The Book Review

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 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.

Charlotte McConaghy’s latest novel, “Wild Dark Shore,” opens with an enigma: A mysterious, half-drowned woman washes ashore. The stranger’s name is Rowan, and she has arrived on Shearwater, a remote island near Antarctica. The island, which houses an important seed bank, was once teeming with a community of scientists, but now the project is shutting down, the workers have left and the land lies quiet and deserted, everybody gone except for the Salt family, whose members are all lost in their own way. And all are hiding terrible secrets. They’re not alone. Rowan herself has come to the island with a hidden purpose, putting this small community on a crash course for a long-overdue reckoning. On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “Wild Dark Shore” with his colleagues Lauren Christensen and Elisabeth Egan. 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.

Summer is slipping away and we are on break this week. But we have a fantastic rerun for you — our conversation with Min Jin Lee from last summer, when her book "Pachinko" was named one of the "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" by a New York Times Book Review panel. She spoke about 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 was a great thinker, a great logician, a great empathizer and also a great psychologist. She was all of those things. And she was also political. She understood so many aspects of the human mind and the way we interact with each other. And then above all, I think she has a great heart.” 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.

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 subject — some of it declassified only in recent years — for her 2024 book “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” which walks readers through the 72 minutes from launch to global annihilation. In the Book Review last year, Barry Gewen said the book was “gripping,” and declared it essential reading “if you want to understand the complex and disturbing details that go into a civilization-destroying decision.” This week, Jacobsen visits the podcast to talk about her book and why she wrote it, as well as offering some hope that catastrophe can be avoided. “I wanted to write a book that showed in absolutely appalling detail how horrific nuclear war would be,” she tells the host Gilbert Cruz. “And so when people say to me either ‘I could barely read your book, but I had to read it.’ or ‘I had to read it in one sitting, I was terrified, I was horrified,’ I believe I did my job.” 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.

Summer is the season for road trips, and also for road trip stories. Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” may be the most famous example in American literature — but there are lots of other great road trip books, so this week the Book Review’s staff critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai presented readers with a list of 18 of their favorites. On this episode of the podcast they chat with host Gilbert Cruz about the project, their picks and the top-down, wind blown, carefree appeal of the road trip narrative as a genre. Books discussed in this episode: “On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” by Jesmyn Ward “Lost Children Archive,” by Valeria Luiselli “I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home,” by Lorrie Moore “Tramps Like Us," by Joe Westmoreland “Driving Mr. Albert,” by Michael Paterniti “Gypsy: A Memoir," by Gypsy Rose Lee “The Dog of the South,” by Charles Portis “All Fours,” by Miranda July “Hearts,” by Hilma Wolitzer “The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life,” by John le Carré “Machine Dreams,” by Jayne Anne Phillips “Lonesome Dove,” by Larry McMurtry “Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck “The Price of Salt,” by Patricia Highsmith 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 this month’s installment of the Book Review Book Club, we’re discussing “The Catch,” the debut novel by the poet and memoirist Yrsa Daley-Ward. The book is a psychological thriller that follows semi-estranged twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey, who were babies when their mother was presumed to have drowned in the Thames. The novel begins decades later, when Clara sees something strange: A woman who looks just like their mother is stealing a watch. Clara believes this is her mother, and wants to welcome her back into her life. Dempsey is less certain, in part because the woman doesn’t seem to have aged a day. She believes the woman is a con artist because it’s simply not possible for her to be their mother … right? What’s real? What’s not? And what does that mean for the lives of these struggling sisters? Daley-Ward unpacks it all in her deliciously slippery novel. On this episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin talks about “The Catch” with fellow Book Review editors Jennifer Harlan and Sadie Stein. Other books mentioned in this week’s episode: “The Other Black Girl,” by Zakiya Dalila Harris “The Haunting of Hill House,” by Shirley Jackson “Wish Her Safe at Home,” by Stephen Benatar “Erasure,” by Percival Everett “Playworld,” by Adam Ross “The House on the Strand,” by Daphne du Maurier “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” by Max Porter “The Furrows,” by Namwali Serpell “Dead in Long Beach, California,” by Venita Blackburn “The Vanishing Half,” by Brit Bennett “Death Takes Me,” by Cristina Rivera Garza “Audition,” by Katie Kitamura 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.

We’re halfway through 2025, and we at the Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the ones that just won’t let us go. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the best books of the year so far. Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode: “King of Ashes,” by S.A. Cosby “The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann “A Marriage at Sea,” by Sophie Elmhirst “Careless People,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams “Isola,” by Allegra Goodman “The Catch,” by Yrsa Daley-Ward “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove,” by Barbara Demick “The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones “Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin,” by Sue Prideaux “Raising Hare,” by Chloe Dalton “To Smithereens,” by Rosalyn Drexler “The Fate of the Day,” by Rick Atkinson “Flesh,” by David Szalay “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li “These Summer Storms,” by Sarah MacLean 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.

Some time ago, the British journalist Sophie Elmhirst was reporting a story about people who try to escape the land and to live on the water. “I found myself trolling around as you do in these moments, online and on a website devoted to castaway stories and shipwreck stories,” she tells host Gilbert Cruz. “There were lots of photographs and tales of lone wild men who were pitched up on desert islands and had various escapades. And in among all of these was a tiny little black-and-white picture of a man and a woman." The couple were Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a husband and wife who took to the seas from 1970s England, selling their suburban home to buy a boat and sail to New Zealand. Nine months into the trip, a sperm whale breached under their boat, leaving them stranded on a crude raft with an assortment of salvaged items, luckily including water, canned food, a camera — and a biography of King Richard III. Elmhirst tells the Baileys’ story in her new book, “A Marriage at Sea." 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.

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”: So reads one of the great opening lines in British literature, the first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s classic 1925 novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.” The book tracks one day in the life of an English woman, Clarissa Dalloway, living in post-World War I London, as she prepares for, and then hosts, a party. That’s pretty much it, as far as the plot goes. But within that single day, whole worlds unfold, as Woolf captures the expansiveness of human experience through Clarissa’s roving thoughts. On this week’s episode, Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses it with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Laura Thompson. Other books mentioned in this episode: “The Passion According to G.H.,” by Clarice Lispector “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” by Eimear McBride “The Lesser Bohemians,” by Eimear McBride “To the Lighthouse,” by Virginia Woolf “Orlando,” by Virginia Woolf “A Room of One’s Own,” by Virginia Woolf “The Hours,” by Michael Cunningham “Headshot,” by Rita Bullwinkel “Tilt,” by Emma Pattee 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 this week's episode, A.O. Scott joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about the value of close reading poetry. And New York Times Book Review poetry editor Greg Cowles recommends four recently published collections worth reading. Books mentioned in this episode * "New and Collected Hell: A Poem," by Shane McCrae * "Ominous Music Intensifying," by Alexandra Teague * "Ecstasy: Poems," by Alex Dimitrov * "New and Selected Poems," by Marie Howe 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.

