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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

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.”

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This Reporter Can Tell Us What Nuclear Apocalypse Looks Like

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

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It's Still Summer. Let's Talk Road Trip Books.

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

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Catch,' by Yrsa Daley-Ward

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

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The Best Books of the Year (So Far)

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."

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The True Story of a Married Couple Stranded at Sea

“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

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 'Mrs. Dalloway" at 100

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

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A.O. Scott on the Joy of Close Reading Poetry

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.

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.

50 Years After ‘Jaws’ Terrified Filmgoers, a Reporter Looks Back

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

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

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Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Safekeep'

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."

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.

Talking Barbra Streisand and Rebecca Yarros

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