Podcast: The Book Review

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 which reporter Alexandra Alter talks to author Susanna Clarke upon the 20th anniversary of her masterful fantasy novel “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.”

Clare Keegan's slim 2021 novella about one Irishman's crisis of conscience during the Christmas season, which was one of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, 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.

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.

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: Dolly Alderton's "Good Material."

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.

This Thanksgiving weekend, we are re-running our roundtable conversation about Percival Everett's recent National Book Award winner for fiction.

“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.

As part of The New York Times Book Review's project on the 100 Best Books published since the year 2000, Nick Hornby called "Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" one of the "greatest literary achievements of the 21st century." The author Patrick Radden Keefe joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about his book, which has now been adapted into an FX miniseries.

The works of John le Carré are among the most beloved spy thrillers of all time. So it was a perilous task that author Nick Harkaway, one of le Carré's sons, set out for himself. On this week's episode, Harkaway discusses how he picked up the torch from his father, who died in December 2020, to write a new tale starring George Smiley, the Cold War spy who has appeared in more than a half dozen novels.

Sally Rooney is a writer people talk about. Since her first novel, “Conversations With Friends,” was published in 2017, Rooney has been hailed as a defining voice of the millennial generation because of her ability to capture the particular angst and confusion of young love, friendship and coming-of-age in our fraught digital era.

In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses “Intermezzo,” her fourth and latest novel, with his fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Sadie Stein and Dave Kim.

Halloween is just around the corner, so we turned to two great horror authors — Joe Hill and Stephen Graham Jones — for their recommendations of books to read this season.

Salman Rushdie's "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder," has been nominated in the nonfiction category as part of this year's National Book Awards, which will take place in mid-November. This week, we are running Rushdie's conversation with Ezra Klein from earlier this year.

The actor-director-producer Stanley Tucci is also, famously, an avid eater. He explored his enthusiasm for food in his 2021 memoir “Taste,” and now a food diary, “What I Ate in One Year." In this week’s episode, Tucci discusses his new book with host Gilbert Cruz and talks about bad meals, his food idol and his path to tracking a year’s worth of eating. Gilbert also chats with The Book Review's Joumana Khatib about the National Book Award finalists in fiction and nonfiction.

The writer discusses her follow-up to her best-selling 2021 novel “The Plot.”

Jo Hamya’s novel “The Hypocrite” follows a famous English novelist as he watches a new play by his daughter, Sophia, in London. The lights go down in the theater, and immediately the novelist realizes: The play is about him, the vacation he took with Sophia a decade earlier and the sins he committed while they were away. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with editors Joumana Khatib and Lauren Christensen.

This weekend marks the official start of autumn, so what better time to take a peek at the fall books we’re most excited to read? On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz chats with Joumana Khatib and Anna Dubenko about the upcoming season of reading and the books on the horizon that they’re looking forward to most eagerly.

Robert Caro’s 1974 biography “The Power Broker” is a book befitting its subject, Robert Moses — the unelected parochial technocrat who used a series of appointed positions to entirely reshape New York City and its surrounding environment for generations to come. Like Moses, Caro’s book has exerted an enduring and outsize influence. This week, Caro tells host Gilbert Cruz how he accounts for its enduring legacy.

The British writer Kate Atkinson has had a rich and varied career since publishing her first book in 1996. But she may be best known for her Jackson Brodie series of crime novels. Sarah Lyall speaks with Atkinson about the sixth entry in the series, "Death at the Sign of the Rook."

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, Isabel Wilkerson joins host Gilbert Cruz to discuss her 2010 book about the Great Migration.

The New York Times Book Review recently 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.

In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.