This July, The New York Times Book Review published a list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century . The top choice was “My Brilliant Friend,” by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein. The book is the first novel in Ferrante’s so-called Neapolitan quartet, which tracks the lifelong friendship between Lenù and Lila, two women from a rough neighborhood in Naples, Italy, even as family, relationships and work pull their lives in different directions. In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin disc...
Aug 23, 2024•51 min•Ep 504•Transcript available on Metacast As part of its recent 100 Best Books of the 21st Century project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Jennifer Egan joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss her Pulitzer-winning novel about the music industry, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” and talks, among other things, about the early challenges it faced in finding an audience, the meaning of its title and her initial reluctance to decide whether the book was a novel or a st...
Aug 19, 2024•41 min•Ep 496•Transcript available on Metacast A summer camp in the Adirondacks. A rich girl gone missing, 14 years after her older brother also disappeared. A prominent local family harboring dark secrets. Liz Moore’s new novel, “The God in the Woods,” turns these elements into a complex and suspenseful meditation on parenting and social class and the rituals of summer friendship. On this week’s podcast, Liz Moore chats with Gilbert Cruz about her new novel. ( Spoiler alert: the last 10 or so minutes address the book's ending.) Unlock full ...
Aug 16, 2024•40 min•Ep 503•Transcript available on Metacast It’s August, which means that Labor Day and back-to-school are just around the corner. The vacation that seemed so leisurely a month ago suddenly feels a little more frantic. But there’s still time to squeeze in a last batch of summer reading. On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz chats with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Anna Dubenko about the books that have been occupying their attention this season. Books mentioned on this episode: "Talk," by Linda Rosencrantz "Crossroads," by Jonatha...
Aug 09, 2024•33 min•Ep 502•Transcript available on Metacast As part of its recent " 100 Best Books of the 21st Century " project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, George Saunders — who had three books on the list, including his short story collections "Pastoralia" and "Tenth of December" — joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss his novel "Lincoln in the Bardo." Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nyt...
Aug 05, 2024•41 min•Ep 495•Transcript available on Metacast Sarah Jessica Parker has been a familiar presence on TV, movie screens and Broadway stages for five decades. But since 2016 she has also been a force in the book world, initially at the helm of the fiction imprint SJP for Hogarth and for the past two years with SJP Lit, an imprint at the independent publisher Zando. Parker visits the podcast this week to chat with the host Gilbert Cruz about her lifelong love of reading, the kinds of books that excite her most and her entry into the publishing b...
Aug 02, 2024•36 min•Ep 501•Transcript available on Metacast As part of its recent " 100 Best Books of the 21st Century " project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Min Jin Lee joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss her novel, as well as the book she's read the most times — George Eliot's "Middlemarch." “I’m willing to say it’s the best English language novel, period. Without question,” Lee says. “George Eliot is probably the smartest girl in the room ever as a novelist. She really ...
Jul 29, 2024•35 min•Ep 494•Transcript available on Metacast Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley” follows a young, down-on-his-luck scammer, Tom Ripley, who is looking to reverse his fortunes. When he receives a job offer to go to Italy and retrieve Dickie Greenleaf, a rich socialite on an endless holiday, Tom finds the perfect opportunity to work his way into the upper crust. But as he becomes more and more obsessed with Dickie and Dickie’s life, the breezy getaway turns into something much more sinister, sending them down a dange...
Jul 26, 2024•46 min•Ep 500•Transcript available on Metacast As part of its recent " 100 Best Books of the 21st Century " project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss his 2016 novel. 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....
Jul 22, 2024•36 min•Ep 493•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jul 19, 2024•33 min•Ep 499•Transcript available on Metacast 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 week’s 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 polit...
Jul 12, 2024•37 min•Ep 498•Transcript available on Metacast Rita Bullwinkel’s impressive debut novel, “Headshot,” follows eight teenagers fighting in the Daughters of America Cup, a youth women’s 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 girl’s life, with flashes into the past and the future and into the girls’ min...
Jun 28, 2024•34 min•Ep 492•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Griffin’s sister) Dominique. On this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, Dunne talks about his book, “ The Friday...
Jun 21, 2024•38 min•Ep 491•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jun 14, 2024•28 min•Ep 490•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jun 07, 2024•38 min•Ep 489•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
May 31, 2024•46 min•Ep 488•Transcript available on Metacast 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 he’s back, with a look at the American side of the ledger, in his new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on t...
May 17, 2024•43 min•Ep 487•Transcript available on Metacast 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 it’s also her first work of historical fiction: Set during the Inquisition in 16th-century Spain, it...
May 10, 2024•42 min•Ep 486•Transcript available on Metacast Colm Tóibín’s 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, Tóibín has surprised himself by writing a sequel. “Long Island,” his new novel, finds Eilis relocated to the suburbs...
May 03, 2024•44 min•Ep 485•Transcript available on Metacast 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 brok...
Apr 26, 2024•47 min•Ep 484•Transcript available on Metacast Simon & Schuster is not growing old quietly. The venerable publishing house — one of the industry’s 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 com...
Apr 12, 2024•31 min•Ep 483•Transcript available on Metacast This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie.” In the decades since, King has experimented with length, genre and style, but has always maintained his position as one of America’s most famous writers. On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks to the novelist Grady Hendrix, who read and re-read many of King’s books over several years, writing an essay on each as well as King superfan Damon Lindelof, the TV showrunner behind shows such as “L...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 482•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this month, the Book Review’s staff critics — Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai — released a list of 22 novels they have found reliably funny since Joseph Heller’s landmark comic novel “Catch-22” came out in 1961. On this week’s 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. (“Ameri...
Mar 29, 2024•31 min•Ep 481•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 22, 2024•44 min•Ep 480•Transcript available on Metacast Frank Herbert’s 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 Villeneuve’s recent film adaptations starring Timothée Chalamet. (Part 2 is in theaters now.) This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks to The Times’s critic Alissa Wilkinson, who covers movies, culture ...
Mar 15, 2024•39 min•Ep 479•Transcript available on Metacast It’s not often that the Academy Awards give the publishing world any gristle to chew on. But at this year’s 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. Obvi...
Mar 08, 2024•44 min•Ep 478•Transcript available on Metacast Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “ There There ” — one of the Book Review’s 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 ...
Mar 01, 2024•38 min•Ep 477•Transcript available on Metacast Tricia Romano’s new book, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” is an oral history of New York’s 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 who...
Feb 23, 2024•36 min•Ep 476•Transcript available on Metacast Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “ Demon Copperhead ,” a riff on “David Copperfield” that moves Charles Dickens’s story to contemporary Appalachia and grapples engagingly with topics from poverty to ambition to opioid addiction, was one of the Book Review’s 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 week’s spoiler-filled episode, MJ Franklin talks with Elisabeth Egan (an editor a...
Feb 16, 2024•42 min•Ep 475•Transcript available on Metacast 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, 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. “It’s just ...
Feb 09, 2024•34 min•Ep 474•Transcript available on Metacast 
