of them as having the answers. I think they all lead to hierarchy, in some ways to more inequality, to division. We are desperately polarized, and there’s no way around that. I’m not saying if we would all just drop our preconceptions, we could get along. Because we can’t. There are these fundamental clashes of values in this country that are expressed in politics, and that’s not going away. But I think we’ve lost the sense of a common American identity, which I do think still exists, even though it’s been buried.”

Suzanne Simard visits the podcast this week to talk about her new book, “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering Wisdom in the Forest,” and the remarkable relationships maintained between trees.

“Trees, I call them mother trees, these big old trees, can discern which seedlings are their own and which ones are not, and they actually can favor those seedlings by shuttling them more carbon,” Simard says. “It’s a very sophisticated communication that involves a lot of information going back and forth, below ground, even as you’re walking through the forest.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“The Great Dissenter” by Peter S. Canellos

“Where You Are Is Not Who You Are” by Ursula M. Burns

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A More Perfect Union

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 20:40:36 +0000

“The Engagement,” by Sasha Issenberg, recounts the complex and chaotic chain reaction that thrust same-sex marriage from the realm of conservative conjecture to the top of the gay political agenda and, eventually, to the halls of the Supreme Court. On this week’s podcast, Issenberg talks about the deeply researched book, which covers 25 years of legal and cultural history.

“What they have done, ultimately,” he says of those who won the victory, “is helped to enshrine, both in the legal process and in American culture, a sense that marriage is a unique institution. And the language they used to talk about it — about love and commitment — is so particular, I think, to the dynamic between two people that in a certain respect marriage is a more central institution in American life now than it was 30 years ago, because we went through this political fight over it.”

J. Hoberman visits the podcast to discuss his piece about 10 books that, taken together, tell the story of Hollywood. He talks, among other subjects, about why the only celebrity memoir on his list is “Lulu in Hollywood,” by Louise Brooks, who acted in the 1920s and ’30s and published her memoir much later in life.

“She was a remarkably cleareyed observer of what was going on,” Hoberman says, “and embarked on the whole star-making thing with a healthy degree of ambivalence. So she’s able to write about herself and about the conditions under which movies were made and the people she met in Hollywood and so on, in a way that’s both personal and detached. There aren’t too many other memoirs like this.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary; and Elisabeth Egan and Andrew LaVallee talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Libertie” by Kaitlyn Greenidge

“Malibu Rising” by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“On Juneteenth” by Annette Gordon-Reed

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Reimagining the Aftermath of a Wartime Attack

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Jun 2021 17:01:30 +0000

Francis Spufford’s new novel, “Light Perpetual,” is rooted in a real event: the rocket attack on a Woolworth’s in London, killing 168 people, toward the end of World War II. Spufford fictionalizes the tragedy and invents five children who survive it, trailing them through the ensuing decades to discover all they might have done and seen if they had lived. On this week’s podcast, Spufford says that he settled on this real-life incident for intentionally arbitrary reasons.

“The ordinariness is kind of the point,” he says. “I wanted something that was terrible but not exceptional. Something which was one tree in a wartime forest of bad things happening, which I could select out and then follow out the long-term consequences of through time.”

Egill Bjarnason visits the podcast to talk about “How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island.”

“The title is maybe the opposite of humble,” he says, “but I went into this project wanting to write about the history of Iceland. I have always found that really compelling, because unlike other European nations, we can tell our history almost from the beginning. But I figured that people who don’t have high stakes in that story may not be so interested. So I wanted to tell the history of Iceland through our impact on the outside world, by looking at where we have shaped events in some way or another.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary this year; and Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“A Ghost in the Throat” by Doireann Ni Ghriofa

“Languages of Truth” by Salman Rushdie

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A Desperate Writer Steals 'The Plot'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 May 2021 18:20:25 +0000

Jake Bonner, the protagonist of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s “The Plot,” writes a novel based on someone else’s idea. The book becomes a big hit, but Jake has a hard time enjoying it because he’s worried about getting caught. On this week’s podcast, Korelitz says that Jake’s more general anxieties about his career as a writer are relatable, despite her own success (this is her seventh novel).

“Jake is all of us,” Korelitz says. “I used to regard other people’s literary careers with great curiosity. I used to have this little private parlor game: Would I want that person’s career? Would I want that person’s career? And those names have changed over the years as careers have faltered, disappeared. I’ve been publishing for a very long time, and my contemporaries in the 1990s were people with massive successes who have not been heard of now for 10, 15 years. So it’s very much a tortoise and hare kind of thing, in my own case.”

Elizabeth Hinton visits the podcast to discuss her new book, “America on Fire,” a history of racial protest and police violence that reframes the civil rights struggle between the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the widespread demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Hinton writes about major uprisings, but also focuses on lesser-known examples of systemic violence against Black communities in places like York, Pa., and Cairo, Ill.

“Part of the reason why the violence in both of those cities was so extreme was the deep entanglement between white vigilante groups and white power groups and the police department and political and economic elites in both cities,” Hinton says. “So in many ways, what happened, in Cairo especially, is a warning to all of us about what the consequences are when officials decide to use the police to manage the material consequences of socioeconomic exclusion and poverty.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary this year; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Dispatches” by Michael Herr

“The Emigrants” by W.G. Sebald

“Lenin” by Victor Sebestyen

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Maggie O’Farrell on ‘Hamnet’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 May 2021 16:49:12 +0000

Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” one of last year’s most widely acclaimed novels, imagines the life of William Shakespeare, his wife, Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, and the couple’s son Hamnet, who died at 11 years old in 1596. On this week’s podcast, O’Farrell says she always planned for the novel to have the ensemble cast it does, but that her deepest motivation was the desire to capture a sense of the young boy at its center.

“The engine behind the book for me was always the fact that I think Hamnet has been overlooked and underwritten by history,” she says. “I think he’s been consigned to a literary footnote. And I believe, quite strongly, that without him — without his tragically short life — we wouldn’t have the play ‘Hamlet.’ We probably wouldn’t have ‘Twelfth Night.’ As an audience, we are enormously in debt to him.”

Judith Shulevitz visits the podcast to discuss Rachel Cusk’s new novel, “Second Place,” and to analyze Cusk’s literary style.

“In this review, I quote Isaac Babel: ‘No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.’ There’s this kind of clinical accuracy to her writing,” Shulevitz says, “that she brings to bear on both the physical world and on the emotional world that is almost scary. Which is what I like.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history as it celebrates its 125th anniversary this year; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“The Life She Wished to Live” by Ann McCutchan

“Dedicated” by Pete Davis

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Louis Menand on 'The Free World'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 May 2021 17:24:56 +0000

Louis Menand’s new book, “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,” covers the interchange of arts and ideas between the United States and Europe in the decades following World War II. On this week’s podcast, Menand talks about the book, including why he chose to frame his telling from the end of the war until 1965.

“What I didn’t get right away was the extent to which, what happened in American culture, both at the level of avant-garde art, like John Cage’s music, and at the level of Hollywood movies, was influenced by countries around the world,” Menand says. “When American culture comes into its own — because before 1945, I think, nobody really thought of America as a central player in world culture; that changes in the ’60s — but when that happens, culture becomes global, becomes international.”

Phillip Lopate has edited many acclaimed anthologies throughout his career, but his latest project might be his most ambitious: three volumes of American essays from colonial times to the present day. “The Glorious American Essay” was published last year; “The Golden Age of the American Essay” arrived last month; and “The Contemporary American Essay” will be available this summer.

“I’m really trying to expand the notion of what an essay is,” Lopate says on the podcast. “So I’ve included essays that are in the form of letters, like Frederick Douglass’s letter to his master; I’ve included essays in the form of sermons, like Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan preacher; I’ve included essays in the form of rants. I’m just trying to get people to see the essay as occurring in many, many different forms.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Gal Beckerman and Gregory Cowles talk about what they’re reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“The Committed” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

“The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler

“Beijing Payback” by Daniel Nieh

“Yoga” by Emmanuel Carrère

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Michael Lewis on 'The Premonition'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 May 2021 18:19:22 +0000

In 2018, Michael Lewis published “The Fifth Risk,” which argued, in short, that the federal government was underprepared for a variety of disaster scenarios. Guess what his new book is about? Lewis visits the podcast this week to discuss “The Premonition,” which recounts the initial response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“It wasn’t just Trump,” Lewis says. “Trump made everything worse. But there had ben changes in the American government, and changes in particular at the C.D.C., that made them less and less capable of actually controlling disease and more and more like a fine academic institution that came in after the battle and tried to assess what had happened; but not equipped for actual battlefield command. The book doesn’t get to the pandemic until Page 160. The back story tells you how the story is going to play out.”

The historian Annette Gordon-Reed visits the podcast to talk about her new book, “On Juneteenth,” which combines history about slavery in Texas with more personal, essayistic writing about her own family and childhood.

“This is a departure for me, but it is actually the kind of writing that I always thought that I would be doing when I was growing up, dreaming about being a writer,” Gordon-Reed says. “I’ve always been a great admirer of James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal’s essays I thought were wonderful, better than the novels, and that’s the kind of thing that I wanted to do. So it was sort of a dream come true for me to be able to take this form and talk about some things that were very important to me.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Parul Sehgal and John Williams talk about the latest in literary criticism. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the critics this week:

“The Secret to Superhuman Strength” by Alison Bechdel

“Jackpot” by Michael Mechanic

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Amy Klobuchar on 'Antitrust'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 20:08:55 +0000

In her new book, “Antitrust,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota explores the history of fighting monopoly power in this country, and argues that the digital age calls for a renewed effort.

“I think the best way to do this right now is to have our laws be as sophisticated as the companies that we’re dealing with,” Klobuchar says on this week’s podcast. To her, that means “switching the burden for the big, big mergers or for the big exclusionary conducts of the companies that are the largest, and say, ‘Instead of the government having to prove that it hurts competition, you guys have to prove that it doesn’t hurt competition.’” She continues: “You’ve got to look backwards, just like they did with AT&T or some of the big cases — Standard Oil — they looked backwards and said, ‘Wait a minute, this has gotten out of hand.’ It doesn’t mean that we’re going to make this company go away. The chairman of AT&T, after the breakup, said they got stronger because they had to compete.”

Andrew Solomon visits the podcast to talk about Katie Booth’s “The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness.” Bell was a proponent of oralism, a theory that pressured deaf people to learn speech and, more important, not to learn sign language.

“He thought that sign language was a secondary, second-rate thing,” Solomon says of Bell. “He learned it very fluently, and could use it very well, but he didn’t find any beauty in it, and he didn’t really recognize it as another language of equal validity. His underlying belief was that if you could be someone who passed for hearing, you were doing well, and that was what he was trying to teach people. And of course, the deaf politics movement, which had already begun in his day, though it had not reached the strength it’s reached now, said that actually, while it was nice to be able to interact with people who were hearing, and convenient and helpful, that there was a great beauty in sign.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’re reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Despair” by Vladimir Nabokov

“A Fan’s Notes” by Frederick Exley

“So Much for That” by Lionel Shriver

“How Beautiful We Were” by Imbolo Mbue

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Patrick Radden Keefe on ‘Empire of Pain’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 19:08:08 +0000

Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, “Empire of Pain,” is a history of the Sacklers, the family behind Purdue Pharma, the creator of the powerful painkiller OxyContin, which became the root of the opioid crisis in the United States. One of the subjects covered in Keefe’s investigative work is what the company knew, and when, as the crisis began to unfold.

