The Book Review

The journalist, novelist and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman is best known for writing about rock music and pop culture in astute essay collections like “The Nineties,” “X” and “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.” But Klosterman got his start in college as a sports journalist, and with his new book, “Football,” he has finally devoted an entire collection to the sport that has fundamentally shaped him alongside American society at large.“I’ve unconsciously been thinking about football for most of my life,” Klosterman tells host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s episode. “I decided at some point, I do want to write a book about sports. You know, I’d always mentioned sports here and there in the culture writing I had done, or the kind of conventional pop culture writing I’d done, but I wanted to do a real sports book. And initially my idea was it would be about basketball — but over time it became very clear to me it had to be about football, for a variety of reasons. … It seemed as though if you’re going to do a sports book, particularly as it relates to society, there is only one choice in the United States.” Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

A new year means new books are on the way! So many new books. On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin about the upcoming fiction and nonfiction titles they’re most anticipating between now and April.Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:“Vigil,” by George Saunders“Where the Serpent Lives,” by Daniyal Mueenuddin“Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings and the Rebirth of White Rage,” by Heather Ann Thompson“Five Bullets,” by Elliot Williams“Lost Lambs,” by Madeline Cash”Half His Age,” by Jennette McCurdy“A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” by Michael Pollan“On Morrison,” by Namwali Serpell“Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon,” by Toni Morrison“Clutch,” by Emily Nemens“Murder Bimbo,” by Rebecca Novack“Kin,” by Tayari Jones“Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks,” by Benjamin Hale“Lake Effect,” by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney“Now I Surrender,” by Alvaro Enrigue“The Keeper,” by Tana French Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Virginia Evans’s debut novel, “The Correspondent,” was published last April and became one of the publishing industry’s heartwarming champions of 2025: a slow-burn success story that gathered momentum over the summer and fall and finally topped the New York Times hardcover best-seller list in December. For Evans, who had written and failed to sell seven previous novels, the book’s popularity has felt magical, as she explains to host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s podcast.“I went on a kind of a brief book tour in the fall, meeting hundreds of people,” Evans says, “and … different bookstores were starting to say, this is becoming a thing, we can’t keep it in the store. We keep running out of stock. And then they were going back, reprint after reprint. So then I started to think, oh, it’s getting bigger. But I think, I just didn’t have a context. I still don’t understand publishing. So I thought every step of the way was the mountaintop. I keep getting a new mountaintop.” Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “What We Can Know,” is many things at once: It’s a science fiction imagining of a future world devastated by climate catastrophe; it’s a literary mystery about a scholar’s search for a long-lost poem; it’s a deep dive into complicated marriages; and it’s a meditation on how the past lingers and how history morphs with time.“It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review. “It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.”In this episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses “What We Can Know” with his colleagues Sarah Lyall (who profiled McEwan for the Book Review this year) and Leah Greenblatt. You can follow along, and add your own comments to the discussion here.Other Books mentioned in this discussion:“Atonement,” “Saturday,” “On Chesil Beach,” “The Comfort of Strangers,” “The Cement Garden” and “Enduring Love,” by Ian McEwan“Fleishman Is in Trouble,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner“Fates and Furies,” by Lauren Groff“Marston Meadows: A Corona for Prue,” by John Fuller“How the Word Is Passed,” by Clint Smith“The Stranger’s Child,” “The Line of Beauty” and “Our Evenings,” by Alan HollinghurstWe would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

From political tell-alls to the continued triumph of romantasy novels, it’s been an eventful year in the publishing world. On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin talks with his Book Review colleagues Alexandra Alter, Tina Jordan and John Maher about the biggest book stories and most significant reading trends of 2025.Correction: An earlier version of this podcast referred incorrectly to an arts grant from the Mellon Foundation. The $50 million initiative, launched by Mellon, is a collaborative effort with six other foundations and is intended to support nonprofit literary organizations across a range of genres and forms; it is not solely intended to support poetry. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Here we are in mid-December, which means that along with all of the other year-end lists we produce and avidly consume at this time each year, The New York Times Book Review's staff critics are also looking back on everything they read in 2025, and toasting the books that have stayed with them.On this episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai about their standout fiction and nonfiction of the past 12 months.Books mentioned:"What We Can Know," by Ian McEwan"Flesh," by David Szalay"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny," by Kiran Desai"Playworld," by Adam Ross"When the Going Was Good," by Graydon Carter"I Regret Almost Everything," by Keith McNally"When All the Men Wore Hats," by Susan Cheever"Notes to John," by Joan Didion"A Flower Traveled in My Blood," by Haley Cohen Gilliland"38 Londres Street," by Philippe Sands"Wild Thing," by Sue Prideaux"Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life," by Dan Nadel"Class Clown," by Dave Barry"Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel," by Frances Wilson"Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson," by Ted Geltner"Shadow Ticket," by Thomas Pynchon"Selected Letters of John Updike," edited by James Schiff"Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford," by Carla Kaplan"More Everything Forever, AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity," by Adam Becker Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