Steven Spielberg’s movie “Jaws” hit theaters 50 years ago this month, in June 1975, and became a phenomenon almost instantly. In some ways that was no surprise: The Peter Benchley novel it was based on, also called “Jaws,” had been a huge best seller the year before, and the public was primed for a fun summer scare. Brian Raftery — the author of “Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” — wrote about “Jaws” for the Book Review last year in honor of the novel’s 50th anniversary, and this week he visits the podcast to talk about the book, the movie adaptation and the era of blockbuster thrillers. “If you’ve seen ‘Jaws,’ you could probably guess what the opening chapter of the book is,” he tells Gilbert Cruz (who has indeed seen “Jaws,” dozens of times). “It’s this shark attack, where this shark at night just devours this young female swimmer. The writing is really fun. It’s really gnarly, and it’s one of those amazing opening chapters where the book is moving as fast as the shark. After you read that first chapter, you are just completely pulled in.” 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.

In S.A. Cosby’s latest thriller, “King of Ashes,” a successful and fast-living financial adviser is called suddenly back to the small Virginia hometown he fled, where his family runs the local crematory and his father is in a coma stemming from a car crash that may not be as accidental as it seems. Cosby himself is from a small Virginia town, and on this week’s podcast he discusses the allure of homecoming, the tricky emotional terrain of complicated families and the reason he keeps revisiting the rural South in his fiction. “Once manufacturing moved out of these places, these rural places, there was nothing left to replace it. But crime — crime is America’s great secret industry. It’s our great secret empire. And when the legitimate businesses leave, crime steps in the fold. Nature abhors a vacuum, so crime steps in to fill that place. And I wanted to talk about cities like that." 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.

MJ Franklin, who hosts the Book Review podcast’s monthly book club, says that whenever someone asks him, “What should I read next?,” Yael van der Wouden’s “The Safekeep” has become his go-to recommendation. So he was particularly excited to discuss the novel on this week’s episode. Set in the Netherlands in 1961, “The Safekeep” is one of those books it’s best not to know too much about, as part of its delight is discovering its secrets unspoiled. As the reviewer for The New York Times coyly wrote in her piece about the book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024: “What a quietly remarkable book. I’m afraid I can’t tell you too much about it.” Here are some other books discussed in this week’s episode: “The Torqued Man,” by Peter Mann “The Little Stranger,” by Sarah Waters “Mice 1961,” by Stacey Levine “The New Life,” by Tom Crewe 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.

Alison Bechdel rose to fame as the creator of a long-running alt-weekly comic strip before jumping to an even wider audience by way of her celebrated graphic memoirs “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” Her new book, “Spent,” is a graphic novel — but it was originally meant to be another memoir, as Bechdel tells Gilbert Cruz on this week’s podcast. “Over the years that I turned myself from being a comic strip writer into a memoirist, I got very sort of self-righteous about memoir as a genre,” Bechdel says. “I just thought, why would you bother making anything up? Life is incredible. It’s all right there. It’s served up on a platter every day. Write about that. My friends who are fiction writers would say, You’re able to tell a deeper kind of truth with fiction, don’t you think? And I would agree with them, but secretly I would think, no, you can’t. You’ve got to tell the actual truth. But that does get really tiresome. It gets tiring." 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 biographer Ron Chernow has written about the Rockefellers and the Morgans. His book about George Washington won a Pulitzer Prize. His book about Alexander Hamilton was adapted into a hit Broadway musical. Now, in “Mark Twain,” Chernow turns to the life of the author and humorist who became one of the 19th century’s biggest celebrities and, along the way, did much to reshape American literature in his own image. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Chernow tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he came to write about Twain and what interested him most about his subject. “The thing that triggered this Mark Twain mania in me was more Mark Twain the platform artist, Mark Twain the political pundit, Mark Twain the original celebrity, even more than Mark Twain the novelist or short story writer,” Chernow says. But at the same time, “I felt that he was very seminal in terms of bringing, to American literature, really bringing the heartland alive — writing about ordinary people in the vernacular and taking this wild throbbing kind of madcap culture, of America’s small towns in rural areas, and really introducing that into fiction.” 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.

Summer arrives just over a month from now, and along with your last-minute scramble for a house share or a part-time job scooping ice cream, you’re probably also wondering what to read. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Joumana Khatib about some of the books they're most looking forward to, from a James Baldwin biography to the true-life story of a young couple shipwrecked in the Pacific and a political thriller co-written by James Patterson and Bill Clinton. Books discussed: “The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda,” by Nathalia Holt “Atmosphere: A Love Story,” by Taylor Jenkins Reid “The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild,” by Bryan Burrough “Next to Heaven," by James Frey “A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck,” by Sophie Elmhirst “The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri “The First Gentleman,” by Bill Clinton and James Patterson “King of Ashes,” by S.A. Cosby “Bonding," by Mariel Franklin “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” by V.E. Schwab “Katabasis,” by R.F. Kuang “Baldwin: A Love Story,” by Nicholas Boggs 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.

At 82, Isabel Allende is one of the world’s most beloved and best-selling Spanish-language authors. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and 80 million copies of her books have been sold around the world. That’s a lot of books. Allende’s newest novel, “My Name Is Emilia del Valle” is about a dark period in Chilean history: the 1891 Chilean civil war. Like so much of Allende’s work, it’s a story about women in tough spots who figure out a way through. Thematically, it’s not that far off from Allende’s own story. She was raised in Chile, but in 1973, when she was 31, raising two small children and working as a journalist, her life was upended forever. That year a military coup pushed out the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who was her father’s cousin. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote “The House of the Spirits,” which evolved from a letter she had begun writing to her dying grandfather. That book became a runaway best seller and it remains one of her best-known. Allende and Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz spoke about her life and career. 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.