“One thing I was able to establish very definitively in the book is that, in fact, there is this paper trail, really starting in 1997, so just a year after the drug is released, of sales reps sending messages back saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem here. People are abusing this drug,’” Keefe says. “And there’s very high-level discussion by senior executives at the company, some of whom subsequently testified under oath that they didn’t know anything about this until early 2000. In terms of the timeline, it’s very hard to reconcile what they have always said publicly and what I was able to substantiate with internal documents.”

Elisabeth Egan, an editor at the Book Review, is on the podcast this week to discuss “What Comes After,” by JoAnne Tompkins, the latest pick for Group Text, our monthly column for readers and book clubs. The novel starts with the deaths of two high school students, and becomes a mystery when we meet Evangeline McKensey, a pregnant 16-year-old with a connection to the dead boys.

“I am the mother of three teenagers, and I’m constantly looking for the book that makes me feel a little better about how little I know about what’s running through my kids’ heads at any given time,” Egan says. “There was something about this book that felt reassuring to me, as strange as that sounds because it begins with this terrible tragedy. But it’s really, actually a book about life.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary, and Lauren Christensen and John Williams talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Crusoe’s Daughter” by Jane Gardam

“The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” by Deesha Philyaw

“True Grit” by Charles Portis

“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Celebrating Our 15th Anniversary

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 18:17:46 +0000

We’ve been in celebration mode all week as the Book Review’s podcast turns 15 years old. Pamela Paul shared 15 of her favorite episodes since she began hosting in 2013. We chose 10 other memorable conversations from the show’s full archives, and did a bit of digging to tell the story of the podcast’s earliest days.

Now, appropriately, we cap things off with a new episode dedicated to the milestone. This week, Paul speaks with Sam Tanenahus, her predecessor and the founding host, and Dwight Garner, now a critic for The Times who came up with the idea to do the podcast when he was the senior editor at the Book Review. Jocelyn Gonzales, a former producer of the show, and Pedro Rosado, its current maestro, talk about their favorite and unusual memories from over the years. (Did one guest really call in from a submarine? It’s uncertain.) And Paul answers questions about what it’s been like to host the show, sharing a few clips of Robert Caro and others discussing their work.

We also conduct some business as usual this week, with Tina Jordan looking back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary and Alexandra Alter discussing news from the publishing world.

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Blake Bailey on Writing His Life of Philip Roth

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Apr 2021 18:36:13 +0000

Blake Bailey’s long-awaited biography of Philip Roth has generated renewed conversation about the life and work of the towering American novelist who died at 85 in 2018. Bailey visits the podcast this week to take part in that conversation himself.

“Most of Philip’s life was spent in this little cottage in the woods of Connecticut, standing at a desk and living inside his head 12 hours a day,” Bailey says. “This is not unique to Philip. This is a phenomenon that I experienced vis-à-vis my other subjects, too. They don’t see people very clearly. They sort of see themselves projected out, they see what they want to see. And Philip needed to understand that — though I was very fond of him, I was — I had a job to do. So our relationship was constantly teetering on the cusp between professional and friendship, and that could be an awkward dynamic. But for the most part I was extremely fond of Philip.”

Julia Sweig visits the podcast to discuss her new book, “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight.”

“I wanted to write a book about women and power,” Sweig says. “And to be truthful, I didn’t have a subject when I got into this, and discovered that Lady Bird had kept this immense record of her time in the White House. And of course, Lady Bird Johnson is married to the American president of the 20th century perhaps most associated with the word ‘power.’ So the doors, once they opened, just showed a huge opportunity to discover somebody who I thought I had some feel for, but really did not.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said” by Timothy Brennan

“Francis Bacon: Revelations” by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan

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Carl Zimmer on Defining Life

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Apr 2021 18:20:07 +0000

In his new book, “Life’s Edge,” Carl Zimmer asks the modest questions: What is life? How did it begin? And by what criteria can we define things as “living”? On this week’s podcast, Zimmer, a science columnist for The Times, talks about just how difficult it can be to find answers.

“There are actually philosophers who have argued that maybe we should just try not to define life at all, in fact; that maybe we’re getting ourselves into trouble,” Zimmer says. “If you look for a definition of life from scientists, you will find hundreds of them; hundreds of published definitions that are different from each other. And every year a new one comes out, or maybe two, and they just keep going. there was a paper I read not too long ago that said that there are probably as many definitions of life as people who are trying to define life.”

Paulina Bren visits the podcast to discuss her new book, “The Barbizon,” an account of the storied hotel for women that first opened in 1928.

“It went through all sorts of incarnations,” Bren says. “This hotel really follows in so many ways not just the history of women in the 20th century, but truly the ups and downs, the history, of New York.”

Also on this week’s episode, Elisabeth Egan and John Williams talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Visitors” by Anita Brookner

“Firekeeper’s Daughter” by Angeline Boulley

“I Am, I Am, I Am” by Maggie O’Farrell

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Tillie Olsen and the Barriers to Creativity

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 18:42:06 +0000

A.O. Scott, The Times’s co-chief film critic, returns to the Book Review’s podcast this week to discuss the work of Tillie Olsen, the latest subject in his essay series The Americans, about writers who give a sense of the country’s complex identity. Olsen, who died in 2007 at 94, was known best as the author of “Tell Me a Riddle,” a collection of three short stories and a novella published in 1961. She also wrote rigorous depictions of working-class families, conveying the costs of living for burdened mothers, wives and daughters.

“I think people should read her now for a few different reasons,” Scott says. “I was really drawn to this idea of the difficulty of writing, and the ways that our other responsibilities and the fatigue of living can make it hard to write. I think I related to this very much in this year. One of the themes in her stories is tiredness, is just the physical and mental fatigue of being alive and how hard that can make it to create anything.”

Wendy Lower visits the podcast to discuss “The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed.” In the book, Lower, a historian of the Holocaust, considers a photograph taken in October 1941 that shows several men shooting a woman who holds the hand of a small boy.

“Most people think that we know all there is to know about the Holocaust,” Lower says, “and this is an important example of how these records are just being declassified now from various countries that were involved in the Holocaust or occupied by the Nazis.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

“100 Boyfriends” by Brontez Purnell

“Until Justice Be Done” by Kate Masur

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Four Decades of Downs and Ups in New York City

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 15:45:04 +0000

There’s nothing wrong with your eyes: The title of Thomas Dyja’s new book is “New York, New York, New York.” (The triplicate is inspired by the urbanist Holly Whyte’s answer when he was asked to name his three favorite American cities.) On this week’s podcast, Dyja discusses how he went about organizing this sweeping look at the past four decades in the city’s history.

“I love timelines,” Dyja says. “I make huge charts to take themes through, so this had an eight-foot-long thing on my wall that basically took certain themes and wove them through all those years.” With all that material, “having to make tough choices was just basic," and "there are things that are on the cutting room floor that I kind of miss. But at the end of the day, I think it conveys that subway-express-train-blasting-along-from-stop-to-stop experience of New York.”

The magician, writer and theatrical performer Derek DelGaudio visits the podcast to talk about his new book, “Amoralman: A True Story and Other Lies,” which is told in two parts: The first covers his childhood in Colorado, and the second the time he spent doing a very unusual job.

“When I was in my 20s, I worked as what’s known as a bust-out dealer, which is a professional card cheat hired by the house to cheat its customers,” DelGaudio says. “And what I experienced at that house, and what I recognized, I thought was something worth sharing.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gal Beckerman and Dave Kim talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“An Empire of Their Own” by Neal Gabler

“My Heart” by Semezdin Mehmedinovic

“Le Freak” by Nile Rodgers

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Imbolo Mbue on Writing Her Second Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 18:28:00 +0000

Imbolo Mbue first began writing her new novel, “How Beautiful We Were,” in 2002. The book concerns the impact of an American oil company’s presence on a fictional African village. She eventually put the idea aside to work on what turned into her acclaimed debut novel, “Behold the Dreamers.” When she began working again on the earlier idea, it was 2016. On this week’s podcast, she says that returning to the novel at that moment changed the way she approached writing it.

“Flint, Michigan, had happened, and Sandy Hook had happened a few years before,” she says. “So I was thinking a lot about children. I was thinking a lot about what it means to be a child growing up in a world in which you don’t understand why things are happening and nobody is doing something about it. And that was what gave me the inspiration to tell the story mostly from the point of the view of the children. That definitely changed a huge part of the story.”

Annalee Newitz visits the podcast to discuss “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.” In the book, Newitz gleans lessons about urban living from four cities that no longer exist: Pompeii; Angkor, a metropolis of medieval Cambodia; Cahokia, an urban sanctuary that sprawled across both sides of the Mississippi River a thousand years ago; and Catalhoyuk, a city that existed 9,000 years ago above the plains of south-central Turkey.

“It’s a tragedy because for us now, in the present day, looking back, a lot of us would love to know more about what life was like in these places and be able to visit them in their prime,” Newitz says. “So it’s sad because we can’t go and see them alive. But I also think that in many cases, people left these cities for good reason. The abandonment, it’s a rejection of something that’s gone wrong, and I think it’s good that we have these examples.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

“The Empathy Diaries” by Sherry Turkle

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Kazuo Ishiguro and Friendship With Machines

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Mar 2021 21:47:58 +0000

Kazuo Ishigruo’s eighth novel, “Klara and the Sun,” is his first since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. It’s narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend — a humanoid machine who acts as a companion for a 14-year-old child. Radhika Jones, the editor of Vanity Fair, talks about the novel and where it fits into Ishiguro’s august body of work on this week’s podcast.

“How human can Klara be? What are the limits of humanity, in terms of transferring it into machinery? It’s one of the many questions that animate this book,” Jones says. “It’s not something that’s oversimplified, but I do think it’s very poignant because the truth is that Klara is our narrator. So as far as we’re concerned, she’s the person whose inner life we come to understand. And the question of what limits there are on that, for a being that is artificial, is interesting.”

Mark Harris visits the podcast to discuss “Mike Nichols: A Life,” his new biography of the writer, director and performer whose many credits included “The Graduate” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“He was remarkably open,” Harris says of his subject. “There are few bigger success stories for a director to look back on than ‘The Graduate,’ and I was asking Mike about it 40 years and probably 40,000 questions after it happened. But I was so impressed by his willingness to come at it from new angles, to re-examine things that he hadn’t thought about for a while, to tell stories that were frankly not flattering to him. I’ve never heard harsher stories about Mike’s behavior over the years than I heard from Mike himself. He was an extraordinary interview subject.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“No One Is Talking About This” by Patricia Lockwood

“The View From Castle Rock” by Alice Munro

“The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories” by Henry James

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Lauren Oyler Talks About Deception Online

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 20:14:52 +0000

Lauren Oyler’s debut novel, “Fake Accounts,” features a nameless narrator who discovers that her boyfriend has a secret life online, where he posts conspiracy theories. The novel is about that discovery, but also more broadly about how the time we spend online — especially on social media — transforms our personalities.

“The book is about various modes of deceit or lying or misdirection, and the ways we deceive each other in various ways, both on the internet and off,” Oyler says on this week’s podcast.

Stephen Kearse visits the podcast to discuss the work of Octavia Butler, who “committed her life,” as Kearse recently wrote, “to turning speculative fiction into a home for Black expression.”

But despite Butler’s groundbreaking career, “I wouldn’t want to overstate how different she was,” Kearse says, “because she was very much interested in the things that golden age sci-fi authors were interested in — so, space travel and human extinction and aliens visiting. But I think her innovations were on the level of craft and even just concept. She saw alien stories as very connected to colonization. She saw time travel as escapist. She was able to think about how these tropes rely on certain ideas of privilege and access and really just dive in deeper.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Dwight Garner asks questions of Pamela Paul, the editor of the Book review and the podcast’s host.

