The Book Review

Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai weigh in on 22 of the funniest novels since “Catch-22.”

The great Irish crime novelist Tana French joins Sarah Lyall to talk about her new novel "The Hunter," a sequel to 2020's "The Searcher."

The Times’s critic Alissa Wilkinson discusses Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel and Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptations.

A scathing satire about race, publishing and identity politics, Everett’s acclaimed 2001 novel is the basis of the Oscar-nominated movie “American Fiction.”

Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “There There” 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. This week, Orange visits the podcast to discuss his new work as well as the book he has read most in his life, Clarice Lispector's "The Hour of the Star."

Dwight Garner discusses a new oral history of the venerable alt-weekly, Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out to Write.”

On this week's episode, a roundtable conversation about Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” a riff on “David Copperfield” that moves Charles Dickens’s story to contemporary Appalachia and grapples with topics from poverty to ambition to opioid addiction.

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.

A.O. Scott joins for a spoiler-filled conversation about both David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon" and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated film adaptation.

Molly Roden Winter and her husband have been married for 24 years. But since 2008 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, Sarah Lyall chats with Winter about her book, her marriage and why she decided to go public.

It's gonna be a busy spring! On this week’s episode, we talk about some of the upcoming books we are anticipating most keenly over the next several months, including new work from Salman Rushdie, Percival Everett, Tana French and Erik Larson.

Every January, the director Steven Soderbergh posts a detailed list of his previous year's cultural consumption — every movie and TV series watched, every book read. On this week's episode, we talk books!

In our last episode of 2023, we convene to talk about James McBride's novel — one of the year's most celebrated books.

John Vaillant, the author of “Fire Weather” (one of our 10 Best Books this year), discusses climate change and the fire that devastated a Canadian petroleum town in 2016.

Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs look back on the books that have stuck with them in 2023.

They're here!

Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz talks to reporter Alexandra Alter about Rebecca Yarros, author of the smash "romantasy" hit "Fourth Wing," and critic Alexandra Jacobs, who reviewed Barbra Streisand's sprawling new memoir.

The Book Review's Sarah Lyall talks with Adrian Edwards, head of the Printed Heritage Collections at the British Library, about a new edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

It's scary story season. The Book Review's Gilbert Cruz talks to fellow editors Tina Jordan and Sadie Stein about their favorites.

Host Gilbert Cruz is joined by writers and podcasters Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales to talk about their new book “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios."

Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz is joined by Joumana Khatib to talk about the biggest titles yet to arrive in 2023.

You love books. You love podcasts. Ergo, we assume you love audiobooks. This week we’ve devoted our entire episode to the form.

Zadie Smith joins the podcast to talk about her new novel "The Fraud." And we talk about the recent controversy involving the National Book Awards and erstwhile host Drew Barrymore.

Times critic Jennifer Szalai talks about Walter Isaacson's biography of the world's richest man and her recent look at the writer and activist Naomi Klein.

Stephen King joins the podcast to talk about his new thriller "Holly." And Joumana Khatib gives us a look at six of the month's most anticipated releases.

The novelist discusses his career and his recent essay about cadavers in crime fiction, and the actor Richard E. Grant talks about his memoir and his love of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

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 books.

Ann Patchett returns to the podcast to talk about her new novel, "Tom Lake," and waxes poetic on Thornton Wilder.

As record breaking temperatures are recorded across the world, we talk to Jeff Goodell, author of the new book "The Heat Will Kill You First."

Colson Whitehead joins the podcast once again, this time to talk about his new novel "Crook Manifesto."

The editors of the Book Review revisit some of the most popular and most acclaimed books of 2023 so far, including "Birnam Wood," "The Wager" and "You Could Make This Place Beautiful."

The editors of The Book Review talk about the nitty gritty of literary translation. And then, a conversation about the novel “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” which was published in the U.S. 25 years ago.

Gilbert Cruz and Dwight Garner discuss the legacy of a titanic author, followed by some stories about one of the great American book editors.

Jonathan Eig discusses his new book about the life and times of Martin Luther King.

Gilbert Cruz is joined by The Times’s thriller columnist, Sarah Lyall, to talk about some great suspenseful titles to check out this summer. And the editor Joumana Khatib gives her picks for books to look out for between now and Labor Day.

The Times critics Dwight Garner and Jason Zinoman celebrate the life and work of the great British novelist and literary critic, who died last week.

