Lev Grossman, author of fantasy novel "The Magicians" and its two sequels, joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about writing his version of Camelot in "The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur." 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.
This week The New York Times Book Review rolled out the results of an ambitious survey it conducted to determine the best books of the 21st century so far. On this weeks episode, Gilbert Cruz chats with fellow editors Tina Jordan, Scott Heller and Joumana Khatib about the results of that survey and about the project itself, including the willingness of some participants to let us share their ballots with the public. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politi...
Rita Bullwinkels impressive debut novel, Headshot, follows eight teenagers fighting in the Daughters of America Cup, a youth womens boxing tournament staged in a dilapidated gym in Reno. Each chapter details a match between fighters, bout after bout, until finally a champion is declared. We are thrown into the high-octane theater of each fight, as the boxers work to defeat their opponents. But we also explore each girls life, with flashes into the past and the future and into the girls minds as ...
Every family has its stories, and every family has its drama and some families, like the one the actor and director Griffin Dunne was born into, have an excess of both. His uncle was the writer John Gregory Dunne, his aunt was Joan Didion and his father was Dominick Dunne, who became famous for his Vanity Fair dispatches from the trial of the man who killed his daughter (and Griffins sister) Dominique. On this weeks episode of the Book Review podcast, Dunne talks about his book, The Friday After...
Summer is upon us and you're going to need a few books to read. Book Review editors Elisabeth Egan and Joumana Khatib join host Gilbert Cruz to talk through a few titles they're looking forward to over the next several months. Books discussed in this episode: "Farewell, Amethystine," by Walter Mosley "The Cliffs," by J. Courtney Sullivan "Horror Movie," by Paul Tremblay "Liars," by Sarah Manguso "The God of the Woods," by Liz Moore "The Bright Sword," by Lev Grossman "Pearl," by Sian Hughes "San...
For many years now, Elin Hilderbrand has published a novel every summer set on the island of Nantucket. With her 30th book, 'Swan Song,' the bestselling author says she will step off that hamster wheel and try something new. On this week's episode, she and host Gilbert Cruz talk about her career, what she's reading, and what's next. 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 S...
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 Twains 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...
The year 1986 was notable for two big disasters, both of them attributable to human error and bureaucratic negligence at competing super powers: the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in the United States. The journalist Adam Higginbotham wrote about Chernobyl in his 2019 book, Midnight in Chernobyl. Now hes back, with a look at the American side of the ledger, in his new book, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the E...
In the world of fantasy fiction, Leigh Bardugo is royalty: Her Grishaverse novels are mainstays on the young adult best-seller list, her Shadow and Bone trilogy has been adapted for a Netflix series and her adult novels Ninth House and Hell Bent established her as a force to reckon with in the subgenre known as dark academia. Now Bardugo is back with a new fantasy novel, The Familiar, and its also her first work of historical fiction: Set during the Inquisition in 16th-century Spain, it deals wi...
Colm Tibns 2009 novel Brooklyn told the story of a meek young Irishwoman, Eilis Lacey, who emigrates to New York in the 1950s out of a sense of familial obligation and slowly, diligently begins building a new life for herself. A New York Times best seller, the book was also adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Saoirse Ronan and now, 15 years after its publication, Tibn has surprised himself by writing a sequel. Long Island, his new novel, finds Eilis relocated to the suburbs and, in th...
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, ...
Simon & Schuster is not growing old quietly. The venerable publishing house one of the industrys so-called Big 5 is celebrating its 100th birthday this month after a period of tumult that saw it put up for sale by its previous owner, pursued by its rival Penguin Random House in an acquisition bid that fell apart after the Justice Department won an antitrust suit , then bought for $1.62 billion last fall by the private equity firm KKR. With conditions seemingly stabilized since then, the company ...
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stephen Kings first novel, Carrie. In the decades since, King has experimented with length, genre and style, but has always maintained his position as one of Americas most famous writers. On this weeks episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks to the novelist Grady Hendrix, who read and re-read many of Kings books over several years, writing an essay on each as well as King superfan Damon Lindelof, the TV showrunner behind shows such as Lost and...
Earlier this month, the Book Reviews staff critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai released a list of 22 novels they have found reliably funny since Joseph Hellers landmark comic novel Catch-22 came out in 1961. On this weeks episode, they tell Gilbert Cruz why Catch-22 was their starting point, and explain a bit about their process: how they think about humor, how they made their choices, what books they left off and what books led to fights along the way. (American Psycho t...
If you're familiar with Tana French, it's likely for her Dublin Murder Squad series of crime novels that kicked off in 2007 with "In the Woods." But her new book, "The Hunter," a sequel to 2020's "The Searcher," takes place outside of that series. In this episode of the podcast, speaking to Sarah Lyall about her shift to new characters, French said, "I wasn't comfortable with sticking to the detective's perspective anymore. I think from the perspective of a detective, a murder investigation is a...
Frank Herberts epic novel Dune and its successors have been entrenched in the science fiction and fantasy canon for almost six decades, a rite of passage for proudly nerdy readers across the generations. But Dune is experiencing a broader cultural resurgence at the moment thanks to Denis Villeneuves recent film adaptations starring Timothe Chalamet. (Part 2 is in theaters now.) This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks to The Timess critic Alissa Wilkinson, who covers movies, culture and reli...