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Writing About Illness Without Platitudes

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 18:53:44 +0000

At 22 years old, Suleika Jaouad was a recent college graduate who had moved to Paris, looking forward to everything life might offer. Then she received a diagnosis of leukemia. In her new memoir, “Between Two Kingdoms,” Jaouad writes about the ensuing years. On this week’s podcast, she discusses her experience with the disease and her effort, in writing the book, to avoid the many platitudes that surround serious illness.

“When you’re sick, you get bombarded with all kinds of bumper-sticker sayings,” she says. “You’re told to find the silver lining, that everything happens for a reason, or — the one that I hated the most — that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle, because in my case it certainly felt like I had been given more than I could handle. So I was really focused on writing toward the silence and toward the shadows, and writing about the experiences that maybe aren’t as palatable but that, from my perspective, needed to be unveiled.”

The Times’s comedy critic, Jason Zinoman, visits the podcast to discuss his favorite memoirs by comedians, including books by Harpo Marx, Joan Rivers and Tina Fey, and to discuss the genre as a whole.

“The comedy memoir is the worst genre of book that I can’t get enough of,” Zinoman says. “I gobble up comedy memoirs, even though the vast, vast majority of them are terrible.” One reason for that, Zinoman says, is because “you don’t need to make a great book to become a best seller. It’s the same with political books; most books by politicians are bad because they don’t need to be good to be successful, and the same logic applies here.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Let Me Tell You What I Mean” by Joan Didion

“Her First American” by Lore Segal

“A Promised Land” by Barack Obama

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This Land Is Whose Land?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 18:44:19 +0000

When Simon Winchester takes on a big subject, he takes on a big subject. His new book, “Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World,” travels through centuries and to places like Ukraine, New Zealand, Scotland, the United States and elsewhere. On this week’s podcast, he talks about the history of private land ownership and a few of the many aspects of this history that caught his attention.

“The whole notion of trespass I find absolutely fascinating,” Winchester says. “There is this pervasive feeling — it’s not uniquely American, but it is powerfully American — that once you own it, you put up posted signs, you put up barbed wire, you put up fences, to keep people off. Because one of the five ‘bundle of rights,’ lawyers call it — when you buy land, you get these rights — is that you have an absolute right of law to exclude other people from your land. In Sweden, in Norway, in Denmark, you can’t do that.”

The journalist Amelia Pang visits the podcast to talk about her new book, “Made in China,” in which she investigates the brutal system of forced labor that undergirds China’s booming export industry. She tells the story of one average American woman who bought a cheap Halloween decoration during a clearance sale after the holiday one year.

“She didn’t really need it,” Pang says. “It actually sat in her storage for about two years before she remembered to open it. And so she was very shocked to find this SOS message written by the prisoner who had made this product when she finally opened it. It just goes to show the trivialness of a lot of the products that are made in these camps. In my book, I try to go into: Do we as Americans actually need so much of this stuff? And how much is our shopping habits and consumer culture contributing to factors that compel Chinese factories to outsource work to labor camps?”

Here are the books discussed by Times critics this week:

“My Year Abroad” by Chang-rae Lee

“Gay Bar” by Jeremy Atherton Lin

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Chang-rae Lee on His New Novel: ‘It’s Kind of a Crazy Book.’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Feb 2021 19:50:41 +0000

Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, “My Year Abroad,” is his sixth. On this week’s podcast, Lee says that his readers might be surprised by it.

“It’s kind of a crazy book, and particularly I think for people who know my work,” Lee says. “I’m sure my editor was surprised by what she got. I didn’t quite describe it the way it turned out.” The novel follows a New Jersey 20-year-old named Tiller, who is at loose ends, as he befriends a very successful Chinese entrepreneur. “They go traveling together,” Lee says. “They have what we might call business adventures, but those adventures get quite intense.”

Maurice Chammah visits the podcast to talk about his densely reported first book, “Let the Lord Sort Them,” which is a history, as the subtitle has it, of “the rise and fall of the death penalty.”

“One of the fascinating parts of researching this book was revisiting a time that I kind of dimly remembered when the death penalty had a role in the culture war pantheon, along with gun control and abortion,” Chammah says. “Starting around the year 2000, it feels like that was a high-water mark where something broke, and over the 20 years since, the death penalty has declined, both in the number of people who support it, but I think more importantly, in relevance. It’s less of a thing that people feel matters to their daily lives.”

Also on this week’s episode, Tina Jordan looks back at Book Review history during this year of its 125th anniversary; Elizabeth A. Harris has news from the publishing world; and Tina Jordan and John Williams talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

The books of John le Carré

“Read Me” by Leo Benedictus

“Nine Perfect Strangers” by Liane Moriarty

“Dear Child” by Romy Hausmann

“Winterkeep” by Kristin Cashore

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Navigating the Maze of Paying for College

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 20:08:25 +0000

Ron Lieber’s new book, “The Price You Pay for College,” aims at helping families with, as the book’s subtitle puts it, the biggest financial decision they will ever make. Lieber, a personal financial columnist for The Times, visits the podcast this week to discuss it. Among other subjects, he addresses all the ways in which the price to attend a particular college can vary from student to student, similar to how the cost of seats on one airplane flight can vary.

Michael J. Stephen visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “Breath Taking: The Power, Fragility, and Future of Our Extraordinary Lungs.” Stephen, a pulmonary expert at Thomas Jefferson University, talks about what we’ve learned about the lungs during the coronavirus crisis, and more generally about the wonders and perplexities of this organ.

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and the Times’s critics talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the critics this week:

“The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968-2011” by William Feaver

“The Liar’s Dictionary” by Eley Williams

“1984” by George Orwell

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The Ethics of Adoption in America

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 16:26:25 +0000

In “American Baby,” the veteran journalist Gabrielle Glaser tells the story of one mother and child, and also zooms out from there to consider the ethics of adoption in this country. Our reviewer, Lisa Belkin, calls the book “the most comprehensive and damning” account of the “growing realization that old-style adoption was not always what it seemed.” Glaser visits the podcast this week to talk about it.

Kenneth R. Rosen visits the podcast to discuss his new book, “Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs.” The book is an examination of the “tough-love industry” of wilderness camps and residential therapeutic programs for young people. Rosen himself, as a troubled teen, spent time at a few of these places, and his book strongly criticizes their methods.

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles and Tina Jordan talk about what they’ve been reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:

“Summer Cooking” by Elizabeth David

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

“The Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder

“Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson

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James Comey and Truth in Government

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 17:56:15 +0000

James Comey’s “Saving Justice,” arrives three years after his first book, “A Higher Loyalty.” Joe Klein reviews it for us, and visits the podcast this week to discuss, among other subjects, how the new book is different from the first.

“It doesn’t differ very much at all, actually,” Klein says, “except for one thing: He rehearses all of the confrontations he had with Donald Trump in both books, but in the second book he places that in the context of the need for truth and transparency in government, which I think is a valuable thing. The book is a repetition of the first book, but it’s not an insignificant repetition because of the context that he’s now placed it in.”

Elisabeth Egan, an editor at the Book Review, is on the podcast to discuss the latest selection for our monthly column Group Text: “A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself,” by Peter Ho Davies.

“What I found especially compelling about this book in this moment, when we’re all still kind of confined to our houses,” Egan says, “is that it was very reassuring to read about parental worry in a moment when we’re all flying blind. But you have this worry with a lot of funny lines and funny observations about parenthood.”

Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by the Times’s critics this week:

“Kill Switch” by Adam Jentleson

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Charles Yu Talks About ‘Interior Chinatown’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Jan 2021 18:04:35 +0000

Charles Yu’s “Interior Chinatown,” which won the National Book Award for fiction in November, is a satire about Hollywood’s treatment of Asian-Americans. It features an actor named Willis Wu, who has a very small role in a TV show. On this week’s podcast, Yu, himself a writer for TV as well as a novelist, discusses the book and why he wrote it.

David S. Brown visits the podcast to discuss his new biography of Henry Adams, “The Last American Aristocrat.” Adams was the great-grandson of John Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the author of “The Education of Henry Adams,” a posthumously published memoir that is widely considered one of the greatest nonfiction works of the 20th century.

Also, Alexandra Alter answers questions from listeners about the publishing industry, and Gregory Cowles, John Williams and the show's host, Pamela Paul, discuss what they're reading. The books discussed on "What We're Reading" this week:

“Just Like You” by Nick Hornby

“The Watch Tower” by Elizabeth Harrower

“The Last Million” by David Nasaw

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Fareed Zakaria on Life After the Pandemic

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Jan 2021 15:58:37 +0000

The author and CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls the coronavirus pandemic “the most transformative event of our lifetimes.” He says: “What has happened over the last 50 years is, we have gotten increasingly confident about the power of science and medicine, so we’ve kind of lost sight of the effect that something like a plague, a pandemic, has. And I think this was a mistake."

The historian Margaret MacMillan visits the podcast to discuss her most recent book, “War: How Conflict Shaped Us,” one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020. MacMillan has written about specific wars in the past, but here she looks more broadly at the subject throughout human history, which led her to some new conclusions. “What I hadn’t really got involved in or really understood,” MacMillan says, “was the debate about whether war is something that’s biologically driven — are we condemned to war because of something that evolution has left us with, or is war the product of culture?”

Also on this week’s episode, Gregory Cowles and John Williams talk about what they’re reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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The Listeners’ Episode: Editors and Critics Answer Your Questions

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 00:39:33 +0000

We respond to questions about criticism, reading habits, favorite stories and more. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Agents of Change

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 08:26:00 +0000

Kerri Greenidge discusses two books about African-Americans in the years before the Civil War, and Neal Gabler talks about “Catching the Wind,” his biography of Edward Kennedy. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jo Nesbo Talks About 'The Kingdom'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 18:04:27 +0000

Nesbo discusses his latest novel, and David Michaelis talks about his new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Sedaris on a Career-Spanning Collection

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Dec 2020 19:18:12 +0000

Sedaris talks about “The Best of Me” and his life as an essayist.

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Talking About the 10 Best Books of 2020

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 16:39:40 +0000

On a special episode of the podcast, taped live, editors from The New York Times Book Review discuss this year's outstanding fiction and nonfiction.

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Joy Williams and Unique Views of America

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 19:32:39 +0000

A.O. Scott talks about Williams’s fiction, and Nicholas Christakis discusses his new book about the coronavirus, “Apollo’s Arrow.”

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David Byrne on Turning 'American Utopia' Into a Book

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 18:16:30 +0000

Byrne talks about his work with the artist Maira Kalman on his latest book, and Brittany K. Barnett discusses "A Knock at Midnight."

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The Birth of the Animal Rights Movement

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Nov 2020 18:24:27 +0000

Ernest Freeberg talks about “A Traitor to His Species,” and the illustrator Christian Robinson discusses his career in picture books.

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A Writing Career Among Trailblazing Music Stars

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 15:00:55 +0000

Peter Guralnick talks about “Looking to Get Lost,” and Alex Ross discusses “Wagnerism.”

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Real-Life Political Violence Fuels Fiction in ‘The Abstainer’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 15:49:56 +0000

Ian McGuire talks about his new novel, and Elisabeth Egan discusses Romy Hausmann’s “Dear Child.”

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The Ottoman Empire’s Influence on the Present Day

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 17:53:17 +0000

Alan Mikhail talks about “God’s Shadow,” and Benjamin Lorr discusses “The Secret Life of Groceries.”

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The Fate of Refugees After World War II

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Oct 2020 18:35:51 +0000

David Nasaw talks about “The Last Million,” and Carlos Lozada discusses “What Were We Thinking.”

