Podcast: The Book Review

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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").

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.

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.”

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."

“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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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.