All year long, the staff of The New York Times Book Review conducts a running discussion over what belongs on its year-end Top 10 list. In this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz gathers a group of fellow Book Review editors to talk about the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year. Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:Fiction“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai“Angel Down,” by Daniel Kraus“The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri“The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann“Stone Yard Devotional,” by Charlotte WoodNonfiction“A Marriage at Sea,” by Sophie Elmhirst“Wild Thing,” by Sue Prideaux“Mother Emanuel,” by Kevin Sack“There Is No Place for Us," by Brian Goldstone“Mother Mary Comes to Me,” by Arundhati Roy Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

History has not graced us with many details about Shakespeare as a person, but we do know that he and his wife had three children, including a son named Hamnet who died at the age of 11 in 1596, four years before Shakespeare went on to write his great tragedy “Hamlet.”Maggie O’Farrell’s novel “Hamnet” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020, and the source of Chloé Zhao’s new movie of the same name — starts from those scant facts, and spins them into a powerful story of grief, art and family steeped in the textures of late-16th-century life.In this episode of the Book Review Book Club, host MJ Franklin discusses “Hamnet” with his colleagues Leah Greenblatt, Jennifer Harlan and Sarah Lyall. Other works mentioned in this podcast:“Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “The Winter’s Tale,” by William Shakespeare“Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott“Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” by Max Porter“Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders“Fi,” by Alexandra Fuller“Things In Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li“The Accidental Tourist,” by Anne Tyler“Will in the World” and “Dark Renaissance,” by Stephen Greenblatt“Gabriel,” by Edward Hirsch“Once More We Saw Stars,” by Jayson Greene“The Dutch House,” by Ann Patchett Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Literature isn’t a horse race. Taste is subjective, and artistic value can’t be measured in terms of “winners" and “losers.”That doesn’t mean it’s not fun to try.The book world’s awards season officially kicked off on Oct. 9, when the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize, and continued this month when the Booker Prize in England went to the novel “Flesh,” by the British writer David Szalay (also of Hungarian descent, as it happens). Then this week, five National Book Award winners were crowned in various categories at a ceremony in New York.On this episode of the podcast, the host MJ Franklin talks with his fellow Book Review editors Emily Eakin, Joumana Khatib and Dave Kim about the finalists, the winners and what this year’s big book awards might tell us about the state of literature in 2025.We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Nicholas Boggs’s “Baldwin: A Love Story,” is many things at once. It’s a comprehensive biography of James Baldwin. It’s a nimble excavation of Baldwin’s work, filled with astute literary analysis of his books and prose. And, most pressingly, it’s an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin through the lens of love. The biography is structured around Baldwin’s relationships with a series of men — relationships that, as Boggs outlines, shaped Baldwin’s life and writing in crucial ways. Boggs joins MJ Franklin on this week's episode to talk about his new book.Other works mentioned in this discussion:Zadie Smith’s essay “Conscience and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person,” from her new collection “Dead and Alive”“James Baldwin: A Biography,” by David Leeming“Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood,” by James Baldwin, illustrated by Yoran Cazac, edited by Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody“Goodbye Days,” by Jeff Zentner“Virginia Woolf,” by Hermione Lee Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

On Nov. 10, 1975, during a calamitous storm, the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk below the waves of Lake Superior. All 29 men aboard went down with the vessel. With no survivors and no eyewitnesses, there’s always been a sense of mystery to what is arguably the most famous shipwreck in American history. The story itself was almost immediately immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s surprise hit ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”Fifty years on, John U. Bacon has written a new account of the disaster. In “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he humanizes the story, telling stories of each man on the ship as well as several of the families left behind. (Readers will also learn a good deal about the history of industry and shipping on the Great Lakes.). In this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, Bacon spoke with the host Gilbert Cruz about his new book. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones, is two things at once: a searching historical novel that examines America’s past sins and also a gory horror thriller.The book opens in 2012, when a construction worker in a dilapidated church parsonage finds a 100-year-old journal written by a pastor named Arthur Beaucarne. The journal recounts a strange tale: In 1912, a mysterious Indigenous man, Good Stab of the Blackfeet tribe, walked into Arthur’s church and revealed the harrowing and disturbing story of how he had been transformed into a vampire who sought revenge for the violence done unto his people.In this Halloween episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” with his colleagues Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib. Other books and movies mentioned during this discussion:“Dracula,” by Bram Stoker“Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” by V.E. Schwab“Sinners,” directed by Ryan Coogler“Twilight,” by Stephenie Meyer“Twin Peaks: The Return,” created and directed by David Lynch“Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears,” by Diane Glancy“Lone Women,” by Victor LaValle“The Reformatory,” by Tananarive Due Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

May October never end! As Halloween approaches, we present you with two conversations from years past with great horror authors. Joe Hill, whose latest, "King Sorrow," is out now, recommends several great spooky reads. And Victor LaValle ("Lone Women") talks about the book he has read the most in his life: Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House." Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