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Hari Kunzru on Writing ‘Red Pill’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Oct 2020 18:39:31 +0000

Kunzru talks about his new novel, and Ben Macintyre discusses “Agent Sonya,” his latest real-life tale of espionage.

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C.I.A. Operatives in the Early Years of the Cold War

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 16:02:08 +0000

Scott Anderson discusses “The Quiet Americans,” and Peter Baker and Susan Glasser talk about “The Man Who Ran Washington.”

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Ayad Akhtar on Truth and Fiction

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 17:42:39 +0000

Akhtar discusses "Homeland Elegies," and Marc Lacey talks about "Cry Havoc," by Michael Signer, and "The Violence Inside Us," by Chris Murphy.

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Brian Stelter on Fox News and Reed Hastings on Netflix

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 17:54:39 +0000

Stelter talks about "Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth" and Reed Hastings discusses "No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention."

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Jeffrey Toobin on Writing About Trump

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Sep 2020 19:12:45 +0000

Toobin talks about “True Crimes and Misdemeanors,” and Dayna Tortorici discusses Elena Ferrante’s “The Lying Life of Adults.”

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Kurt Andersen on ‘Evil Geniuses’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 18:42:28 +0000

Andersen talks about his new book, and Lesley M.M. Blume discusses “Fallout.”

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The Life of a Brilliant, Suffering Scientist

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 17:01:39 +0000

Samanth Subramanian discusses “A Dominant Character,” his biography of J. B. S. Haldane, and Patrik Svensson talks about “The Book of Eels.”

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The Fictional World of Edward P. Jones

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 18:13:15 +0000

A.O. Scott talks about Jones’s work and the American experience, and Eric Jay Dolin discusses “A Furious Sky.”

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Isabel Wilkerson Talks About 'Caste'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Aug 2020 17:37:45 +0000

Wilkerson describes the ideas about race in America that fuel her new book, and David Hill discusses “The Vapors.”

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The 'Seductive Lure' of Authoritarianism

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 17:03:17 +0000

Anne Applebaum discusses "Twilight of Democracy," and Barbara Demick talks about "Eat the Buddha."

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The Yearning for the Unexplained

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 14:29:26 +0000

Colin Dickey talks about “The Unidentified,” and Miles Harvey discusses “The King of Confidence.”

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Newt Gingrich and the Start of an Era

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 19:27:33 +0000

Julian E. Zelizer talks about "Burning Down the House," and Lacy Crawford talks about "Notes on a Silencing."

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David Mitchell's Vast and Tangled Universe

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 16:56:08 +0000

Daniel Mendelsohn discusses Mitchell's career and new novel, "Utopia Avenue," and Maria Konnikova talks about "The Biggest Bluff."

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Jules Feiffer on His Long, Varied Career

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 2 Jul 2020 23:47:52 +0000

Feiffer talks about his new picture book and more, and Steve Inskeep discusses "Imperfect Union."

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A Short Guide to 'The World'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 18:47:23 +0000

Richard Haass talks about his new primer on global affairs, and Abhrajyoti Chakraborty on new novels in translation.

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André Leon Talley on 'The Chiffon Trenches'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 17:46:51 +0000

Talley talks about his new memoir; Claudia Rankine and Jericho Brown read new poems; and Megha Majumdar discusses her debut novel, "A Burning."

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Stephen Fry on Reimagining the Greek Myths

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 17:55:53 +0000

Stephen Fry

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A.O. Scott on the Work of Wallace Stegner

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Jun 2020 19:23:21 +0000

Scott discusses his first in a series of essays about American writers, and David Kamp talks about "Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America."

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A Manhunt on the 17th Century’s High Seas

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 May 2020 17:19:16 +0000

Steven Johnson talks about “Enemy of All Mankind,” and Gilbert Cruz offers a guide to Stephen King’s work.

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Immigration Reform, Past and Present

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 May 2020 19:12:37 +0000

Jia Lynn Yang talks about “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide,” and Judith Newman talks about books that help simplify life.

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One Young Mother and the Homelessness Crisis

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 May 2020 16:45:42 +0000

Lauren Sandler talks about “This Is All I Got,” and Sarah Weinman discusses classic mysteries.

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The Angry Children Are Our Future

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 May 2020 17:21:57 +0000

Lydia Millet talks about “A Children’s Bible,” and Barry Gewen discusses “The Inevitability of Tragedy.”

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Lawrence Wright on Researching a (Fictional) Pandemic

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 May 2020 18:01:32 +0000

Wright talks about “The End of October,” and Dalia Sofer discusses “Man of My Time.”

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The Great Alaska Quake of 1964

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 20:14:31 +0000

Jon Mooallem talks about “This Is Chance!” and Elisabeth Egan discusses Charlie Mackesy’s “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.”

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Samantha Irby Talks About ‘Wow, No Thank You’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 15:23:28 +0000

Irby on her new essay collection, and Jon Meacham discusses three books about leadership during times of crisis.

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Robert Kolker Discusses 'Hidden Valley Road'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 16:29:20 +0000

Kolker talks about a large family beset by schizophrenia, and Elisabeth Egan discusses Lily King's "Writers & Lovers."

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Parenting When the Family Is Locked Inside

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Apr 2020 17:29:51 +0000

The clinical psychologist Lisa Damour discusses the specific challenges of raising children during the pandemic, and Dwight Garner asks Pamela Paul about putting together the Book Review.

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From the Archives: Colson Whitehead and Jeffrey Toobin

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 18:49:58 +0000

Whitehead discusses “The Underground Railroad,” and Toobin talks about “American Heiress.”

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Robert Caro on How He Does It

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 04:00:00 +0000

The acclaimed biographer of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses talks about his book “Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing.”

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From the Archive: Michael Lewis and Tana French

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 15:42:28 +0000

Lewis discusses "The Fifth Risk," and French talks about "The Witch Elm."

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James McBride Talks About ‘Deacon King Kong’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Mar 2020 20:48:38 +0000

McBride discuss his latest novel, and Rebecca Solnit talks about “Recollections of My Nonexistence.”

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The Ties That Bind Deutsche Bank and Donald Trump

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 21:01:35 +0000

David Enrich discusses "Dark Towers," and Kiran Millwood Hargrave talks about "The Mercies."

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Unjust America

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 22:51:25 +0000

Adam Cohen talks about “Supreme Inequality,” and Madeline Levine discusses “Ready or Not.”

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A History of Seduction

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 20:30:11 +0000

Clement Knox talks about “Seduction,” and Elisabeth Egan discusses Amina Cain’s “Indelicacy.”

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Leslie Jamison on Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Feb 2020 22:52:18 +0000

Jamison talks about Offill’s new novel, and Courtney Maum talks about “Before and After the Book Deal.”

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The Paradoxes of Nuclear War

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 17:46:46 +0000

Fred Kaplan discusses “The Bomb,” and Sarah Lyall talks about new thrillers.

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Andrea Bernstein on 'American Oligarchs'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 19:55:26 +0000

Bernstein discusses her new book about the Trumps and Kushners, and David Zucchino talks about “Wilmington’s Lie.”

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Americans on a Financial 'Tightrope'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 20:26:18 +0000

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn talk about their new book, and Daniel Susskind discusses “A World Without Work.”

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Life in Tech’s ‘Uncanny Valley’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 18:29:32 +0000

Anna Wiener discusses her new memoir, and Elisabeth Egan talks about Group Text, a new monthly feature from the Book Review.

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Medicine in the Middle Ages

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Jan 2020 19:21:40 +0000

Jack Hartnell talks about “Medieval Bodies,” and Matt Dorfman talks about his work as the Book Review’s art director.

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Ralph Ellison’s Life in Letters

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Dec 2019 16:15:13 +0000

Saidiya Hartman talks about Ellison’s correspondence, and Olaf Olafsson discusses his new novel, “The Sacrament.”

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Times Critics Talk About Their Year-End Lists

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 18:12:19 +0000

Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai on the top books of 2019.

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Poems About the Challenges of Life After Prison

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 18:13:17 +0000

Reginald Dwayne Betts talks about “Felon,” and Jung Chang discusses “Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister.”

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The Life of Mike Nichols

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Dec 2019 23:35:13 +0000

Ash Carter and Sam Kashner discuss their new oral history of the director, and Alexandra Jacobs talks about her biography of Elaine Stritch.

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10 Best Books of 2019

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 16:37:12 +0000

On a special episode of the podcast, taped live, editors from The New York Times Book Review discuss this year’s outstanding fiction and nonfiction. Read more details about the books discussed on this episode here.

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The Authorized Life of the Iron Lady

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 22:22:46 +0000

Charles Moore discusses the final volume of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, and Adrienne Brodeur talks about her memoir, “Wild Game.”

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Revisiting Baldwin vs. Buckley

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 22:16:34 +0000

Nicholas Buccola talks about “The Fire Is Upon Us,” and Saeed Jones discusses “How We Fight for Our Lives.”

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Among the Trolls

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Nov 2019 20:26:39 +0000

Andrew Marantz talks about “Antisocial,” and Gail Collins discusses “No Stopping Us Now.”

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The Life of Thomas Edison

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Nov 2019 16:42:17 +0000

David Oshinsky talks about Edmund Morris’s “Edison,” and Tina Jordan discusses new memoirs by Demi Moore, Julie Andrews and Carly Simon.

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John Lithgow on His Satirical Poems

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 21:03:51 +0000

The actor talks about "Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse," and Leigh Bardugo discusses "Ninth House."

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Thomas Chatterton Williams on ‘Unlearning Race’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 19:14:53 +0000

Williams talks about his new memoir, “Self-Portrait in Black and White,” and Stephen Kinzer discusses “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.”

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Are Cheap Clothes Ruining the Planet?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 19:42:07 +0000

Dana Thomas discusses “Fashionopolis,” and Steven Greenhouse talks about “Beaten Down, Worked Up.”

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Ben Lerner's New Novel and the Politics of Language

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Oct 2019 15:46:07 +0000

Garth Risk Hallberg talks about Lerner's "The Topeka School," and Bari Weiss discusses "How to Fight Anti-Semitism."

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Samantha Power on What She's Learned

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 19:20:36 +0000

Power talks about her new memoir, "The Education of an Idealist," and Craig Johnson discusses his Longmire mysteries.

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Two Times Reporters on ‘The Education of Brett Kavanaugh’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 21:41:50 +0000

Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly discuss their new book, and Tim Winton talks about his most recent novel, “The Shepherd’s Hut.”

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Bringing Down Harvey Weinstein

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 18:52:29 +0000

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey talk about their new book, “She Said,” and Ian Urbina discusses “The Outlaw Ocean.”

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Trump, TV and America

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Sep 2019 16:05:29 +0000

James Poniewozik discusses “Audience of One,” and Bina Venkataraman talks about “The Optimist’s Telescope.”

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The Ruining of the American West

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 18:19:56 +0000

Christopher Ketcham talks about “This Land,” and Gretchen McCulloch discusses “Because Internet.”

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The Politicization of Academic Life

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 18:37:09 +0000

Anthony Kronman talks about “The Assault on American Excellence,” and Christopher Benfey discusses “If,” his new book about Rudyard Kipling.

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Jia Tolentino on Life With the Internet

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 16:29:12 +0000

Tolentino talks about “Trick Mirror,” and John Taliaferro discusses “Grinnell,” his biography of a pioneering conservationist.

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Toni Morrison's Legacy

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Aug 2019 17:53:24 +0000

Wesley Morris, Parul Sehgal and Dwight Garner talk about Morrison’s career, and Sarah M. Broom talks about her debut memoir, “The Yellow House.”

