Podcast
The Book Review
Hosted by The New York Times · EN
The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world.
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Alafair Burke On Writing Crime Novels and Teaching Law
Jan 24, 202500:34:16Summary readyIn 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.” 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.
SummaryHow a Wildfire Sent Pico Iyer in Search of Silence
Jan 17, 202500:42:56Summary readyDecades 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." 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.
SummaryThe Books We’re Excited About in Early 2025
Jan 10, 202500:37:46Summary readyAnd 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 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.
SummaryDraft for Publish on 2024-12-27
Dec 27, 202400:16:22Summary readyThe 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. 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.
SummaryBook Club: "Small Things Like These," by Claire Keegan
Dec 20, 202400:51:41Summary readyClare 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 Elizabeth 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." 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.
SummaryOur Book Critics On Their Year in Reading
Dec 13, 202400:31:39Summary readyDwight 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 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.
SummaryBook Club: Dolly Alderton's 'Good Material' (Rerun)
Dec 6, 202400:46:41Summary readyFollowing 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. 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.
SummaryThe 10 Best Books of 2024
Dec 3, 202401:18:44Summary readyDon'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 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.
SummaryBook Club: 'James,' by Percival Everett (Rerun)
Nov 29, 202400:45:32Summary readyThe 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. 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.
SummaryBook Club: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
Nov 22, 202400:41:09Summary readyIt 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. 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.
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