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Episodes from The Book Review
The Best Books of the 21st Century: Taffy Brodesser-Akner on ‘The Corrections’
If you were a reading adult in the early 2000s, you probably tackled, or at least heard about, “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s best-selling and much discussed book.The novel won the National Book Award, was a Pulitzer finalist, and an Oprah Book Club pick. (Until it wasn’t.)The book arrives…
It’s Time for a Big Ol’ Fall Book Preview
Jordan Baker said it best: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”In just one short sentence, the character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” sums up that wonderful feeling of anticipation that comes with autumn. For bookish people, the season comes with its own set…
Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘London Falling’
At the center of Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, “London Falling,” is a mystery: In 2019, a young man named Zac Brettler disappeared, and a few days later his body was found in the Thames River. Surveillance footage showed what appeared to be Zac jumping off the balcony of a nearby luxury tower,…
Why We Can’t Resist a Great Bookstore
What is it about a bookstore? You walk in planning to browse for a few minutes, and somehow an hour later you’re still wandering the stacks with an armful of books you can’t seem to put down. For this week’s episode, our guest host, MJ Franklin, and the producer Sarah Diamond take a field trip to a…
This Reporter Can Tell Us What Nuclear Apocalypse Looks Like (Encore)
Imagine, if you will, that for unknown reasons North Korea has just launched a nuclear bomb at the United States. What happens next? The journalist Annie Jacobsen has imagined exactly that, and spent more than a decade interviewing dozens of experts while mastering the voluminous literature on the…
Let’s Talk About the 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century
What are the best thrillers published since 2000? That was the question that the team at The New York Times’s Book Review posed to hundreds of writers of every kind of crime fiction, from legal thrillers to spy novels to cozy mysteries, as well as librarians, editors, critics and bookstagrammers.…
Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘John of John’
Early in Douglas Stuart’s new novel, “John of John,” the Booker Prize-winning author describes a peculiar irony: “What skinned him was that the closer he got to home, the more lost he felt.” It’s a passing line, but it captures the tension at the heart of this magnificent book: Here is a story of…
Let’s Talk About the Best Books of the Year (So Far)
The editors at The New York Times Book Review spend almost the entire year discussing, debating and sometimes arguing about the year’s best books. We’re halfway through 2026, which means it’s time for the host Gilbert Cruz and the Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin to talk about…
Sophie Elmhirst on the True Story of a Shipwrecked Couple
Today we want to bring back an episode from our archives. It’s about a book that has real beach read vibes. There’s a lot of water. It’s a relationship drama. And it’s also a daring story of survival. “Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck" made it onto the Book Review Top…
This Author Says You Shouldn’t Be Intimidated by ‘The Odyssey’
If you can’t tell your Eurylochus from your Telemachus, fear not: Your primer on “The Odyssey” is here, just in time for Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of the 3,000-year-old epic. Madeline Miller, who reinvented “The Odyssey” in her best-selling novel “Circe,” explains why you shouldn’t be…
Jill Lepore on What to Read This Fourth of July
The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday this summer, giving Americans a chance to reflect on the nation’s past and imagine its future. Who better to help us make sense of this moment than Jill Lepore? The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and…
Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Yesteryear,' by Caro Claire Burke
“Yesteryear,” Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, tells the story of Natalie Heller Mills: an ultrasuccessful tradwife influencer who posts about her life on Yesteryear Ranch, a homestead where she grows her own food, tends to cows and chickens, raises her six children and models a particular brand of…