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The Fight for the Supreme Court

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Aug 2019 18:36:28 +0000

Carl Hulse talks about “Confirmation Bias,” and De’Shawn Charles Winslow discusses “In West Mills.”

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Fiction About Unprecedented Situations

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 21:43:15 +0000

Ted Chiang talks about “Exhalation,” and Helen Phillips discusses “The Need.”

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Colson Whitehead Talks About 'The Nickel Boys'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 18:07:46 +0000

The Pulitzer Prize winner discusses his new novel, and Jon Gertner talks about “The Ice at the End of the World.”

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George F. Will on Conservatism’s Homelessness

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 19:55:28 +0000

Will discusses “The Conservative Sensibility,” and David Maraniss talks about “A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father.”

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Picking the Best Memoirs Since 1969

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Jul 2019 19:54:34 +0000

The Times’s book critics talk about choosing the best 50 memoirs of the past 50 years, and Daniel Okrent discusses “The Guarded Gate.”

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner Talks About Her First Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 16:08:52 +0000

Brodesser-Akner discusses “Fleishman in Trouble,” and Katherine Eban talks about “Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom.”

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Jill Lepore on the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 20:14:38 +0000

Lepore discusses several new books about the Apollo 11 mission, and Julie Satow talks about the history of the Plaza Hotel.

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The World's Far Corners and Deepest Depths

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 20:49:42 +0000

Robert Macfarlane talks about "Underland," and Julia Phillips discusses "Disappearing Earth."

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Rethinking the Epidemic of Domestic Violence

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Jun 2019 18:52:35 +0000

Rachel Louise Snyder talks about “No Visible Bruises,” and Josh Levin discusses “The Queen.”

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Thrillers for Summer

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 31 May 2019 16:07:22 +0000

Vanessa Friedman talks about this season’s notable thrillers, and Liesl Schillinger discusses new books about travel.

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A Trilogy About the American Revolution Begins

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 May 2019 16:14:40 +0000

Rick Atkinson talks about “The British Are Coming,” and Brenda Wineapple discusses “The Impeachers.”

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Harper Lee's Unwritten True-Crime Book

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 May 2019 16:00:36 +0000

Casey Cep discusses "Furious Hours," and Eliza Griswold talks about "Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America."

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The Real Life of a Diplomat, Told Like a Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 May 2019 15:57:04 +0000

George Packer talks about “Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century,” and Lori Gottlieb discusses “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.”

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Laila Lalami on 'The Other Americans'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 May 2019 14:26:29 +0000

Lalami discusses her latest novel, and Jenny Odell talks about "How to Do Nothing."

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Connecting the Dots Between Reconstruction and Jim Crow

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 20:31:38 +0000

Henry Louis Gates Jr. talks about “Stony the Road” and “Dark Sky Rising,” and David Wallace-Wells discusses “The Uninhabitable Earth.”

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Robert Caro on How He Does It

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 17:47:22 +0000

The acclaimed biographer of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses talks about his new book, "Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing."

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Ruth Reichl's Delicious New Memoir

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 18:51:23 +0000

Reichl discusses "Save Me the Plums," and Emily Bazelon talks about "Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration."

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The Chernobyl Disaster in Full

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Apr 2019 19:18:02 +0000

Adam Higginbotham talks about his sweeping new history of the nuclear accident and its aftermath, and Nellie Bowles discusses Clive Thompson's "Coders."

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Preet Bharara on the Rule of Law

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 18:41:26 +0000

Bharara discusses “Doing Justice,” and Senator Doug Jones talks about “Bending Toward Justice.”

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The Life of Sandra Day O'Connor

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 17:24:21 +0000

Evan Thomas talks about “First,” his new biography of O’Connor, and Mitchell S. Jackson discusses “Survival Math.”

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Isaac Mizrahi on His New Memoir

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 19:50:31 +0000

The fashion designer discusses “I.M.,” and David McCraw talks about “Truth in Our Times.”

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A Violent Summer in Chicago

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Mar 2019 17:38:38 +0000

Alex Kotlowitz discusses “An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago,” and John Lanchester talks about his new novel, “The Wall.”

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A Gripping Political Mystery in Northern Ireland

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Mar 2019 18:25:19 +0000

Patrick Radden Keefe talks about “Say Nothing,” and Frans de Waal discusses “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves.”

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Seeking Silence

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 20:14:22 +0000

Gal Beckerman discusses “How to Disappear,” by Akiko Busch, and “Silence,” by Jane Brox; and Steve Luxenberg talks about “Separate.”

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A Class in ‘Dreyer’s English’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 17:57:05 +0000

Benjamin Dreyer discusses his best-selling book about writing, and Thomas Mallon discusses “Landfall,” his new novel about the presidential administration of George W. Bush.

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Marlon James Talks About His Epic New Trilogy

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Feb 2019 16:12:18 +0000

James discusses "Black Leopard, Red Wolf," and Stephanie Land talks about "Maid."

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Assessing the Facebook Problem

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Feb 2019 16:18:51 +0000

Roger McNamee talks about "Zucked," and Charles Finch discusses the season's best thrillers.

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Dani Shapiro on Her Surprising 'Inheritance'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 22:35:20 +0000

Shapiro talks about her new best-selling memoir, and David Treuer discusses “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.”

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A New Novel Conjures Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 17:51:13 +0000

A. O. Scott talks about Linn Ullmann’s “Unquiet,” and Judith Newman discusses new books about anxiety, mental illness and grief.

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How Curses Function in Literature

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 17:49:26 +0000

Julian Lucas talks about the role of curses in contemporary African literature, and Abby Ellin discusses "Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married."

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Fugitive Slaves and the Road to the Civil War

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Jan 2019 20:33:04 +0000

Andrew Delbanco discusses “The War Before the War,” and Rob Dunn talks about “Never Home Alone.”

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Tyranny in Rome and Fake Drugs in Fiction

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 21:18:02 +0000

Yascha Mounk discusses Edward J. Watts's "Mortal Republic," and Jonathan Lethem talks about the surge of fictional psychotropic drugs in novels.

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Isabel Wilkerson Talks About Michelle Obama’s Memoir

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 20:06:26 +0000

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian discusses the former first lady’s story, and Helen Schulman talks about her novel “Come With Me.”

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Poetry & Politics

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 19:13:09 +0000

The Book Review’s poetry editor, Gregory Cowles, discusses Tracy K. Smith’s essay about political poetry and more from this week’s special issue; and Maria Russo discusses the best children's books of 2018.

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Immaturity in American Politics

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Dec 2018 20:29:02 +0000

Alan Wolfe discusses “The Politics of Petulance,” and Nadja Spiegelman talks about two newly published books by Lucia Berlin, “Evening in Paradise” and “Welcome Home.”

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Talking About the 10 Best Books of 2018

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 19:03:46 +0000

On a special episode of the podcast, taped live, editors from The New York Times discuss the Book Review’s list of the year’s outstanding fiction and nonfiction.

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The Epic Tragedy of Vietnam

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 17:37:18 +0000

Max Hastings discusses his new history of the war, and Sue Prideaux talks about the life of Friedrich Nietzsche.

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The Past, Present and Future of Jews in America

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 17:12:38 +0000

Gal Beckerman discusses several new books about the state of Judaism in this country, and Kiese Laymon talks about his new memoir, “Heavy.”

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Big New Biographies of Two Big American Lives

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Nov 2018 20:36:10 +0000

David W. Blight talks about “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” and Bob Spitz talks about “Reagan: An American Journey.”

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Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on “Friday Black”

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Nov 2018 20:21:51 +0000

“Black people being murdered is unfortunately a constant in this country. Murdered with impunity. It’s something that’s constantly on my mind,” Adjei-Brenyah says. “So some of these stories respond to that very specifically.” Plus, Joseph Ellis discusses his new book, “American Dialogue.”

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Lisa Brennan-Jobs on 'Small Fry'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 18:40:00 +0000

In a special episode of the Book Review's podcast, taped in front of a live audience, Brennan-Jobs talks about her memoir, and Gary Shteyngart discusses "Lake Success."

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Susan Orlean on a Great Library Fire

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 17:35:11 +0000

Orlean discusses “The Library Book,” and Reid Hoffman talks about “Blitzscaling.”

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Barry Jenkins and Meg Wolitzer on Two of This Season's Novels on Screen

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 15:40:17 +0000

Jenkins talks about his adaptation of James Baldwin's "If Beale Street Could Talk," and Wolitzer discusses the adaptation of her novel "The Wife."

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Michael Lewis and Tana French on Their Latest Books

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 19:41:02 +0000

Lewis talks about "The Fifth Risk," and French discusses "The Witch Elm."

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Kate Atkinson on 'Transcription'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Oct 2018 18:32:53 +0000

Atkinson talks about her new novel, and Shane Bauer discusses "American Prison."

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The End of the ‘Struggle’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 20:14:32 +0000

Daniel Mendelsohn discusses Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” and Jill Lepore talks about “These Truths: A History of the United States.”

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Esi Edugyan on Her Booker-Shortlisted 'Washington Black'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 16:29:03 +0000

Edugyan talks about her new novel, and Lisa Margonelli talks about “Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology.”

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A Memoir From the Hard-Working ‘Heartland’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 20:07:08 +0000

Sarah Smarsh talks about her new book, and Allan Lichtman discusses "The Embattled Vote in America."

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'The Most Secretly Interesting Place in America'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Sep 2018 16:25:21 +0000

Sam Anderson talks about “Boom Town,” his new book about Oklahoma City; and David Enrich and Andrew Ross Sorkin discuss finance in fiction, including in Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, “Lake Success.”

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The Uses and Misuses of Identity

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 19:31:22 +0000

Kwame Anthony Appiah talks about “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity,” and Jonathan Haidt discusses “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

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Interrogating the Change Makers

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 16:34:40 +0000

Anand Giridharadas talks about his new book on the world of a global elite, and Kim Brooks discusses “Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear.”

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Rethinking the 'Tangled Tree' of Life

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 15:32:37 +0000

David Quammen discusses his new book about the science of evolution, and Andrea Gabor talks about “After the Education Wars.”

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Lydia Millet on 'Fight No More'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 19:57:46 +0000

Millet discusses her new collection of stories, and Alexandra Jacobs talks about Jamie Bernstein’s “Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein.”

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Beth Macy on 'Dopesick'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Aug 2018 15:48:37 +0000

Macy discusses her new book about the opioid crisis; Lovia Gyarkye talks about Chibundu Onuzo’s “Welcome to Lagos”; and Jennifer Schuessler discusses a controversy in the world of poetry.

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Drawing History

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 16:52:34 +0000

Hillary Chute talks about new graphic books that address serious issues, and Nicole Lamy discusses her Match Book column, in which she helps readers find books they'll love.

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True Crime Starring the Creator of Sherlock Holmes

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 18:10:40 +0000

Margalit Fox talks about “Conan Doyle for the Defense,” and Tina Jordan discusses this season’s thrillers.

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Making a Killing

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 14:22:28 +0000

In this special bonus episode of the Book Review’s podcast, best-selling thriller writers Lee Child, Megan Abbott, Meg Gardiner, Lisa Gardner and Lisa Scottoline discuss the tricks of their best-selling trade.

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From Transcribing for Obama to Writing Her Own Story

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 16:34:59 +0000

Beck Dorey-Stein discusses “From the Corner of the Oval,” and Caroline Weber talks about “Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-De-Siècle Paris.”

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An Inside View of Putin

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Jul 2018 19:09:37 +0000

Michael McFaul discusses "From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia," and Ottessa Moshfegh talks about her new novel, "My Year of Rest and Relaxation."

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The Latest in Cyberwarfare

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 19:41:38 +0000

David E. Sanger talks about “The Perfect Weapon,” and Stacy Horn discusses “Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York.”

