Steven Spielberg’s movie “Jaws” hit theaters 50 years ago this month, in June 1975, and became a phenomenon almost instantly. In some ways that was no surprise: The Peter Benchley novel it was based on, also called “Jaws,” had been a huge best seller the year before, and the public was primed for a fun summer scare. Brian Raftery — the author of “Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” — wrote about “Jaws” for the Book Review last year in honor of the novel’s 50th anniversary, ...
Jun 14, 2025•37 min
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 t...
Jun 06, 2025•37 min
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. As the reviewer for The New York Times coyly wrot...
May 30, 2025•39 min
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. “Over the years that I turned myself from being a comic strip writer into a memoirist, I got very sort of self-righteous about memoir as a genre,” Bec...
May 23, 2025•36 min
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 the host Gilbert Cruz how he...
May 16, 2025•43 min
Summer arrives just over a month from now, and along with your last-minute scramble for a house share or a part-time job scooping ice cream, you’re probably also wondering what to read. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Joumana Khatib about some of the books they're most looking forward to, from a James Baldwin biography to the true-life story of a young couple shipwrecked in the Pacific and a political thriller co-written by James Patterson and Bill Clinton. Books discussed: “The ...
May 09, 2025•33 min
At 82, Isabel Allende is one of the world’s most beloved and best-selling Spanish-language authors. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and 80 million copies of her books have been sold around the world. That’s a lot of books. Allende’s newest novel, “My Name Is Emilia del Valle” is about a dark period in Chilean history: the 1891 Chilean civil war. Like so much of Allende’s work, it’s a story about women in tough spots who figure out a way through. Thematically, it’s not t...
May 02, 2025•42 min
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, and the dangers that swirl around each. Although “Playworld” grapples with bleak material, it sparkles with Ross’s vivid eye and sardonic sense of humor. The result is a dark, off-kilter bildungsroman about one overextended teenager trying to figure himself out while being failed, continually, by every adult...
Apr 25, 2025•44 min•Ep. 516
Last summer, when The New York Times Book Review released its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, one of the authors with multiple titles on that list was Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022. Those novels were “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” the first two in a trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the all-purpose fixer and adviser to King Henry VIII. Those books were also adapted into a 2015 television series starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damien Lewis as King Henry. It’...
Apr 18, 2025•35 min
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. As the Book Review’s A.O. Scott wrote in a recent essay about the book’s centennial: “What we think about Gatsby illuminates what we think about money, race, romance and history. How we imagine him has a lot to do wit...
Apr 11, 2025•32 min
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...
Apr 04, 2025•37 min
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. Transforming real life into a haunting dreamscape, “We Do Not Part” is about grief, tragedy, the weight of the...
Mar 28, 2025•49 min
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.) Books discussed: "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne," by Sarah Bakewell "Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining,'" by Lee Unkrich and J.W. Rinzler "Cocktails with George and Martha," by Philip Gefter T...
Mar 21, 2025•43 min
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. Books discussed on this episode: "Dream Count," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "Sunrise on the Reaping," by Suzanne Collins "The Buffalo Hunter Hunter," by Stephen Graham Jones "Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools," by Mary A...
Mar 07, 2025•32 min
Samantha Harvey’s novel “Orbital,” which won the Booker Prize last year, has a tight, poetic frame: We follow one day in the lives of six people working on a space station above Earth, orbiting the planet 16 times every 24 hours. But this is not a saga of adventure or exploration. It’s a quiet meditation on what it means to be human, prompted by a series of personal reckonings each character faces while floating 250 miles above home. This week on the Book Review Book Club, MJ Franklin talks abou...
Feb 28, 2025•42 min
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 — often depicting delightfully grim neo-Victorian themes and settings — graced everything from book jackets to the opening credits of the PBS show “Mystery!” to his own eccentric storybooks like “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” in which young children come to unfortunate...
Feb 21, 2025•35 min
One day, several decades ago, the writer Winnie Holzman was shopping in a Manhattan bookstore where a particular cover caught her eye. It showed a woman with a green face, a black hat pulled down over her eyes. The book was “Wicked” by Gregory Maguire, a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” stories from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. “When I turned it over and read the little précis on the back, it blew my mind,” Holzman said. “I thought it was such a brilliant premise.” The book ...
Feb 19, 2025•27 min•Ep. 515
The screenwriter Peter Straughan has become adept at taking well known — and beloved — books and adapting them for the big and small screens. He was first nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of the 2011 film “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” based on the classic John le Carré spy novel, and then adapted Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy into an award-winning season of television, with an adaptation of the third novel coming out soon. Now he has been nominated for a second Oscar: for his scree...
Feb 14, 2025•23 min
Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties,” traces the events that led up to Bob Dylan’s memorable performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The book is about Dylan, but also about the folk movement, youth culture, politics and the record business. For the writer and director James Mangold, Wald’s work provided an opportunity to tell an unusual story about the musician. “You could structure a screenplay along the lines of what...
Feb 11, 2025•23 min
When the filmmaker and photographer RaMell Ross first read “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black boys in a dangerous reform school in the 1960s, he couldn’t help but put himself in the shoes of its protagonists, Elwood and Turner. In his film adaptation of the book, Ross does that to the audience: You see what the characters see, because it’s filmed from the main character’s point of view. “I wondered,” Ross said, “how do you explicitly film from the ...
Feb 07, 2025•22 min
The novel “Our Evenings,” by Alan Hollinghurst, follows a gay English Burmese actor from childhood into old age as he confronts confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate in the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s the story of a life — beautifully related by a literary master whose 2004 novel “The Line of Beauty” won the Booker Prize and was named to the Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century . Reviewing “Our Evenings” for us las...
Jan 31, 2025•48 min
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...
Jan 24, 2025•34 min
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." "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 ...
Jan 17, 2025•43 min
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. 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 t...
Jan 10, 2025•38 min
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 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 befor...
Dec 27, 2024•16 min
Clare 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 Elisabeth 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, burnish...
Dec 20, 2024•52 min
Dwight 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 Couro...
Dec 13, 2024•32 min
Following 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 r...
Dec 06, 2024•47 min•Ep. 514
Don'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 Alde...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 19 min
The 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 capa...
Nov 29, 2024•46 min