It's October, which means it's time for scary books and scary movies. There's one person who is well known for both: Stephen King. Since his first novel, "Carrie," was published in 1974 and adapted into a hit film two years later, his novels and short stories have been a reliable source of material for film and TV adaptations. And while he's known as a master of horror, some of the more popular films based on his work are drawn from non-horror material. On this week's episode, Sean Fennessey, co-host of the Ringer podcast "The Big Picture," joins Gilbert Cruz to talk about "Stand By Me," "The Shawshank Redemption" and more.Books and movies discussed in this episode:"Stand by Me," based on the novella "The Body" from 1982's "Different Seasons""The Running Man," based on the 1982 novel of the same name published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman"The Shawshank Redemption," based on the novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" from "Different Seasons""Dolores Claiborne," based on the 1992 novel of the same name"The Green Mile," based on the 1996 serial novel of the same name"The Life of Chuck," based on the novella from 2020's "If It Bleeds""The Long Walk," based on the 1979 novel of the same name published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

The novelist Brandon Taylor has been a force to reckon with right from the start: His debut, “Real Life,” was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2020, and he quickly followed that up with two other books, the story collection “Filthy Animals” in 2021 and another novel, “The Late Americans,” in 2023, along with a steady stream of reviews, essays and literary hot takes he publishes on his popular Substack account, Sweater Weather.Now Taylor returns with a new novel, “Minor Black Figures,” about a 31-year-old painter on the Upper East Side of Manhattan who falls unexpectedly in love with a former Catholic priest. On this week's episode, MJ Franklin speaks with Taylor about how he came to write “Minor Black Figures” and what drew him to the world of fine art as a setting.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

This week, the Book Review podcast presents an episode of The Sunday Special from early September.Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz talks with fellow word lover Sadie Stein and the author Louis Sachar (“Wayside School” series, “Holes”) about the books that they all read when they were students, and ways to encourage young readers today to keep reading. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”So opens Jane Austen’s Regency-era romantic comedy “Pride and Prejudice,” which for centuries has delighted readers with its story of the five Bennet sisters and their efforts to marry well. While the novel moves nimbly among all of the family members and their various entanglements, its particular focus remains on the feisty second-eldest daughter, Elizabeth, and her vexed chemistry with the wealthy, arrogant, gorgeous Mr. Darcy. Their sharp wit, verbal jousting and mutual misunderstandings form the core of what might be considered the first enemies-to-lovers plot in modern literature.On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “Pride and Prejudice” with his colleagues Jennifer Harlan, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles, and Austen in general with The Times’s Sarah Lyall. Other books and authors mentioned in this discussion:“Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors,” by Sonali Dev“Book Lovers,” by Emily Henry“The Marriage Plot,” by Jeffrey Eugenides“Washington Square,” by Henry James“Such a Fun Age,” by Kiley Reid Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

The best-selling science journalist Mary Roach has written about sex and death and the digestive system — basically, all of the topics that children are taught to avoid in polite company. In her latest, “Replaceable You,” she examines prosthetics, robotics and other ways that technology can interact with human anatomy. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Roach tells host Gilbert Cruz how she comes up with her ideas and what keeps drawing her back to the bizarre, hilarious bits of trivia that the human body offers up. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

In last week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, host Gilbert Cruz and his fellow editor Joumana Khatib offered a preview of some of the fall’s most anticipated works of fiction. This week they return to talk about upcoming nonfiction, from memoirs to literary biographies to the latest pop science offering from the incomparable Mary Roach.Books discussed in this episode:“All the Way to the River,” by Elizabeth Gilbert“Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” by Stephen Greenblatt“Mother Mary Comes to Me," by Arundhati Roy“Poems and Prayers,” by Matthew McConaughey“The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us,” by John J. Lennon“We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution," by Jill Lepore“Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel,” by Francis Wilson“Joyride: A Memoir," by Susan Orlean“Next of Kin,” by Gabrielle Hamilton“Paper Girl,” by Beth Macy“Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America,” by Jeff Chang“Book of Lives," by Margaret Atwood”The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding,” by Joseph J. Ellis“History Matters," by David McCullough“The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II,” by David Nasaw“Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor,” by Christine Kuehn“Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy," by Mary Roach Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Every fall brings the promise of some of the year’s biggest books and this one is no different. On this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, the host Gilbert Cruz and fellow editor Joumana Khatib talk about several of their most anticipated titles as well as a few upcoming big screen adaptations. (Come back next week for our fall nonfiction preview.)Books mentioned in this episode:“The Secret of Secrets,” by Dan Brown“The Wayfinder,” by Adam Johnson“Clown Town,” by Mick Herron“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai“The Impossible Fortune,” by Richard Osman“We Love You, Bunny,” by Mona Awad“Shadow Ticket,” by Thomas Pynchon“What We Can Know,” by Ian McEwan“Trip,” by Amie Barrodale“King Sorrow,” by Joe Hill 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.