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The Life of Atticus Finch

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 18:41:41 +0000

Joseph Crespino talks about his biography of Harper Lee's fictional character, and Philip Dray talks about “The Fair Chase: The Epic Story of Hunting in America.”

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The Things We Inherit

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 19:38:41 +0000

Carl Zimmer discusses “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh,” and Henry Alford talks about “And Then We Danced.”

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Michael Pollan on His Acid Test

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Jun 2018 17:23:06 +0000

Michael Pollan talks about “How to Change Your Mind,” and Edward Tenner discusses “The Efficiency Paradox.”

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Dinosaurs, the Master of Horror and Philip Roth

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Jun 2018 17:37:39 +0000

Steve Brusatte talks about “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs”; Victor Lavalle and Gilbert Cruz discuss the work of Stephen King; and Dwight Garner, A.O. Scott and Taffy Brodesser-Akner talk about the legacy of Philip Roth.

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David Sedaris on ‘Calypso’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 May 2018 16:57:43 +0000

Sedaris talks about his latest book, and Alisa Roth discusses “Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness.”

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Lost at Sea

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 May 2018 20:55:44 +0000

Rachel Slade talks about “Into the Raging Sea,” and Clemantine Wamariya discusses “The Girl Who Smiled Beads.”

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Amy Chozick on 'Chasing Hillary'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 May 2018 16:48:16 +0000

Chozick discusses her time covering Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, and Sloane Crosley talks about her new collection of essays, “Look Alive Out There.”

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There Is Nothin' Like a Tune

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 May 2018 20:54:35 +0000

Todd S. Purdum talks about “Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution,” and Fran Leadon discusses “Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles.”

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Julian Barnes on 'The Only Story'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 17:37:54 +0000

Barnes talks about his latest novel, and Lawrence Wright discusses “God Save Texas.”

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Jo Nesbo Reimagines ‘Macbeth’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Apr 2018 16:57:44 +0000

James Shapiro discusses Nesbo’s new novel, and Leila Slimani talks about “The Perfect Nanny.”

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Parenting in the Age of Omnipresent Screens

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 16:01:25 +0000

Pamela Druckerman discusses “The Art of Screen Time” and “Be the Parent, Please,” and Ben Austen talks about “High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing.”

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Tara Westover on 'Educated'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Apr 2018 18:19:13 +0000

Westover discusses her best-selling memoir, and Mark Weinberg talks about "Movie Nights With the Reagans."

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All in the Family

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 16:44:30 +0000

Luis Alberto Urrea talks about his new novel, “The House of Broken Angels,” and Martin Doyle discusses “The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers.”

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'Just the Funny Parts'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 06:06:14 +0000

Nell Scovell discusses her new memoir, and Joanne Lipman talks about "That's What She Said."

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Impeachment, Then and Now

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 15:51:02 +0000

Cass R. Sunstein talks about “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide” and “Can It Happen Here?”; and Kathryn Hughes discusses “Victorians Undone.”

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Ronen Bergman on Israel’s Targeted Assassinations

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Mar 2018 18:12:57 +0000

Bergman talks about “Rise and Kill First,” and Felix Salmon discusses Chris Hughes’s “Fair Shot.”

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A Marine’s Inventive Memoir

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Mar 2018 19:13:11 +0000

Matt Young discusses “Eat the Apple,” and A. O. Scott talks about Martin Amis’s “The Rub of Time.”

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Tayari Jones on 'An American Marriage'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 20:14:46 +0000

Jones talks about her new novel, and J. Randy Taraborrelli discusses “Jackie, Janet & Lee.”

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Lisa Halliday on 'Asymmetry'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 18:52:31 +0000

Halliday discusses her debut novel, and Naomi Novik and Gerald Jonas remember the life and work of Ursula K. Le Guin.

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Laura Lippman on 'Sunburn'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Feb 2018 16:29:59 +0000

Lippman talks about her new novel, and Tina Jordan discusses new romance novels.

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Rose McGowan on 'Brave'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Feb 2018 17:01:41 +0000

McGowan talks about her new memoir, and Katie Kitamura discusses Tom Malmquist’s new novel, “In Every Moment We Are Still Alive.”

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Twilight's Last Gleaming?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 17:37:30 +0000

David Frum talks about “Trumpocracy,” and Helen Thorpe discusses “The Newcomers.”

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'Off the Charts'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 18:26:59 +0000

Ann Hulbert discusses her new book about child prodigies, and Sam Graham-Felsen talks about his debut novel, “Green.”

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Some Assembly Required

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 13:50:14 +0000

Alexander Langlands discusses “Craeft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts,” and Max Boot talks about “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.”

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What to Read About North Korea

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Jan 2018 18:10:28 +0000

Nicholas Kristof discusses the best books about the secretive country, and Tui Sutherland talks about the graphic novel edition of “Wings of Fire.”

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The Fire Next Time

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 16:43:24 +0000

Brendan I. Koerner talks about “Megafire” and “Firestorm,” and Henry Fountain discusses “The Great Quake.”

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'The Story of the Jews' Continues

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 17:11:57 +0000

Simon Schama talks about “Belonging: 1492-1900,” and Christopher de Hamel discusses “Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts.”

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Mary Beard on 'Women & Power'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 20:55:55 +0000

Beard talks about her new manifesto, and Hillary Chute discusses “Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere.”

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'The Second Coming of the KKK'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Dec 2017 19:53:04 +0000

Linda Gordon talks about “The Second Coming of the KKK”; Scott Kelly discusses “Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery”; and editors from the Book Review talk about our 10 Best Books of 2017.

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The History of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Dec 2017 18:35:25 +0000

Joe Hagan discusses "Sticky Fingers," and Simon Winchester talks about "The Taste of Empire" and "A Thirst for Empire."

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O Pioneers!

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 21:37:50 +0000

Caroline Fraser talks about “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” and Tiya Miles discusses “The Dawn of Detroit.”

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Mother Knows Best?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 19:23:42 +0000

James Wolcott talks about “Raising Trump” and “The Kardashians,” and Tina Brown discusses “The Vanity Fair Diaries.”

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Kurt Andersen on Channeling President Trump

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 17:30:16 +0000

Andersen talks about "You Can't Spell America Without Me"; Liza Mundy discusses “Code Girls”; and Maria Russo on the season's children’s books.

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The American Revolution in Six Lives

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Nov 2017 18:45:39 +0000

Russell Shorto talks about “Revolution Song,” and Richard Aldous discusses his new biography of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

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Marilyn Stasio on True Crime

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 16:24:29 +0000

Stasio discusses new books about real crimes, and Dave Eggers talks about his two new illustrated books.

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From Podcast to Book with Marc Maron

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 16:15:48 +0000

Marc Maron discusses “Waiting for the Punch,” and Victor Sebestyen talks about his new biography of Lenin.

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Ron Chernow on 'Grant'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 16:50:50 +0000

Chernow talks about his new biography of Ulysses S. Grant, and Mike Wallace discusses “Greater Gotham: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919.”

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Jennifer Egan Talks About 'Manhattan Beach'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Oct 2017 16:25:17 +0000

Egan discusses her new novel, and Franklin Foer talks about “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech.”

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Recent Romances

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 16:37:08 +0000

Robert Gottlieb talks about new romance novels, and Celeste Ng discusses her new novel, “Little Fires Everywhere.”

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Jesmyn Ward on 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 23:21:09 +0000

Ward discusses her new novel; David Dobbs on five new books about Darwin; and Kristin Cashore talks about “Jane, Unlimited.”

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Jill Abramson on the 2016 Presidential Campaign

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 22:54:28 +0000

Abramson discusses Katy Tur's "Unbelievable" and Hillary Clinton's "What Happened."

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'Gorbachev: His Life and Times'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Sep 2017 19:26:50 +0000

William Taubman discusses his biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, and N. K. Jemisin talks about reading, writing and reviewing science fiction and fantasy.

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An American Abroad

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Sep 2017 17:32:39 +0000

Suzy Hansen discusses “Notes on a Foreign Country,” and David Thomson talks about “Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio.”

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The Joys of Children’s Literature

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 15:55:47 +0000

Bruce Handy talks about “Wild Things,” and Adrian Owen discusses “Into the Gray Zone.”

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Analyzing Freud

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 20:26:18 +0000

George Prochnik discusses “Freud,” and Nancy MacLean talks about “Democracy in Chains.”

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New Books About Parenting

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 15:55:33 +0000

Judith Newman discusses new parenting books, and Bill Goldstein talks about “The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature.”

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Amy Schumer on ‘Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Aug 2017 14:38:12 +0000

Amy Schumer discusses her memoir, and Gregory Cowles talks about the Book Review's special poetry issue.

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'Lights On, Rats Out'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 16:47:58 +0000

Cree LeFavour talks about her new memoir, and Andrew Sean Greer discusses his new novel, "Less."

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Steve Bannon's Road to the White House

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 21:33:33 +0000

Joshua Green talks about “Devil’s Bargain”; Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich discusses “The Fact of a Body”; and Laura Dassow Walls on her new biography of Thoreau.

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The World of Jane Austen Fans

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 16:39:42 +0000

Deborah Yaffe talks about “Among the Janeites,” and Robert Ferguson discusses “Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North.”

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The History of the London Zoo

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Jul 2017 15:27:08 +0000

Isobel Charman discusses "The Zoo," and R. L. Stine talks about scary stories for children.

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Silk on a Stick

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 21:39:23 +0000

Aaron Retica talks about Tim Marshall’s “A Flag Worth Dying For,” and Jill Eisenstadt discusses her new novel, “Swell.”

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'The Boy Who Loved Too Much'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 16:06:23 +0000

Jennifer Latson talks about “The Boy Who Loved Too Much”; Daniel Menaker discusses two new books about how to understand others and make ourselves understood.

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China's World

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 20:36:32 +0000

Howard W. French talks about “Everything Under the Heavens,” and Judith Newman discusses new books about how to grieve and how to die.

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Al Franken on Life in the Senate

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Jun 2017 20:27:06 +0000

Franken discusses his new political memoir; Thomas E. Ricks talks about “Churchill and Orwell”; and Dav Pilkey on the movie adaptation of “Captain Underpants” and more.

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David Sedaris Talks About His Diaries

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Jun 2017 16:15:49 +0000

Sedaris discusses "Theft by Finding," and Christopher Knowlton talks about "Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West."

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Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 May 2017 15:46:09 +0000

Mike Rapport discusses "The Unruly City," and Dan Egan talks about "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes."

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Joshua Ferris on ‘The Dinner Party’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 May 2017 16:21:28 +0000

Ferris talks about his new collection of stories, and Jonathan Taplin discusses “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”

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Elizabeth Warren on Fighting for the Middle Class

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 May 2017 16:06:35 +0000

Elizabeth Warren talks about “This Fight Is Our Fight,” and Doree Shafrir discusses her debut novel, “Startup.”

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Gabourey Sidibe and Neil deGrasse Tyson

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 May 2017 16:24:25 +0000

Gabourey Sidibe talks about her memoir, "This Is Just My Face," and Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry."

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Sheryl Sandberg on Life After Tragedy

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 16:01:51 +0000

Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant talk about “Option B,” and Annie Jacobsen discusses “Phenomena.”

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'Hamlet Globe to Globe'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 18:30:14 +0000

Dominic Dromgoole talks about “Hamlet Globe to Globe”; and Judith Newman discusses new books about sex and relationships.

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Power and Punishment

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 15:01:23 +0000

Chris Hayes discusses "A Colony in a Nation," and Jason Zinoman talks about "Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night."