Set in New York in the 1980s, Adam Ross’s new novel, “Playworld,” tells the story of a young actor named Griffin as he navigates the chaos of the city, of his family and of being a teenager, and the dangers that swirl around each. Although “Playworld” grapples with bleak material, it sparkles with Ross’s vivid eye and sardonic sense of humor. The result is a dark, off-kilter bildungsroman about one overextended teenager trying to figure himself out while being failed, continually, by every adult around him. On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “Playworld” with his colleagues Dave Kim and Sadie Stein. Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode: “Playworld,” by Adam Ross “Mr. Peanut,” by Adam Ross “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Nine Stories,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” and “Franny and Zooey,” by J.D. Salinger “Long Island Compromise,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner “How Little Lori Visited Times Square,” by Amos Vogel, illustrated by Maurice Sendak “The Squid and the Whale,” directed by Noah Baumbach “The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt “Headshot,” by Rita Bullwinkel “The Copenhagen Trilogy,” by Tove Ditlevsen “Jakob von Gunten,” by Robert Walser 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.

Last summer, when The New York Times Book Review released its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, one of the authors with multiple titles on that list was Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022. Those novels were “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” the first two in a trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the all-purpose fixer and adviser to King Henry VIII. Those books were also adapted into a 2015 television series starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damien Lewis as King Henry. It’s now a decade later and the third book in Mantel’s series, “The Mirror and the Light,” has also been adapted for the small screen. Its finale airs on Sunday, April 27. Joining host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s episode is Mantel’s former editor Nicholas Pearson. He describes what it was like to encounter those books for the first time, and to work with a great author on a groundbreaking masterpiece of historical fiction. 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 century after “The Great Gatsby” was first published, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender novel about a mysterious, lovelorn millionaire living and dying in a Long Island mansion has become among the most widely read American fictions — and also among the most analyzed and interpreted. As the Book Review’s A.O. Scott wrote in a recent essay about the book’s centennial: “What we think about Gatsby illuminates what we think about money, race, romance and history. How we imagine him has a lot to do with how we see ourselves.” Scott joins the host Gilbert Cruz on the podcast this week to discuss Fitzgerald’s novel and its long afterlife, looking at the ways “Gatsby” has made its way into the fabric of American culture. 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 his new novel, “Twist,” the National Book Award-winning Irish writer Colum McCann tells the story of a journalist deep at sea in more ways then one: A man adrift, he accepts a magazine assignment to write about the crews who maintain and repair the undersea cables that transmit all of the world’s information. Naturally, the assignment becomes more treacherous and psychologically fraught than he had anticipated. On this week’s episode, McCann tells host Gilbert Cruz how he became interested in the topic of information cables and why the story resonated for him at multiple levels. “Now, I don’t know if the novel is prescient in any way. I wanted to talk about repair. And when I got deep into the subject, I did talk about repair — which is, human repair or actual repair of a cable. But I also ended up talking about sabotage, too. And the sabotage of these cables is something that has to be on our minds.” 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 novel “We Do Not Part,” by the Nobel laureate Han Kang, involves a pet-sitting quest gone surreal: It follows a writer and documentarian whose hospitalized friend beseeches her to take care of her stranded pet parakeet on an island hundreds of miles away. When she arrives, the writer finds not only the bird but also an apparition of her friend, who has a devastating history to tell. Transforming real life into a haunting dreamscape, “We Do Not Part” is about grief, tragedy, the weight of the past, and the painful but essential work of remembering, delivered by one of the most electrifying writers working today. (Han’s 2016 novel, “The Vegetarian,” won the International Booker Prize and was chosen as one of The New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century.) On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “We Do Not Part” with with fellow Book Review editors Lauren Christensen and Emily Eakin. 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 director Steven Soderbergh has just released his second film of 2025: the spy thriller "Black Bag," starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett. In January 2024, Soderbergh spoke with host Gilbert Cruz about some of the more than 80 books that he read in the previous year. (This episode is a rerun.) Books discussed: "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne," by Sarah Bakewell "Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining,'" by Lee Unkrich and J.W. Rinzler "Cocktails with George and Martha," by Philip Gefter The work of Donald E. Westlake "Americanah," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "Pictures From an Institution," by Randall Jarrell "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," by Robert M. Sapolsky 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 season brings its share of books to look forward to, and this spring is no different. Host Gilbert Cruz is joined by Book Review editor Joumana Khatib to talk about a dozen or so titles that sound interesting in the months ahead. Books discussed on this episode: "Dream Count," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "Sunrise on the Reaping," by Suzanne Collins "The Buffalo Hunter Hunter," by Stephen Graham Jones "Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools," by Mary Annette Pember "Great Big Beautiful Life," by Emily Henry "John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs," by Ian Leslie "Yoko: A Biography," by David Sheff "Searches," by Vauhini Vara "Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America," by Michael Luo "Rabbit Moon," by Jennifer Haigh "Mark Twain," by Ron Chernow "Authority," by Andrea Long Chu "Spent," by Alison Bechdel "Fish Tales," by Nettie Jones 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.

Samantha Harvey’s novel “Orbital,” which won the Booker Prize last year, has a tight, poetic frame: We follow one day in the lives of six people working on a space station above Earth, orbiting the planet 16 times every 24 hours. But this is not a saga of adventure or exploration. It’s a quiet meditation on what it means to be human, prompted by a series of personal reckonings each character faces while floating 250 miles above home. This week on the Book Review Book Club, MJ Franklin talks about “Orbital” with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and Jennifer Harlan. 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.

You’re familiar with Edward Gorey, whether you know it or not. The prolific author and illustrator, who was born 100 years ago this week, was ubiquitous for a time in the 1970s and 1980s, and his elaborate black-and-white line drawings — often depicting delightfully grim neo-Victorian themes and settings — graced everything from book jackets to the opening credits of the PBS show “Mystery!” to his own eccentric storybooks like “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” in which young children come to unfortunate but spectacular ends. On this week’s episode, the Book Review’s Sadie Stein joins Gilbert Cruz for a celebration of all things Gorey. “He was so incredibly prolific,” Stein says. “He was Joyce Carol Oates-like in his output. And it’s amazing when you look at the work because the line drawings, as you mentioned, are so intricate. It looks almost like pointillism sometimes, like it would have taken hundreds of hours. But he was either preternaturally disciplined or incredibly fast, and each one that I’ve ever seen at least is beautiful. And complete in a way.” 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.

