The Book Review

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

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.

Transcribed - Published: 30 May 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 23 May 2025

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 host Gilbert Cruz how he came to write about Twain and what interested him most about his subject.

Transcribed - Published: 16 May 2025

Summer arrives just over a month from now. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Joumana Khatib about some of the books they're most looking forward to.

Transcribed - Published: 9 May 2025

The Book Review is off this week, but please enjoy this episode of the The New York Times podcast "The Interview," in which Gilbert Cruz speaks with the author Isabel Allende about her new novel "My Name is Emilia del Valle."

Transcribed - Published: 2 May 2025

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

Transcribed - Published: 25 April 2025

Transcribed - Published: 18 April 2025

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. A.O. Scott joins host Gilbert Cruz this week to discuss Fitzgerald’s novel and its long afterlife.

Transcribed - Published: 11 April 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 4 April 2025

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. On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “We Do Not Part” with fellow Book Review editors Lauren Christensen and Emily Eakin.

Transcribed - Published: 28 March 2025

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.)

Transcribed - Published: 21 March 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 7 March 2025

In "Orbital," by Samantha Harvey, a group of astronauts in the International Space Station orbit the Earth 16 times over 24 hours. This simple and beautiful novel won the 2024 Booker Prize. On this week's episode, MJ Franklin discusses Harvey's slim book with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and Jennifer Harlan.

Transcribed - Published: 28 February 2025

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 graced everything from book jackets to the opening credits of the PBS show “Mystery!” to his own eccentric storybooks. On this week’s episode, the Book Review’s Sadie Stein joins Gilbert Cruz for a celebration of all things Gorey.

Transcribed - Published: 21 February 2025

Meet the writer who helped turn a book into a cultural phenomenon.

Transcribed - Published: 19 February 2025

How the novel became an Oscar-nominated film.

Transcribed - Published: 14 February 2025

The director James Mangold discusses the things we may never understand about the folk legend.

Transcribed - Published: 11 February 2025

The director RaMell Ross on adapting Colson Whitehead’s prize-winning novel.

Transcribed - Published: 7 February 2025

This sweeping novel about the life, loves, struggles and triumphs of a queer English Burmese actor is the topic of our January book club discussion.

Transcribed - Published: 31 January 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 24 January 2025

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."

Transcribed - Published: 17 January 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 10 January 2025

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 which reporter Alexandra Alter talks to author Susanna Clarke upon the 20th anniversary of her masterful fantasy novel “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.”

Transcribed - Published: 27 December 2024

Clare Keegan's slim 2021 novella about one Irishman's crisis of conscience during the Christmas season, which was one of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, 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 Elizabeth Egan.

Transcribed - Published: 20 December 2024