Where to start with one of today’s most prolific and beloved fantasy writers, and the robot who wrote a murder mystery.

Hua Hsu, author of the memoir “Stay True,” and Hernan Diaz, author of the novel “Trust,” discuss their books and their reactions to winning the Pulitzer Prize.

Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris talk publishing news, and Joumana Khatib previews the month’s big books.

The New Zealand writer, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2013 for her novel “The Luminaries,” discusses her latest book.

The New Yorker staff writer discusses his new book, “The Wager,” about the harrowing circumstances and conflicting stories surrounding a 1741 shipwreck.

Elisabeth Egan discusses “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” and Miguel Salazar tells readers where to start with Gabo’s extensive catalog.

In this episode, Gilbert Cruz talks to the Book Review editors Tina Jordan and Greg Cowles about what they're reading, and loving.

Gilbert Cruz talks to Book Review staff members about the books they’ve been enjoying lately.

Just in time for the Academy Awards, our critic Alexandra Jacobs discusses two recent books on the subject, Michael Schulman’s “Oscar Wars” and Bruce Davis’s “The Academy and the Award.”

The Times's critic Dwight Garner looks back on Michael Lesy's cult classic of documentary literature, which was first published in 1973.

Sarah Lyall discusses reading Madeleine L'Engle's classic novel at a pivotal moment in her childhood, and the lessons she has extracted from the book throughout her life.

Erica Ackerberg and Elisabeth Egan talk about community libraries, and MJ Franklin talks about the novelist Paul Harding.

Sadie Stein, an editor at the Book Review, discusses Carmela Ciuraru's book "Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages" with the host Gilbert Cruz.

Gilbert Cruz and Tina Jordan discuss the upcoming books they're most excited to read in the next few months.

New York Times book critics discuss their favorite books and memorable reading experiences of 2022.

On a special new episode of the podcast, taped live, editors and critics from the Books desk discuss this year’s outstanding fiction and nonfiction.

The Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor talk about their book ‘She Said,’ and Neal Gabler discusses the first volume of his Ted Kennedy biography.

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...

Harris discusses the great director’s life and work, and Adam Higginbotham talks about “Midnight in Chernobyl.”

Ezra Klein talks to the science fiction and fantasy novelist N.K. Jemisin about her latest book, “The World We Make.”

The Times’s comedy critic discusses his biography, “Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night,” and the Times Magazine writer Sam Anderson talks about Oklahoma City and his 2018 book, “Boom Town.”

The oncologist and Pulitzer-winning science writer discusses his 2016 book about the history of genetics, and the novelist Kate Atkinson talks about her spy novel “Transcription.”

The writer, celebrated for his short stories, discusses his 2017 debut novel, and the journalist Patrick Radden Keefe talks about “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.”

Nicholas Buccola talks about “The Fire Is Upon Us,” and Lydia Millet discusses “The Children’s Bible.”

Ng discusses her best-selling 2017 novel, “Little Fires Everywhere,” and Judy Blume discusses her adult novel “In the Unlikely Event,” from 2015.

Joe Hagan discusses “Sticky Fingers,” his 2017 biography of Wenner, and a panel of Times critics talks about their 2019 list of outstanding memoirs.

The novelist discusses his Pulitzer-winning comedy about the travels and travails of a heartbroken writer, and William Finnegan talks about surfing.

The novelist talks about her Pulitzer-winning book, which includes one chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation, and Stephen Fry discusses Greek mythology.

The essayist talks about his book “Theft by Finding,” a selection of diary entries spanning 25 years that helped him find and shape his voice as a writer.

The Emmy Award-winning actor John Lithgow discusses his memoir “Drama” and an actor’s education, and the British writer Maggie O’Farrell talks about her novel “Hamnet.”

The Emmy Award-winning actor John Lithgow discusses his memoir “Drama” and an actor’s education, and the British writer Maggie O’Farrell talks about her novel “Hamnet.”

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, ...

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 a...

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...

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 uni...

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 ...

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 prett...

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...

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...

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 i...

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 abo...

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. O...

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 ...

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 writ...

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...

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 s...

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 abou...

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’...

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 live...

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 super...

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 discu...

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 hypocr...

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 diagn...

It’s widely 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 boo...

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...

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...

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 exper...

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 jo...

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, par...

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 being...

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 re...

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 m...

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?Wh...

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...