One day, several decades ago, the writer Winnie Holzman was shopping in a Manhattan bookstore where a particular cover caught her eye. It showed a woman with a green face, a black hat pulled down over her eyes. The book was “Wicked” by Gregory Maguire, a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” stories from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. “When I turned it over and read the little précis on the back, it blew my mind,” Holzman said. “I thought it was such a brilliant premise.” The book ended up on Holzman’s bookshelf, with its enigmatic cover facing out. Years later, the composer Stephen Schwartz contacted Holzman to ask if she’d be interested in adapting Maguire’s book for the stage. The musical they wrote together opened in 2003, and it is now one of the most successful shows in Broadway history. The producers started talking about a movie adaptation, but Holzman was cautious: “We had to really kind of clear our minds and kind of reconceive the whole story.” The film version of “Wicked” opened in 2024, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and with a screenplay by Holzman and Dana Fox. It is one of the highest-grossing movies of the year and is nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Winnie Holzman joins Gilbert Cruz, the editor of the Book Review, to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of adapting your own adaptation. 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 screenwriter Peter Straughan has become adept at taking well known — and beloved — books and adapting them for the big and small screens. He was first nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of the 2011 film “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” based on the classic John le Carré spy novel, and then adapted Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy into an award-winning season of television, with an adaptation of the third novel coming out soon. Now he has been nominated for a second Oscar: for his screenplay for “Conclave,” based on Robert Harris’s political thriller set in the secret world of a papal election.“It’s almost like mosaic work,” Straughan tells Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, about adapting books. “You have all these pieces; sometimes they’re going to be laid out in a very similar order to the book, sometimes a completely different order. Sometimes you’re going to deconstruct and rebuild completely.”In the third episode of our special series devoted to Oscar-nominated films adapted from books, Cruz talks with Straughan about his process of translating a book to the screen, and about the moments in ‘‘Conclave” that he found most exciting to adapt. Produced by Tina Antolini and Alex BarronEdited by Wendy DorrEngineered by Daniel RamirezOriginal Music by Elisheba IttoopHosted by Gilbert Cruz 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.

Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties,” traces the events that led up to Bob Dylan’s memorable performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The book is about Dylan, but also about the folk movement, youth culture, politics and the record business. For the writer and director James Mangold, Wald’s work provided an opportunity to tell an unusual story about the musician. “You could structure a screenplay along the lines of what Peter Shaffer did with “Amadeus,’” Mangold told the Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz. “I don’t really know what I learned about Mozart watching “Amadeus.” But I do know that I learned a lot about how we mortals feel about people with immense talent.” Mangold’s film “A Complete Unknown” is a chronicle of Dylan’s early years on the New York folk scene, and it avoids easy explanations for the musician’s genius and success. “What if the thing we don’t understand, we just don’t want to understand,” said Mangold, “which is that he’s actually different? That he’s just a different kind of person than you or I?” In the second episode of our special series devoted to Oscar-nominated films adapted from books, Cruz talks with Mangold about making a film centered on one of music’s most enigmatic figures. 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.

When the filmmaker and photographer RaMell Ross first read “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black boys in a dangerous reform school in the 1960s, he couldn’t help but put himself in the shoes of its protagonists, Elwood and Turner. In his film adaptation of the book, Ross does that to the audience: You see what the characters see, because it’s filmed from the main character’s point of view. “I wondered,” Ross said, “how do you explicitly film from the perspective of a Black person?” It was an experiment that has paid off in critical acclaim. “Nickel Boys” has been nominated for two Academy Awards: best adapted screenplay and best picture. In the first episode of our special series devoted to Oscar-nominated films adapted from books, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Ross about why he made the film this particular way. Produced by Tina Antolini and Alex Barron With Kate LoPresti Edited by Wendy Dorr Engineered by Sophia Lanman Original music by Elisheba Ittoop Hosted by Gilbert Cruz 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 novel “Our Evenings,” by Alan Hollinghurst, follows a gay English Burmese actor from childhood into old age as he confronts confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate in the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s the story of a life — beautifully related by a literary master whose 2004 novel “The Line of Beauty” won the Booker Prize and was named to the Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Reviewing “Our Evenings” for us last year, Hamilton Cain wrote that the book “is that rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language, surrounding us like a Wall of Sound.” You can join our book club discussion in the comments here. 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.

In Alafair Burke’s new thriller, “The Note,” three friends are vacationing together in the Hamptons when they have an unpleasant run-in with a couple of strangers and decide to exact drunken, petty revenge. But the prank they pull — a note reading “He’s cheating on you” — snowballs, eventually embroiling them in a missing-persons investigation and forcing each woman to wonder what dark secrets her friends are hiding. Burke joins host Gilbert Cruz and talks about how she came up with the idea for “The Note,” and how she goes about writing her books in general. “I always have a few ideas, just, like the setup in my head,” she says. “And then I also have characters in my head. They’re not aligned together initially. I might just be thinking about a character who’s interesting to me for various reasons. It might be the back story that’s interesting, or it might be a personality trait that’s interesting. And then I’ll have a setup, like, three women go on vacation and stir up some nonsense that gets them in trouble. And for me, when I can start writing is when — it’s almost like matchmaking: Oh, OK, if I take that character that I’ve been thinking about with that back story and that set of anxieties and I put her in this scenario, that’s going to get interesting.” 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.

Decades ago, after he lost in home in a California wildfire, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer started to go to a small monastery in Big Sur in search of solitude. On this week's episode he discusses those retreats, which he writes about in his new book "Aflame: Learning from Silence." "It's true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery or convent and I felt a kind of longing, the way other people feel a longing when they see a delectable meal or a Pistachio gelato." 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.

And we're back! Happy new year, readers. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the upcoming books they’re most anticipating over the next several months. Books discussed on this episode: "Stone Yard Devotional," by Charlotte Wood "Aflame: Learning from Silence," by Pico Iyer "Onyx Storm," by Rebecca Yarros "Glyph," by Ali Smith "The Dream Hotel," by Laila Lalami "The Colony," by Annika Norlin "We Do Not Part," by Han Kang "Playworld," by Adam Ross "Death of the Author," by Nnedi Okorafor "The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary," by Susannah Cahalan "Tilt," by Emma Pattee "Dream Count," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "Hope: The Autobiography," by Pope Francis "Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church," by Philip Shenon "The Antidote," by Karen Russell "Source Code: My Beginnings," by Bill Gates "Great Big Beautiful Life," by Emily Henry "Sunrise on the Reaping," by Suzanne Collins 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 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 2004, Susanna Clarke published her debut novel, the sprawling 800-page historical fantasy “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.” It was a sensation. Clarke sold millions of copies, won literary awards and landed on best-seller lists. After just one book, Clarke was regarded as one of Britain’s greatest fantasy novelists. It would be 16 years before she resurfaced with her second novel, “Piranesi.” So, where did she go? And what is she doing now? On the 20th anniversary of her masterpiece, the Times reporter Alexandra Alter visited Clarke at her limestone cottage in England’s Peak District to discuss her winding path to literary stardom and, above all else, her complex relationship with magic. 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.

