The Book Review

Ben Lerner’s slender new novel, “Transcription,” is just 130 pages long, yet it cracks open some of our most colossal and enduring philosophical questions. On this episode, MJ Franklin discusses “Transcription” with fellow Book Review editors Gregory Cowles and Alexandra Jacobs.

Transcribed - Published: 29 May 2026

Today we are delighted to share an episode from our colleagues on “The Ezra Klein Show,” originally published on March 31. Ezra interviewed author Michael Pollan, whose best-selling books include “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food,” and “How to Change Your Mind.” Pollan’s latest book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” came out earlier this year. It’s an exploration of what consciousness is, and the book is — as our review put it — “highly pleasurable to read.”

Transcribed - Published: 22 May 2026

The best-selling author joins the “Book Review” podcast to discuss his new novel, “The Midnight Train.”

Published: 15 May 2026

The crime novelist discusses her new memoir “True Crime.” Also, Daniel Kraus, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, talks about his novel “Angel Down.”

Transcribed - Published: 8 May 2026

From Oprah to romantasy, we look back at two decades of hit books and literary trends.

Transcribed - Published: 1 May 2026

Dilara, the heroine of Kenan Orhan’s debut novel, is a Turkish exile living in Italy and undergoing a routine bathroom renovation that turns out to be not so routine: When the contractors leave, she steps in and finds herself somehow transported to an actual cell in Istanbul’s infamous Silivri Prison. On this week's episode, host MJ Franklin discusses “The Renovation” with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and Dave Kim.

Transcribed - Published: 24 April 2026

The Book Review editors discuss Solvej Balle’s seven-book series, “On the Calculation of Volume.” Plus, a selection of translated fiction to put on your reading list.

Transcribed - Published: 17 April 2026

The author discusses his newest book, about a 19-year-old’s curious death and the investigation that followed.

Transcribed - Published: 10 April 2026

The Book Review editors discuss fiction and nonfiction that caught their eye. Plus, Ada Limón on the power of poetry.

Transcribed - Published: 3 April 2026

On this week’s episode, book club host MJ Franklin leads a discussion about Tayari Jones's latest novel, "Kin."

Transcribed - Published: 27 March 2026

The author talked about adapting his best-selling novel for film, creating the beloved character Rocky and making complex science feel approachable.

Transcribed - Published: 20 March 2026

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author talks process and “Planet of the Apes.”

Transcribed - Published: 13 March 2026

Bob Crawford discusses the leap from stage to page and why his new book, “America’s Founding Son,” feels so relevant.

Transcribed - Published: 6 March 2026

Emily Brontë’s classic “Wuthering Heights” 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.

Transcribed - Published: 27 February 2026

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.”

Transcribed - Published: 24 February 2026

Ahead of this year’s Academy Awards, the director appeared on the Book Review podcast to speak about his latest film.

Transcribed - Published: 20 February 2026

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 how the romance genre has changed over several decades.

Transcribed - Published: 13 February 2026

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,” speaks with host Gilbert Cruz about the iconic Japanese company.

Transcribed - Published: 6 February 2026

Xenobe Purvis’s slim but powerful debut novel, “The Hounding,” is about five young sisters in 1700s England who are suspected of being able to transform into a pack of wild dogs. It is 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 fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.

Transcribed - Published: 30 January 2026

The journalist, novelist and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman is best known for writing about rock music and pop culture. 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.

Transcribed - Published: 23 January 2026

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.

Transcribed - Published: 16 January 2026

Virginia Evans’s debut novel, “The Correspondent,” was published last April and became one of the publishing industry’s heartwarming champions of 2025. 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.

Transcribed - Published: 9 January 2026

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, one of the Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2025, is a literary mystery about a scholar’s search for a long-lost poem.

Transcribed - Published: 27 December 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 19 December 2025

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

Transcribed - Published: 12 December 2025

In this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz gathers a group of fellow editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year.

Transcribed - Published: 2 December 2025

In this week's episode, host MJ Franklin leads a discussion about Maggie O'Farrell's "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.

Transcribed - Published: 28 November 2025

It began with Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize in October, and continued this month with the Booker Prize and the National Book Awards. Our panel of editors discusses what it all means.

Transcribed - Published: 21 November 2025

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. And, most pressingly, it’s an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin through the lens of love. Boggs joins MJ Franklin on this week's episode to talk about his new book.

Transcribed - Published: 14 November 2025

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. Just in time for the disaster's fiftieth anniversary, John U. Bacon has written a new account of the story, “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald." In this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, Bacon spoke with Gilbert Cruz about his new book.

Transcribed - Published: 7 November 2025

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones, is a searching historical novel that examines America’s past sins and also a gory horror thriller. In this Halloween episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses the novel with Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib.

Transcribed - Published: 31 October 2025

May October never end! As Halloween approaches, we present you with two conversations from years past with great horror authors: Joe Hill ("King Sorrow") and Victor LaValle ("Lone Women").

Transcribed - Published: 24 October 2025

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. 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.

Transcribed - Published: 17 October 2025

Brandon Taylor's debut novel, “Real Life,” was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2020, and he quickly followed that up with the story collection “Filthy Animals” and another novel, “The Late Americans." On this week's episode, MJ Franklin speaks with Taylor about his latest work, “Minor Black Figures.”

Transcribed - Published: 10 October 2025

This week, the Book Review podcast presents an episode of The Sunday Special from early September featuring Louis Sachar, the author of beloved children's books like the "Wayside School" series and "Holes" as well as his new novel for adults "The Magician of Tiger Castle."

Transcribed - Published: 3 October 2025

“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. On this week’s episode, Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses the novel with fellow Book Review editors Jennifer Harlan, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.

Transcribed - Published: 26 September 2025

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, Roach tells host Gilbert Cruz how she comes up with her ideas and what keeps drawing her back to the bizarre bits of trivia that the human body offers up.

Transcribed - Published: 19 September 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 12 September 2025

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.)

Transcribed - Published: 5 September 2025

Charlotte McConaghy’s latest novel, “Wild Dark Shore,” opens with an enigma: A mysterious, half-drowned woman washes ashore. On this week’s episode, Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses the novel with his colleagues Lauren Christensen and Elisabeth Egan.

Transcribed - Published: 22 August 2025

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."

Transcribed - Published: 15 August 2025

Annie Jacobsen discusses her book “Nuclear War: A Scenario.”

Transcribed - Published: 8 August 2025

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 so many other great ones. This week the Book Review’s critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai chat with host Gilbert Cruz about some of their favorites.

Transcribed - Published: 1 August 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 25 July 2025

We’re halfway through 2025, and we at the New York Times 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.

Transcribed - Published: 18 July 2025

In "A Marriage at Sea," British journalist Sophie Elmhirst tells the gripping story of a British husband and wife in 1970s England who took to the high seas and found themselves stranded in the middle of the Pacific after a whale sank their boat. As Elmhirst tells host Gilbert Cruz, it's a story of personal survival, but it's also one about how a marriage holds together under the most stressful circumstances imaginable.

Transcribed - Published: 11 July 2025

“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.

Transcribed - Published: 27 June 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 20 June 2025

The culture critic Brian Raftery, who wrote about “Jaws” for the Book Review last year, discusses the movie’s anniversary with Gilbert Cruz.

Transcribed - Published: 13 June 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 6 June 2025