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Lives on the Line

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Apr 2017 16:13:25 +0000

Elisabeth Rosenthal talks about “An American Sickness”; and Jill Filipovic discusses “Unwanted Advances,” by Laura Kipnis, and “The Campus Rape Frenzy,” by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr.

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The Charm of 'The Idiot'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 15:00:11 +0000

Elif Batuman talks about her first novel, “The Idiot,” and David Bellos discusses “The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables.’ ”

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'Ties' to Ferrante?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 17:10:36 +0000

Domenico Starnone and Jhumpa Lahiri talk about “Ties”; Mary Otto discusses “Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America.”

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The Definition of Adulthood

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 17:32:49 +0000

Jami Attenberg talks about her new novel, “All Grown Up,” and Bonnie Rochman discusses “The Gene Machine.”

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Points of No Return

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 21:43:44 +0000

Mohsin Hamid talks about his new novel, “Exit West,” and Gillian Thomas discusses Marjorie J. Spruill’s “Divided We Stand.”

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Happy Trails

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Mar 2017 20:17:37 +0000

Florence Williams discusses “The Nature Fix,” and Jennifer Szalai talks about new Argentine fiction.

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The History of Race and Racism in America

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 18:08:08 +0000

Ibram X. Kendi discusses the history of books about race and racism in America; Bill Schutt talks about "Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History."

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Neil Gaiman's Myths

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 17:02:39 +0000

Neil Gaiman discusses "Norse Mythology"; Sarah Lyall talks about Ali Smith's "Autumn"; and Nick Bilton on two new books about Silicon Valley.

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George Saunders on Lincoln and Lost Souls

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 18:13:50 +0000

George Saunders talks about “Lincoln in the Bardo”; Alan Burdick on “Why Times Flies”; and Maria Russo discusses Laura Ingalls Wilder and the “Little House” books.

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A Brave Look at Depression

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Feb 2017 18:10:52 +0000

Daphne Merkin talks about “This Close to Happy,” and Min Jin Lee discusses her new novel, “Pachinko.”

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From Brooklyn to the Gulag

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 17:32:32 +0000

Sana Krasikov talks about her debut novel, "The Patriots"; and Michael Sims discusses "Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes."

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Barack Obama's Legacy

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 18:11:47 +0000

Jonathan Chait talks about "Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail," and Randall Fuller discusses "The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation."

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Edward Snowden: Hero, Traitor or Spy?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 17:13:50 +0000

Nicholas Lemann talks about Edward Jay Epstein's "How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft," and James Ryerson discusses new books about how to be civil in an uncivil world.

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Should You Stop Eating Sugar?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Jan 2017 17:51:04 +0000

Gary Taubes discusses "The Case Against Sugar," and Anthony Gottlieb talks about a new biography of Casanova.

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How Octopuses Are Like Aliens

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 17:03:59 +0000

Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses “Other Minds,” and Jeff Howe talks about “Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future.”

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The Year in Reading

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 16:40:09 +0000

Editors at the Book Review discuss what many notable people were reading in 2016, and Will Schwalbe talks about "Books for Living."

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Michael Lewis and Arianna Huffington

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 18:15:50 +0000

Michael Lewis discusses his new book, "The Undoing Project," and Arianna Huffington talks about "Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less," by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.

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The 10 Best Books of 2016

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Dec 2016 17:50:59 +0000

Stefan Hertmans talks about "War and Turpentine"; editors at the Book Review talk about the year's best books; and Ian McGuire discusses "The North Water."

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100 Notable Books of 2016

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Dec 2016 17:03:37 +0000

Editors at the Book Review discuss the year's notable books; Ronald H. Fritze talks about "Egyptomania," and Matthew Schneier on "Vanity Fair's Writers on Writers."

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Thomas Friedman on 'Thank You for Being Late'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 17:26:54 +0000

Thomas Friedman discusses "Thank You for Being Late," and David France talks about "How to Survive a Plague."

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Michael Chabon Talks About 'Moonglow'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 17:49:56 +0000

Michael Chabon discusses his new novel, and Blanche Wiesen Cook talks about the third volume in her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

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War Stories

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 15:43:14 +0000

Thomas Ricks discusses new books about military history, and Maria Russo talks about the season's best new children's books.

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John Grisham on 'The Whistler'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Nov 2016 15:26:38 +0000

John Grisham talks about his latest novel, and Ben Macintyre discusses "Rogue Heroes."

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Thrillers and True Crime

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:32:39 +0000

Charles Finch talks about the season’s thrillers; and Marilyn Stasio discusses new true-crime books.

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Beth Macy’s ‘Truevine’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 16:25:26 +0000

Beth Macy talks about “Truevine”; Calvin Trillin and Roz Chast discuss “No Fair! No Fair! And Other Jolly Poems of Childhood”; and Molly Young on “Bridget Jones's Baby.”

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The Rise of Hitler

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 15:40:34 +0000

Adam Kirsch discusses Volker Ullrich's new biography of Hitler; Billy Collins talks about his latest collection of poems; and iO Tillett Wright on his new memoir, "Darling Days."

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'Sing for Your Life'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Oct 2016 16:51:01 +0000

Daniel Bergner talks about "Sing for Your Life," and Maria Semple discusses "Today Will Be Different."

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American Apartheid

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 16:35:28 +0000

Patrick Phillips talks about “Blood at the Root”; Ethan Gilsdorf discusses three new books about gaming; and Melissa Clark on the season’s best new cookbooks.

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Simon Schama's 'The Face of Britain'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 19:48:39 +0000

Simon Schama talks about “The Face of Britain: A History of the Nation Through Its Portraits,” and Robert Gottlieb discusses “Avid Reader.”

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Maureen Dowd on Clinton and Trump

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 16:50:08 +0000

Maureen Dowd talks about “The Year of Voting Dangerously,” and Lauren Collins talks about “When in French.”

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Mark Thompson's 'Enough Said'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Sep 2016 16:19:22 +0000

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Inside The New York Times Book Review: The Attica Uprising

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Sep 2016 15:53:31 +0000

This week, Heather Ann Thompson talks about "Blood in the Water"; Seth Mnookin discusses "Patient H.M."; feedback from readers; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams on what we're reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘ADHD Nation’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Alan Schwarz talks about “ADHD Nation”; Raina Telgemeier discusses “Ghosts”; Nicholson Baker talks about “Substitute”; and Gregory Cowles, Jennifer Schuessler and John Williams on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘I Contain Multitudes’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Ed Yong talks about “I Contain Multitudes”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Meghan Daum discusses Egos, her new column about memoirs; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams on what we’re reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Colson Whitehead and Jeffrey Toobin

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Colson Whitehead discusses his new novel, “The Underground Railroad,” and Jeffrey Toobin talks about “American Heiress,” his new book about Patty Hearst. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘How to Be a Person in the World’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Aug 2016 04:00:00 +0000

Heather Havrilesky discusses her new collection of advice columns, and Jessica Winter talks about her debut novel, “Break in Case of Emergency.”

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Colson Whitehead

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Aug 2016 04:00:00 +0000

In a sneak preview of next week’s podcast, Colson Whitehead talks about what he read (and couldn’t read) while writing “The Underground Railroad.”

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Megan Abbott’s ‘You Will Know Me’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 04:00:00 +0000

Megan Abbott discusses “You Will Know Me”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Marilyn Stasio talks about several new true-crime books; feedback from readers; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘We Are Not Such Things’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Justine van der Leun talks about “We Are Not Such Things”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; David Goldblatt discusses “The Games: A Global History of the Olympics”; feedback from readers; and Gregory Cowles and John Williams on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Jul 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Moira Weigel discusses new biographies of Helen Gurley Brown; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Juliet Nicolson talks about “A House Full of Daughters”; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘You’ll Grow Out of It’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sun, 10 Jul 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Jessi Klein discusses her new essay collection; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Antonio García Martinez talks about “Chaos Monkeys”; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Hogs Wild’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Jul 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Ian Frazier talks about “Hogs Wild”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Barry Friedman discusses two new books about law enforcement; and John Williams, Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Why Populism Now?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Sam Tanenhaus talks about new political books; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Calvin Trillin discusses “Jackson, 1964”; listeners share some of their favorite summer reading memories; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Susan Faludi’s ‘In the Darkroom’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Susan Faludi discusses her new memoir, “In the Darkroom”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; James Lee McDonough talks about his new biography of William Tecumseh Sherman; listeners share some of their favorite summer reading memories; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘First Dads’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Joshua Kendall talks about “First Dads”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Judith Warner discusses “The End of American Childhood”; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Before the Fall’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Jun 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Noah Hawley talks about “Before the Fall”; Andrew Solomon discusses “Far and Away”; Marjorie Ingall on the season’s new Y.A. novels; and Parul Sehgal and Gregory Cowles talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 May 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Adam Hochschild talks about Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Stephanie Danler discusses her debut novel, “Sweetbitter”; Jojo Moyes talks about the film adaptation of her novel “Me Before You”; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Romanovs’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Mon, 23 May 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Simon Sebag Montefiore discusses his new history of the Romanovs; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Laura Miller talks about new audiobooks of childhood favorites; and Parul Sehgal and Gregory Cowles discuss what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Romanovs’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 May 2016 04:00:00 +0000

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Gene’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 May 2016 04:00:00 +0000

Siddhartha Mukherjee talks about “The Gene”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Jennifer Szalai discusses two books about taste; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal talk about what people are reading.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Pumpkinflowers’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 May 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Matti Friedman discusses “Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Judith Shulevitz talks about Angela Duckworth’s “Grit”; Sherman Alexie and Yuyi Morales discuss “Thunder Boy Jr.”; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal discuss what people are reading.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Celebrating 10 Years

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 5 May 2016 04:00:00 +0000

On this special episode of the podcast, Pamela Paul, Sam Tanenhaus, Dwight Garner and Gary Shteyngart discuss the history of the show, which started in 2006.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Listen, Liberal’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 04:00:00 +0000

Thomas Frank talks about “Listen, Liberal”; Lydia Millet discusses her new novel, “Sweet Lamb of Heaven”; and Parul Sehgal and Gregory Cowles talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Michael Kinsley discusses “Old Age”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Eric Fair talks about “Consequence”; Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘At the Existentialist Café'

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Sarah Bakewell discusses her new book about the existentialists; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Liesl Schillinger talks about a new biography of Blanche Knopf; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: The Life of Louisa Adams

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Apr 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Louisa Thomas talks about “Louisa”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Hope Jahren discusses “Lab Girl”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Spain in Our Hearts’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 Apr 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Adam Hochschild talks about “Spain in Our Hearts”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Anna Quindlen discusses “Miller’s Valley”; John Williams talks about James McBride and his new biography of James Brown; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Girls and Sex’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Peggy Orenstein talks about “Girls and Sex”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; John Williams discusses “The Throwback Special”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: American Eugenics

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Adam Cohen talks about “Imbeciles”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Ellen Fitzpatrick discusses “The Highest Glass Ceiling”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Profiteers’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Sally Denton talks about “The Profiteers”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Jack Viertel discusses “The Secret Life of the American Musical”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘All the Single Ladies’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Mar 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Rebecca Traister talks about “All the Single Ladies”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Ben Ratliff discusses “Every Song Ever”; Richard Armitage discusses his audiobook recording of “David Copperfield”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘A Mother’s Reckoning’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Feb 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Sue Klebold talks about her new memoir; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Matthew Desmond discusses “Evicted”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘West of Eden’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Maria Russo discusses Jean Stein’s “West of Eden,” A. O. Scott talks about “Better Living Through Criticism” and Parul Sehgal has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Can the American Dream Survive?

