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The New York Times

The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 

Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

The Book Review

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."

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

S.A. Cosby on Writing Southern Crime Fiction

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

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Our Book Critics On Their Year in Reading

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."

 

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Book Club: "Small Things Like These," by Claire Keegan

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.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The 20th Anniversary of "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell"

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

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The Books We’re Excited About in Early 2025

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."

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

How a Wildfire Sent Pico Iyer in Search of Silence

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.”

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Alafair Burke On Writing Crime Novels and Teaching Law

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.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Book Club: Let’s Talk About Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘Our Evenings’

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

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

How ‘Nickel Boys’ Became One of the Year’s Most Visually Striking Films

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.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Is Bob Dylan Still a ‘Complete Unknown’?

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. 

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Book Club: 'My Brilliant Friend,' by Elena Ferrante

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