The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. 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.
Latest episodes
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52 min
What to Read This Halloween, According to Two Best-Selling Writers
Halloween is the season for scary stories, but what actually makes a book frightening? And where should you start if you’re not already a horror reader?This week on “The Book Revie…
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42 min
A Book Review Critics’ Roundtable
As much as we love hearing from authors on “The Book Review” podcast, there are precious few who have read more than our staff book critics — Jennifer Szalai, Alexandra Jacobs and…
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57 min
Min Jin Lee Wants Us to Rethink Education
For Min Jin Lee, the process of writing fiction usually begins with a deep dive into reality. She spends years researching, traveling and interviewing people.That process underscor…
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36 min
Decades Later, Stephen King Is Finishing What He and Peter Straub Started
There are few living writers as closely associated with a genre as Stephen King is with horror. Over a career spanning more than 50 years, 70 novels and hundreds of short stories,…
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56 min
Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘Etna,’ by Paul Yoon
Paul Yoon’s new novel, “Etna,” follows a haunted, battle-scarred war veteran who wants desperately to go home. He also happens to be a dog — a mixed-breed shepherd trained to sniff…
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58 min
John Green Knows a True Hollywood Ending is Complicated
MJ Franklin is in the host chair this week, in for Gilbert Cruz. MJ spoke with New York Times book critic Dwight Garner about Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers.” Dwight r…
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47 min
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…
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49 min
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…
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54 min
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 th…
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26 min
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 t…
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45 min
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 exac…
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51 min
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 fictio…
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55 min
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…
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39 min
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…
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32 min
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 darin…
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44 min
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-o…
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52 min
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…
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58 min
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 homes…
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35 min
Art, Outrage and How the Culture Wars Began
In April 1989, a newspaper clipping about an art exhibit landed in the mailbox of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the founder of a conservative evangelical group, the American Family Asso…
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37 min
The Best Books of the 21st Century: Ryan Holiday on ‘The Road’
In 2024, The New York Times Book Review gathered more than 500 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets and literary enthusiasts to help pick the best books of the 21st century so far.…