Clare Keegan's slim 2021 novella about one Irishman's crisis of conscience during the Christmas season, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 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 Elisabeth Egan. Keegan's book was also one of The New York Times Book Review's 100 best books of the 21st century. As we wrote, "Not a word is wasted in Keegan’s small, burnished gem of a novel, a sort of Dickensian miniature centered on the son of an unwed mother who has grown up to become a respectable coal and timber merchant with a family of his own in 1985 Ireland. Moralistically, though, it might as well be the Middle Ages as he reckons with the ongoing sins of the Catholic Church and the everyday tragedies wrought by repression, fear and rank hypocrisy." 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.

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. Books discussed: "Intermezzo," by Sally Rooney "All Fours," by Miranda July "You Dreamed of Empires," by Álvaro Enrigue "When the Clock Broke," by John Ganz "Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring," by Brad Gooch "Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius," by Carrie Courogen "My Beloved Monster," by Caleb Carr "Rejection," by Tony Tulathimutte "Beautyland," by Marie-Helene Bertino "Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society," by Daniel Chandler "Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera," by Ricky Ian Gordon 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.

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: "Good Material." 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 broken heart, and it has won Alderton enthusiastic fans in America. In this episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Emily Eakin and Leah Greenblatt. 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.

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. The New York Times Book Review's Top 10 Books of 2024 "James," by Percival Everett "You Dreamed of Empires," by Álvaro Enrigue; translated by Natasha Wimmer "Good Material," by Dolly Alderton "All Fours," by Miranda July "Martyr!," by Kaveh Akbar "The Wide Wide Sea," by Hampton Sides "Everyone Who is Gone is Here," by Jonathan Blitzer "Reagan," by Max Boot "I Heard Her Call My Name," by Lucy Sante "Cold Creamatorium," by József Debreczeni; translated by Paul Olchváry 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 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 capable of love and wit and rage in equal measure. In this episode from May, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book, which was recently awarded the National Book Award, with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Gregory Cowles. 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 begins with one of the most iconic lines in literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” “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. 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.

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. Keefe has now seen his reporting on the life of Irish Republican Army soldier Dolours Price and others make its way from a New Yorker magazine article to an acclaimed nonfiction book to a streaming series. "In terms of storytelling, I try to write in a way that is as visceral and engaging as possible," Keefe said. "But the toolkit that you have when you make a series is so much more visceral. It's almost fissile in its power." 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 works of John le Carré, who died in 2020, are among the most beloved thrillers of all time. For some, books like "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," "A Perfect Spy" and "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" are simply among their favorite works of literature ever. So it was a perilous task that author Nick Harkaway, one of le Carré sons, set out for himself. The author of multiple well-received science fiction novels, Harkaway picked up the torch from his father to write a new tale starring George Smiley, the Cold War spy who has appeared in more than a half dozen novels. According to Harkaway, it took some work to figure out the right period to set the book in. "Smiley's career is a little bit tricky in terms of the continuity because my dad, when he was writing these books, wasn't writing a franchise," Harkaway said. "He was writing one book after another, and each one was the only truth that he cared about." 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.

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. “Intermezzo,” her fourth and latest novel, centers on two brothers separated by 10 years and periods of estrangement, who are grieving the recent death of their father. Peter Koubek is a 32-year-old lawyer with a younger girlfriend, Naomi, and an unextinguished flame for his ex, Sylvia; his brother, Ivan, is a 22-year-old chess prodigy who falls into a relationship with a 36-year-old divorcée, Margaret. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Sadie Stein and Dave Kim. 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.

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. Books discussed: "Mean Spirited," by Nick Roberts"Maeve Fly," by CJ Leede"Come Closer," by Sara Gran"It," by Stephen King"Experimental Film," by Gemma Files"A Head Full of Ghosts," by Paul Tremblay"Lost Man's Lane," by Scott Carson"Fever House," by Keith Rosson"The Devil by Name," by Keith Rosson"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.

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. 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 actor-director-producer Stanley Tucci is also, famously, an avid eater, who has explored his enthusiasm for food through his travel show “Searching for Italy” and through two books: “Taste,” in 2021, 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. “The people at Simon & Schuster wanted me to write another book after ‘Taste,’ and I really didn’t know what to write,” Tucci says. “My wife said, Just write what you eat. So I did, because I do everything she says. And it actually ended up being such a pleasure to write. It just flowed very easily. As you start to write about the mundane, you start to mine all this stuff that you didn’t know you were thinking about, or that was happening. And that’s what the book is. It’s, in essence, the passage of time through the prism of food.” Also on this week’s episode, Gilbert chats with Joumana Khatib about the National Book Award finalists in fiction and nonfiction. 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 2021, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz had a hit with “The Plot,” a book that was partly a mystery, partly a thriller and entirely a delicious sendup of the publishing industry. It told the tale of a once-promising writer, Jacob, who steals somebody else’s story idea and reaches undreamed-of levels of success before things go very badly for him. Korelitz’s new novel, “The Sequel,” is — yes — a sequel to “The Plot.” It follows Jacob’s widow, Anna, who has unexpectedly become a writer herself, only to be confronted with her own dark secrets. On this week’s episode, Korelitz talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about the writing life, the shape of her career and her decision to write a sequel to “The Plot.” 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.

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. The novel is an art monster story and a dysfunctional family saga that explores the ethics of creating work inspired by real life. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with editors Joumana Khatib and Lauren Christensen. 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 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. Books mentioned in this week’s episode: “Intermezzo,” by Sally Rooney “Playground,” by Richard Powers “Sonny Boy: A Memoir,” by Al Pacino “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” by Cher “The Sequel,” by Jean Hanff Korelitz “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” by Ina Garten “We Solve Murders,” by Richard Osman “Creation Lake,” by Rachel Kushner “V13: Chronicle of a Trial,” by Emmanuel Carrère “Absolution,” by Jeff VanderMeer “Lazarus Man,” by Richard Price “Rejection,” by Tony Tulathimutte “Colored Television,” by Danzy Senna “Health and Safety,” by Emily Witt “Patriot: A Memoir,” by Alexei Navalny “The Message,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates “The Serviceberry,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” by Malcolm Gladwell “From Here to the Great Unknown,” by Lisa Marie Presley “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” by Haruki Murakami 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.