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 05:00:00 +0000

Robert Gordon, author of “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” and Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, debate whether the era of strong economic growth is over, or whether innovation can revive America’s future.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Love and Death

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Andrew Solomon discusses five new books about death and dying; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Alexandra Fuller talks about Olga Grushin’s “Forty Rooms”; readers recommend books for Valentine’s Day; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Infinite Jest’ at 20

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Feb 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Michael Pietsch and Tom Bissell talk about David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Chris Jennings discusses “Paradise Now”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Bill Bryson on Britain

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Bill Bryson talks about “The Road to Little Dribbling”; Jennifer Schuessler has news from the literary world; Molly Young discusses new books about productivity; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Dark Money’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Jane Mayer discusses “Dark Money”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; David Greenberg talks about “Republic of Spin”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘City of Thorns’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Ben Rawlence discusses “City of Thorns”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Janice Y. K. Lee talks about “The Expatriates”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Defender’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 Jan 2016 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Brent Staples discusses “The Defender” and the history of the black press; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Maria Konnikova talks about “The Confidence Game”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: You, New and Improved

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Heather Havrilesky talks about Amy Cuddy’s “Presence” and Shonda Rhimes’s “Year of Yes,” and Michael Ian Black discusses “Navel Gazing.” Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: The Year in Poetry

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Parul Sehgal and Gregory Cowles discuss the year in poetry; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; George Saunders talks about children’s books; and Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: From Movement to Mainstream

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Sam Tanenhaus discusses two new books about the history of American conservatism; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Lori Gottlieb talks about Courtney Jung’s “Lactivism”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Reading ‘Pride and Prejudice’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Rosamund Pike talks about recording “Pride and Prejudice” as an audiobook; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Kaiama Glover discusses the work of Patrick Modiano; James Shapiro on “The Year of Lear”; feedback from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: The 10 Best Books of 2015

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Dec 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, editors at the Book Review discuss the year’s best books; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Matthew Schneier discusses facial hair and a treatise on men’s style; Bee Wilson talks about “First Bite”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Lisa Randall talks about “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Louisa Lim discusses five new memoirs about fleeing North Korea; and John Williams has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: David Hare’s Memoir

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, David Hare discusses “The Blue Touch Paper”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Sarah Vowell talks about “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: The Life of George H. W. Bush

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Jon Meacham discusses his biography of the 41st president; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Dan Ephron talks about “Killing a King”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Putin’s Reign

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Nov 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Steven Lee Myers talks about “The New Tsar”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Amy Ellis Nutt discusses “Becoming Nicole”; Maria Russo talks about the season in children’s books; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Michael Connelly’s ‘The Crossing’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Michael Connelly discusses his new novel; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Joseph Kanon talks about a new biography of John le Carré and a memoir by Frederick Forsyth; feedback from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Doomed to Succeed”

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Scott Anderson discusses “Doomed to Succeed”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Roger Lowenstein talks about “America’s Bank”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Parul Sehgal, filling in for Pamela Paul, is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Doomed to Succeed”

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Scott Anderson and Roger Lowenstein.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Richard McGuire talks about “Here”; John Williams has news from the literary world and feedback from readers; Simon Parkin discusses two new books about gaming; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Parul Sehgal, filling in for Pamela Paul, is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Oct 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Kate Clifford Larson discusses the life of Rosemary Kennedy; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Larissa MacFarquhar talks about “Strangers Drowning”; feedback from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Niall Ferguson’s ‘Kissinger’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Oct 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Niall Ferguson discusses his biography of Henry Kissinger; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Sloane Crosley talks about “The Clasp”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Black Silent Majority’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Khalil Gibran Muhammad talks about Michael Javen Fortner’s “Black Silent Majority”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Hanna Rosin discusses David Brock’s “Killing the Messenger”; feedback from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Court and the World’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, John Fabian Witt talks about Stephen Breyer’s new book; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Mira Jacob discusses three new coming-of-age novels; Sam Tanenhaus reminisces about the podcast; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Fates and Furies’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Lauren Groff talks about her new novel, “Fates and Furies”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Scott Shane discusses “Objective Troy”; feedback from listeners; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Bill Clegg’s Debut Novel

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 4 Sep 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Bill Clegg talks about “Did You Ever Have a Family”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Kathryn J. Edin discusses "$2.00 a Day”; feedback from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Give Us the Ballot’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Ari Berman and Simon Winchester.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Give Us the Ballot’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Ari Berman and Simon Winchester.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘NeuroTribes’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Steve Silberman talks about “NeuroTribes” and autism; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Elisabeth Egan discusses “A Window Opens”; questions from readers; Maria Russo talks about the season’s children’s books; and Parul Sehgal has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Vu Tran’s ‘Dragonfish’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Vu Tran discusses his debut novel, “Dragonfish”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Ruth Franklin talks about Lucia Berlin’s stories; listeners share what they’ve been reading; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Katrina: After the Flood’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 7 Aug 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Gary Rivlin discusses “Katrina: After the Flood”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Joe Domanick talks about “Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Conservative Heart’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Arthur C. Brooks discusses “The Conservative Heart”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Susan Southard talks about “Nagasaki”; readers offer changes to the literary canon; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘What Pet Should I Get?’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Maria Russo and Alexandra Alter talk about Dr. Seuss; Jill Ciment discusses “The Hand That Feeds You”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Barbarian Days’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, William Finnegan talks about “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Peter Moore discusses “The Weather Experiment”; questions from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Michael B. Oren’s ‘Ally’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Jacob Heilbrunn discusses Michael B. Oren’s “Ally”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Julia Pierpont talks about her debut novel, “Among the Ten Thousand Things”; questions from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Skyfaring’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sun, 5 Jul 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Mark Vanhoenacker and Kristen Green.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Skyfaring’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Jul 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Mark Vanhoenacker talks about “Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot”; Alexandra Alter has notes from the publishing world; Kristen Green discusses “Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: The Art Issue

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Holland Cotter discusses four new books and the contemporary art scene; Alexandra Alter has notes from the publishing world; Jonathon Keats talks about art theft and forgeries; questions from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: When I Grow Up

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Heather Havrilesky and Meghan Daum discuss new books about bringing up children and redefining adulthood; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Vendela Vida talks about her new novel, “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty”; questions from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Stalin’s Daughter’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Rosemary Sullivan talks about “Stalin’s Daughter”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Eugenia Cheng discusses “How to Bake Pi”; Judd Apatow on his reading habits; questions from listeners; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: “Reagan: The Life”

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 5 Jun 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Jeff Shesol discusses H. W. Brands’s new biography of Ronald Reagan; Alexandra Alter has notes from the publishing world; Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs talks about her new biography of Jonas Salk; questions from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Judy Blume’s ‘In the Unlikely Event’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 29 May 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Judy Blume talks about her new novel; Liesl Schillinger rounds up new travel books; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Vanessa Grigoriadis discusses Wednesday Martin’s memoir, “Primates of Park Avenue”; feedback from readers; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Shakespeare in Love

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 22 May 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Alan Riding discusses two new books about Shakespeare’s women characters and his personal life; Parul Sehgal and John Williams have news from the literary world; Michelle Orange talks about five new essay collections; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: The Future of Work

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 May 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Barbara Ehrenreich discusses “Rise of the Robots” and “Shadow Work”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Andrew Solomon talks about Oliver Sacks’s new memoir, “On the Move”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Matthew Weiner On the End of ‘Mad Men’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 15 May 2015 04:00:00 +0000

In a special supplement from The Times’s culture desk, Mr. Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” discusses the coming conclusion of the series with Dave Itzkoff, a reporter for The Times.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘A God in Ruins’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 8 May 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Tom Perrotta discusses Kate Atkinson’s “A God in Ruins”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Ruth Franklin talks about Shirley Jackson; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 1 May 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Sam Tanenhaus talks about Zachary Leader’s new biography of Saul Bellow; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Emily Bazelon discusses Jon Krakauer’s “Missoula”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Mass Murder in Norway

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Eric Schlosser discusses Asne Seierstad’s “One of Us”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Meghan O’Rourke talks about Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Light of the World”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Spinster’ and Public Shaming

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Kate Bolick discusses “Spinster”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Jon Ronson talks about “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Brothers,’ About the Boston Marathon Bombers

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Masha Gessen discusses “The Brothers”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Gretchen Rubin talks about “Better Than Before”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Becoming Steve Jobs’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Apr 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Brad Stone talks about “Becoming Steve Jobs”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Amanda Schaffer discusses three new books about neuroscience; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Becoming Steve Jobs’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 3 Apr 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, “Becoming Steve Jobs” and three new books about neuroscience.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Folded Clock’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Heidi Julavits and Jeffrey Lieberman.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Folded Clock’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Heidi Julavits discusses “The Folded Clock”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Jeffrey Lieberman talks about “Shrinks”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Opposite of Spoiled’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Ron Lieber discusses “The Opposite of Spoiled”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Harris Irfan talks about “Heaven’s Bankers”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘The Last Flight of Poxl West’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 04:00:00 +0000

This week, Daniel Torday discusses “The Last Flight of Poxl West”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Frank Bruni talks about Barney Frank’s new memoir; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Erik Larson’s ‘Dead Wake’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Mar 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Erik Larson talks about “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Orlando Patterson discusses two new books by black conservatives, “Please Stop Helping Us” and “Shame”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Elliot Ackerman’s ‘Green on Blue’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Tom Bissell discusses Elliot Ackerman’s “Green on Blue”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; John Hooper talks about “The Italians”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘H Is for Hawk’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Vicki Constantine Croke discusses Heather Macdonald’s “H Is for Hawk”; Parul Sehgal has news from the literary world; John Williams talks about Nick Hornby’s “Funny Girl”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: The War on Drugs

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Seth Mnookin discusses Johann Hari’s “Chasing the Scream”; John Williams has news from the publishing world; Ben Yagoda talks about “The B Side”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Love and Lies’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 6 Feb 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Adelle Waldman discusses Clancy Martin’s “Love and Lies”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Dana Goldstein talks about Anya Kamenetz’s “The Test”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Guantánamo Diary’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Sun, 1 Feb 2015 05:00:00 +0000

Mark Danner on “Guantánamo Diary” and David Adam on “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop.”

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Jill Leovy’s ‘Ghettoside’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 23 Jan 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Jill Leovy discusses “Ghettoside”; Patton Oswalt talks about his memoir “Silver Screen Fiend”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Anita Shapira discusses “Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘Leaving Before the Rains Come’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Alexandra Fuller discusses her new memoir, “Leaving Before the Rains Come”; John Williams has news from the publishing world; Lauren Groff talks about Miranda July’s “The First Bad Man”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: ‘America’s Bitter Pill’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 9 Jan 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Steven Brill discusses “America’s Bitter Pill”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Heidi Julavits talks about Rachel Cusk’s “Outline”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Charles D’Ambrosio’s ‘Loitering’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 2 Jan 2015 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Phillip Lopate discusses Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Loitering”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Sven Beckert talks about “Empire of Cotton”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Parul Sehgal is the host, filling in for Pamela Paul.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Patrick Modiano’s ‘Suspended Sentences’

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Alan Riding discusses Patrick Modiano’s “Suspended Sentences”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Judith Newman talks about Ruth Goodman’s “How to Be a Victorian”; and best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: Disappearing Religions

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Gerard Russell talks about “Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Phil Zuckerman discusses “Living the Secular Life”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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Inside The New York Times Book Review: A Rare View of North Korea

books@nytimes.com (The New York Times) — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:00:00 +0000

This week, Suki Kim talks about “Without You, There Is No Us”; Parul Sehgal and John Williams have news from the literary world; Meghan Daum discusses “The Unspeakable”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

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