Its not often that the Academy Awards give the publishing world any gristle to chew on. But at this years Oscars ceremony taking place on Sunday evening one of the Best Picture contenders is all about book publishing: Cord Jefferson s American Fiction is adapted from the 2001 novel Erasure , by Percival Everett, and it amounts to a scathing, satirical indictment of publishers, readers and the insidious biases that the marketplace can impose in determining who tells what stories. Obviously, we re...
Tommy Oranges acclaimed debut novel, There There one of the Book Reviews 10 Best Books of 2018 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, focusing specifically on the character Orvil Red Feather and tracing several generations of his family through the decades before and after the events of There There. This week, Orange visits the podcast to discuss Wanderi...
Tricia Romanos new book, The Freaks Came Out to Write, is an oral history of New Yorks late, great alternative weekly newspaper The Village Voice, where she worked for eight years as the nightlife columnist. Our critic Dwight Garner reviewed the book recently he loved it and he visits the podcast this week to chat with Gilbert Cruz about oral histories in general and the gritty glamour of The Village Voice in particular. You would pick it up and it was so prickly, Garner says. The whole thing ju...
Barbara Kingsolvers novel Demon Copperhead , a riff on David Copperfield that moves Charles Dickenss story to contemporary Appalachia and grapples engagingly with topics from poverty to ambition to opioid addiction, was one of the Book Reviews 10 Best Books of 2022 . And unlike an actual copperhead Demon Copperhead has legs: Many readers have told us it was their favorite book in 2023 as well. In this weeks spoiler-filled episode, MJ Franklin talks with Elisabeth Egan (an editor at the Book Revi...
The early part of a year can mean new books to read, or it can mean catching up on older ones we havent gotten to yet. This week, Gilbert Cruz chats with the Book Reviews Sarah Lyall and Sadie Stein about titles from both categories that have held their interest lately, including a 2022 biography of John Donne, a book about female artists who nurtured an interest in the supernatural, and the history of a Jim Crow-era mental asylum, along with a gripping new novel by Janice Hallett. Its just so d...
Former New York Times film critic A.O. Scott joins to talk both David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon," which continues to sit near the top of the bestseller list, and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated film adaptation. Spoilers abound for both versions. (Also, for history.) 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....
Molly Roden Winter and her husband, Stewart, have been married for 24 years. But since 2008, by mutual agreement, they have also dated other people an arrangement that Winter details in her new memoir, More: A Memoir of Open Marriage. In this weeks episode, The Timess Sarah Lyall chats with Winter about her book, her marriage and why she decided to go public. I didnt see any representations of either people who were still successfully married after having opened it up or people who were honest a...
It's gonna be a busy spring! On this weeks episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Tina Jordan and Joumana Khatib about some of the upcoming books theyre anticipating most keenly over the next several months. Books discussed in this weeks episode: Knife, by Salman Rushdie James, by Percival Everett The Book of Love, by Kelly Link Martyr, by Kaveh Akbar The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson The Hunter, by Tana French Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange Anita de Monte Laughs Last, by Xochitl Gonzalez Splinter...
Every January on his website Extension765.com , the prolific director Steven Soderbergh looks back at the previous year and posts a day-by-day account of every movie and TV series watched, every play attended and every book read. In 2023, Soderbergh tackled more than 80 (!) books, and on this week's episode, he and the host Gilbert Cruz talk about some of his highlights. Here are the books discussed on this weeks episode: "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne," by Sarah Bakewell "Stanley Kubrick's '...
James McBrides novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was one of the most celebrated books of 2023 a critical darling and a New York Times best seller. In their piece for the Book Review, Danez Smith called it a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel and praised its precision, magnitude and necessary messiness. On this weeks episode, the Book Review editors MJ Franklin, Joumana Khatib and Elisabeth Egan convene for a discussion about the book, McBride, and what you might want to rea...
John Vaillants book Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World takes readers to the petroleum boomtown of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in May 2016, when a wildfire that started in the surrounding boreal forest grew faster than expected and tore through the city, destroying entire neighborhoods in a rampage that lasted for days. On this weeks episode, Vaillant (whose book was one of our 10 Best for 2023) calls it a bellwether, and tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he decided to put the fir...
The Timess staff book critics Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs do a lot of reading over the course of any given year, but not everything they read stays with them equally. On this weeks podcast, Gilbert Cruz chats with the critics about the books that did: the novels and story collections and works of nonfiction that made an impression in 2023 and defined their year in reading, including one that Garner says caught him by surprise. Eleanor Cattons Birnam Wood is in some ways m...
Its that time of year: After months of reading, arguing and (sometimes) happily agreeing, the Book Reviews editors have come up with their picks for the 10 Best Books of 2023 . On this weeks podcast, Gilbert Cruz reveals the chosen titles five fiction, five nonfiction and talks with some of the editors who participated in the process. Here are the books discussed on this weeks episode: The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Eastbound, by Maylis de Keranga...
Book Review reporter Alexandra Alter discusses two of her recent pieces. The first is about Georgette Heyer, the "queen of Regency romance," and recent attempts to posthumously revise one of her most famous works in order to remove stereotypical language. The second looks at Rebecca Yarros, author of one of this year's most surprising and persistent bestsellers: the "romantasy" novel "Fourth Wing." Then, staff critic Alexandra Jacobs joins Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz to discuss her review of...