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 joins the podcast and tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he accounts for its enduring legacy. “People are interested in power,” Caro says. “This is a particular kind of power. Robert Moses’ power was unchecked power. We all live in a democracy where we think that power comes from our votes at the ballot box. He was a man who was never elected to anything and he held on to power for 44 years, almost half a century. And with the power, this man who wasn’t elected to anything shaped New York and its surrounding suburbs. So I think, if you’re interested in government, you have to say, as I said maybe 55 years ago when I started this, How did he do it? What happened here?” 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 British writer Kate Atkinson has had a rich and varied career since her debut novel, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1996; her 14 subsequent books have included story collections, historical fiction and an inventive speculative novel, “Life After Life,” that landed on the Book Review’s recent survey of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. But she may be best known for her Jackson Brodie series of crime novels, which began with “Case Histories” in 2004 and was later adapted into a British television show. The sixth book in the series, “Death at the Sign of the Rook,” has just been released, and from the title to the plot to the cast of characters it pays winking homage to the golden age of English cozy mysteries. Atkinson visits the podcast this week to discuss her new novel, and tells The Times’s Sarah Lyall how she approached her tribute to an earlier era. 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.

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 "The Warmth of Other Suns," her sweeping history of the movement of Black Americans from the south to points north over the course of the 20th century. 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 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 discusses the book with fellow editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles. 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.

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 story collection. 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 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.) 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 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 Jonathan Franzen "You Like It Darker," by Stephen King "Transactions in a Foreign Currency," by Deborah Eisenberg "Veronica," by Mary Gaitskill "The Bright Sword," by Lev Grossman "Asymmetry," by Lisa Halliday "Out," by Natsuo Kirino "The God of the Woods," by Liz Moore "The Devil's Grip," by Lina Wolff "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay," by Elena Ferrante "Spy Hook," by Len Deighton "All Fours," by Miranda July 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.

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." 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.

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 business, among other topics. “I just keep learning,” Parker says. “And I think, every time I feel ill equipped, I just recommit to the idea of what books have meant to me since, well, my entire life, literally my entire life, and how I can help an author. … Every year we do this whistlestop of going to literary agents’ offices and just reminding them of the imprint and what we've published and who we're about to publish and the mission of our particular imprint. Because I think people have every right to assume those ideas — ‘dilettante,’ ‘not deserving’ or, like I said, ‘ill equipped.’ People have spent, you know, their whole lives in higher education, and then they come out and pursue this dream of being in publishing in a variety of jobs. And I didn't. And I was very concerned about perception, but also my own concerns for myself about taking care of a writer.” 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.

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 was a great thinker, a great logician, a great empathizer and also a great psychologist. She was all of those things. And she was also political. She understood so many aspects of the human mind and the way we interact with each other. And then above all, I think she has a great heart.” 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.

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 dangerous path. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Tina Jordan, Sadie Stein and Sarah Lyall, our thrillers columnist. Caution: Spoilers abound. 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.

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. 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.

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." 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 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. 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.

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’ minds as they reckon with their intense desires to make something of themselves. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Lauren Christensen. Caution: Spoilers abound. 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 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 Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir.” Of waiting to write it until his father, uncle and aunt had died, Dunne said he needed the distance: “I had the perspective on just how remarkable those three were as writers, what an influence they had on my life.” 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.

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 "Sandwich," by Catherine Newman "The Future Was Now," by Christopher Nashawaty "An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work," by Charlotte Shane 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.

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. 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 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 capable of love and wit and rage in equal measure. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Gregory Cowles. Caution: Spoilers abound. 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 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 the Edge of Space.” On this week’s episode, Higginbotham tells host Gilbert Cruz why he was drawn to both disasters, and what the Challenger explosion revealed about weaknesses in America’s space program. “There was certainly a lot of hubris and complacency that led into this accident,” Higginbotham says. “In complex decision-making processes like those leading to the Chernobyl accident and the Challenger disaster, those concerned with making the decisions start off with a series of extremely carefully governed and defined practices for what constitutes acceptable risk and normal behavior. And then gradually over time, they subtly and almost unconsciously expand what they deem to be acceptable without even realizing it." 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 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 deals with literal royalty (King Philip II of Spain) through the story of a young scullery maid who happens to possess some magical abilities. This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks with Bardugo about her career, her writing process and her decision to write a historical novel 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.

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 and, in the opening scene, confronting a sudden crisis in her marriage. On this week’s podcast, Tóibín talks to Sarah Lyall about the book and how he came to write it. 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.

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 broken heart, and it has won Alderton enthusiastic fans in America. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Emily Eakin and Leah Greenblatt. Caution: Spoilers abound! 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.

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 company is turning 100 at an auspicious time to celebrate its roots and look to its future. On this week’s episode, Gilbert is joined by Simon & Schuster’s publisher and chief executive, Jonathan Karp, to talk about the centennial and what it means. “It was a startup 100 years ago,” Karp says. “It was two guys in their 20s. Richard Simon and Max Schuster. They were just a couple of guys who loved books. And they made a decision that they wanted to read every book they published. … The first book was a crossword puzzle book. It was a monster success. They’d actually raised $50,000 from their friends and family. They didn’t need it. They returned the money. And the company was up and running.” 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.

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 “Lost” and “The Leftovers.” Some of the books discussed in this episode: "Carrie," "Cujo," "Duma Key," "From a Buick 8," "The Tommyknockers," "The Stand," and "The Long Walk." Some of the articles referenced: Grady Hendrix's Stephen King essaysWhen Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse and J.J. Abrams met Stephen KingStephen King reviews Tom Perrotta's "The Leftovers" 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.

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. (“American Psycho” turns out to be as contentious now as it was when it was first published.) “There are only a very few number of books in my lifetime that have made me laugh out loud,” Jacobs says. “And some of them no longer make me laugh out loud, because the thing about humor is it’s like this giant shifting cloud, this shape-shifting thing that changes over the course of our lives and also the life of the culture.” 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.

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 very specific thing. It's a source of power and control. It's a way that you can retrieve order after the disruption that murder has caused. But I kept thinking there are so many other perspectives within that investigation for whom this investigation is not a source of power or control or truth and justice. It's the opposite. It's something that just barrels into your life and upends it and can cause permanent damage." 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.

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 and religion, about Herbert’s novel, Villeneuve’s films and the enduring hold of Fremen lore on the audience’s imagination. “There’s a couple things that I think are really unsettling in ‘Dune,’” Wilkinson says. “One is, the vision of Frank Herbert was, I believe, to basically write a book that questioned authoritarians and hero mythology genuinely, across the board. Any kind of a hero figure he is proposing will always have things and people come up alongside that hero figure that distort their influence. Even if they intend well, if they’re benevolent, there’s still all of this really awful stuff that comes along with it. So Paul is a messiah figure — we believe he wants good things for most of the book — and then he turns on a dime or it feels like he might be turning on a dime. You can never quite tell where anyone stands in this book. And I think that is unsettling, especially because so many of the other kinds of things that we watch — the superhero movies, “Star Wars,” whatever — there’s a clear-cut good and evil fight going on. Good and evil don’t really exist in ‘Dune.’” 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.

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. Obviously, we recommend the movie. But even more, we recommend Everett’s novel. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib, also from the Book Review, and Reggie Ugwu, a pop culture reporter at The Times. Caution: Spoilers abound for both the book and the movie. Have you read “Erasure” or seen “American Fiction,” or both? We’d love to know what you thought. Share your reactions in the comments and we’ll try to join the conversation. We’ll get you started: Joumana Khatib: “I’d read Percival Everett before. I love watching his mind on the page. He’s funny, he's irreverent, he’s sarcastic. There’s nobody that writes like him. And I have to tell you that ‘Erasure’ totally blew me away, just because of the sheer number of textures in this book. … It’s obviously a parodical novel. It’s obviously unbelievably satirical and it’s just outrageous enough that it keeps the momentum without feeling schlocky or shticky.” … Reggie Ugwu: “He has a great sense of pace, like he never wastes time. … You can tell that it’s the work of a very sophisticated and mature writer who knows exactly what to leave on the page and exactly what he can cut. There are some moments where I marveled when he would just leap the plot forward in a few lines.” Send your feedback about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general, 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.

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 discuss “Wandering Stars” as well as the book he has read most in his life, Clarice Lispector's "The Hour of the Star." Orange explained how he decided to write a historical novel while sticking with the characters and story line from his earlier book. “I got drawn in by this part of history because it was so specific to my tribe,” Orange says. “I don’t necessarily love reading historical fiction, but if it’s driven from the interior and it’s character driven, it’s compelling to me. So figuring out the types of humans they might have been or things they might have thought or felt, that was a way for me to try to figure out how to make them real. and that’s sometimes on a sentence level and sometimes on a, like, what are their motivations or what are they doing in their day-to-day lives? What do they want?” 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.

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 whole thing just felt like this production that someone had really thought through, from the great cartoons to the great photographs to the crazy hard news in the front to the different voices in back. It all came together into a package. And there are still great writers out there, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore. No one has really taken over, to my point of view. ... There’s no one-stop shopping to find the great listings at every club and every major theater, just a great rundown of what one might be interested in doing.” 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.

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 at the Book Review) and Anna Dubenko, the Times’s newsroom audience director, about their reactions to Kingsolver’s novel and why it has exerted such a lasting appeal. 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 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 so deft,” Stein says of Hallett’s new thriller, “The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels.” “It’s so funny. It seems like she’s having a lot of fun. One thing I would say, and I don’t think this is spoiling it, is, if there comes a moment when you think you might want to stop, keep going and trust her. I think it’s rare to be able to say that with that level of confidence.” Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode: “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” by Katherine Rundell “The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World,” by Jennifer Higgie “The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels,” by Janice Hallett “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum,” by Antonia Hylton (Briefly mentioned: "You Dreamed of Empires," by Álvaro Enrigue, "Beautyland," by Marie-Helene Bertino, and "Martyr!" by Kaveh Akbar.) 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.

Former New York Times film critic A.O. Scott joins to talk both David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon," which continues to sit near the top of the bestseller list, and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated film adaptation. Spoilers abound for both versions. (Also, for history.) 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.

Molly Roden Winter and her husband, Stewart, have been married for 24 years. But since 2008, by mutual agreement, they have also dated other people — an arrangement that Winter details in her new memoir, “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage.” In this week’s episode, The Times’s Sarah Lyall chats with Winter about her book, her marriage and why she decided to go public. “I didn’t see any representations of either people who were still successfully married after having opened it up or people who were honest about how hard it was,” Winter says. “The stories that were coming out were either, ‘Oh, we tried it. It didn’t work,’ or ‘We’re born polyamorous and it’s just the best and I just feel love pouring out of me 24/7.’ Neither of those things was true for me. I felt like I had learned something really profound through this journey of opening my marriage, and I wanted to share it." 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 gonna be a busy spring! On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Tina Jordan and Joumana Khatib about some of the upcoming books they’re anticipating most keenly over the next several months. Books discussed in this week’s episode: “Knife,” by Salman Rushdie “James,” by Percival Everett “The Book of Love,” by Kelly Link “Martyr,” by Kaveh Akbar “The Demon of Unrest,” by Erik Larson “The Hunter,” by Tana French “Wandering Stars,” by Tommy Orange “Anita de Monte Laughs Last,” by Xochitl Gonzalez “Splinters,” by Leslie Jamison “Neighbors and Other Stories,” by Diane Oliver “Funny Story,” by Emily Henry “Table for Two,” by Amor Towles “Grief Is for People,” by Sloane Crosley “One Way Back: A Memoir,” by Christine Blasey Ford “The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir,” by RuPaul 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 January on his website Extension765.com, the prolific director Steven Soderbergh looks back at the previous year and posts a day-by-day account of every movie and TV series watched, every play attended and every book read. In 2023, Soderbergh tackled more than 80 (!) books, and on this week's episode, he and the host Gilbert Cruz talk about some of his highlights. Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode: "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne," by Sarah Bakewell "Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining,'" by Lee Unkrich and J.W. Rinzler "Cocktails with George and Martha," by Philip Gefter The work of Donald E. Westlake "Americanah," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie "Pictures From an Institution," by Randall Jarrell "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," by Robert M. Sapolsky 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.

James McBride’s novel “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” was one of the most celebrated books of 2023 — a critical darling and a New York Times best seller. In their piece for the Book Review, Danez Smith called it “a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel” and praised its “precision, magnitude and necessary messiness.” On this week’s episode, the Book Review editors MJ Franklin, Joumana Khatib and Elisabeth Egan convene for a discussion about the book, McBride, and what you might want to read next. 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.

John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” takes readers to the petroleum boomtown of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in May 2016, when a wildfire that started in the surrounding boreal forest grew faster than expected and tore through the city, destroying entire neighborhoods in a rampage that lasted for days. On this week’s episode, Vaillant (whose book was one of our 10 Best for 2023) calls it a “bellwether,” and tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he decided to put the fire itself at the center of his story rather than choosing a human character to lead his audience through the narrative. “It was a bit of a leap," he says. "It was a risk. But it also felt like, given the role that fire is increasingly playing in our world now, it really deserved to be focused on, on its own merit, from its own point of view, if you will.” 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 Times’s staff book critics — Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — do a lot of reading over the course of any given year, but not everything they read stays with them equally. On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz chats with the critics about the books that did: the novels and story collections and works of nonfiction that made an impression in 2023 and defined their year in reading, including one that Garner says caught him by surprise. “Eleanor Catton’s ‘Birnam Wood’ is in some ways my novel of the year,” Garner says. “And it’s not really my kind of book. This is going to sound stupid or snobby, but I’m not the biggest plot reader. I’m just not. I like sort of thorny, funny, earthy fiction, and if there’s no plot I’m fine with that. But this has a plot like a dream. It just takes right off. And she’s such a funny, generous writer that I was just happy from the first time I picked it up.” Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode: “Be Mine,” by Richard Ford “Onlookers,” by Ann Beattie “I Am Homeless if This Ia Not My Home,” by Lorrie Moore “People Collide,” by Isle McElroy “Birnam Wood,” by Eleanor Catton “Biography of X,” by Catherine Lacey “Madonna: A Rebel Life,” by Mary Gabriel “The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune,” by Alexander Stille “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions,” by Jonathan Rosen “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State,” by Kerry Howley “The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight,” by Andrew Leland “Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets,” by Burkhard Bilger “King: A Life,” Jonathan Eig “Larry McMurtry: A Life,” Tracy Daugherty “Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey,” by Robert “Mack” McCormick “Roald Dahl, Teller of the Unexpected: A Biography,” by Matthew Dennison “The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” by William Egginton “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” by Naomi Klein “The Notebooks and Diaries of Edmund Wilson” “Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair,” by Christian Wiman “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” by Oliver Burkeman 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.

It’s that time of year: After months of reading, arguing and (sometimes) happily agreeing, the Book Review’s editors have come up with their picks for the 10 Best Books of 2023. On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz reveals the chosen titles — five fiction, five nonfiction — and talks with some of the editors who participated in the process. Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode: “The Bee Sting,” by Paul Murray “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah “Eastbound,” by Maylis de Kerangal “The Fraud,” by Zadie Smith “North Woods,” by Daniel Mason “The Best Minds,” by Jonathan Rosen “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” by Kerry Howley “Fire Weather,” by John Vaillant “Master Slave Husband Wife,” by Ilyon Woo “Some People Need Killing,” by Patricia Evangelista 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.

Book Review reporter Alexandra Alter discusses two of her recent pieces. The first is about Georgette Heyer, the "queen of Regency romance," and recent attempts to posthumously revise one of her most famous works in order to remove stereotypical language. The second looks at Rebecca Yarros, author of one of this year's most surprising and persistent bestsellers: the "romantasy" novel "Fourth Wing." Then, staff critic Alexandra Jacobs joins Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz to discuss her review of Barbra Streisand's epic memoir, "My Name is Barbra." 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 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare died, two of his friends and fellow actors led an effort to publish a single volume containing 36 of the plays he had written, half of which had never been officially published before. Now known as the First Folio, that volume has become a lodestone of Shakespeare scholarship over the centuries, offering the most definitive versions of his work along with clues to his process and plenty of disputes about authorship and intention. In honor of its 400th anniversary, the British Library recently released a facsimile version of the First Folio. On this week’s episode, The Times’s critic at large Sarah Lyall talks with Adrian Edwards, head of the library’s Printed Heritage Collections, about Shakespeare’s work, the library’s holdings and the cultural significance of that original volume. 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.

You don’t need Halloween to justify reading scary books, any more than you need sand to justify reading a beach novel. But the holiday does give editors here a handy excuse to talk about some of their favorite spooky reads. On this week’s episode, the host Gilbert Cruz talks with his colleagues Tina Jordan and Sadie Stein about the enduring appeal of ghost stories, Gothic novels and other scary books. Titles discussed: “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death,” by Deborah Blum “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by Ray Bradbury “Rebecca,” by Daphne du Maurier “Don’t Look Now: And Other Stories,” by Daphne du Maurier “The Exorcist,” by William Peter Blatty “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” by Alvin Schwartz “Ghosts,” by Edith Wharton “Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of Ghost Stories,” by various “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” by M.R. James “The Hunger,” by Alma Katsu “The Terror,” by Dan Simmons “The Little Stranger,” by Sarah Waters “Affinity,” by Sarah Waters “The Paying Guests,” by Sarah Waters “The Haunting of Hill House,” by Shirley Jackson “Hell House,” by Richard Matheson “House of Leaves,” by Mark Z. Danielewski “A Haunting on the Hill,” by Elizabeth Hand “The Virago Book of Ghost Stories,” edited by Richard Dalby “The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James 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 2008 — the same year that Robert Downey Jr. appeared in the action comedy “Tropic Thunder,” for which he would earn his second Oscar nomination — he also appeared as the billionaire inventor and unlikely superhero Tony Stark in “Iron Man,” the debut feature from the upstart Marvel Studios. Downey lost the Oscar (to Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”), but Marvel won the day. In the 15 years since “Iron Man” came out, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has expanded to 32 films that have earned a staggering $26 billion and changed the world of moviemaking for a generation. In a new book, “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” the writers Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards explore the company’s scrappy beginnings, phenomenal success and uncertain hold on the future, with lots of dish along the way. On this week’s episode, Gonzales and Robinson join the host Gilbert Cruz to talk all things Marvel. 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 this week’s episode, a look at the rest of the year in books — new fiction from Alice McDermott and this year’s Nobel laureate, Jon Fosse, a journalist’s investigation of state-sanctioned killings in the Philippines, and a trio of celebrity memoirs. Discussed in this week’s episode: “The Vulnerables,” by Sigrid Nunez “Day,” by Michael Cunningham “Absolution,” by Alice McDermott “A Shining,” by Jon Fosse “Romney: A Reckoniung,” by McKay Coppins “Class,” by Stephanie Land “Some People Need Killing,” by Patricia Evangelista “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” by Tim Alberta “My Name is Barbra,” by Barbra Streisand “The Woman in Me,” by Britney Spears “Worthy,” by Jada Pinkett Smith 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.

Madonna released her first single in 1982, and in one guise or another she has been with us ever since — ubiquitous but also astonishing, when you consider the usual fleeting arc of pop stardom. How has she done it, and how have her various personae shaped or reflected the culture she inhabits? These are among the questions the renowned biographer Mary Gabriel takes up in her latest book, “Madonna: A Rebel Life,” which casts new light on its subject’s life and career. On this week’s episode, the host Gilbert Cruz chats with Gabriel about all things Madonna, and revisits the context of the 1980s’ music industry that she conquered. 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.