The Book Review

Some books find us at the right age and in the right frame of mind to lodge an enduring hold on our imagination; these are the books we turn to again and again, which become the cherished classics of our personal canon.

On this week's episode, the Book Review's thriller columnist and writer at large Sarah Lyall talks to the host Gilbert Cruz about Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel "A Wrinkle in Time," in which the protagonist and her younger brother set out to rescue their father from the supernatural embodiment of evil that is holding him captive. Lyall first read the book when she was 9 years old and returned to it repeatedly throughout her childhood.

"I used to write my name in it every time I read the book," Lyall says. "I probably had 10 signatures there. And I could watch my signature change, I could try new types of signature. I tried cursive and I tried capitals, and I put a little flourish next to it."

Lyall says that what first drew her to "A Wrinkle in Time" was the book's "fantastic heroine," Meg: "She's really smart, but sort of unkempt. She has messy hair, she has glasses, she has braces, people think she's weird. ... But what really happens in the book that I think resonated with me, that I realize now, is that it's a book about two children who've lost their father. And I read the book quite soon after my father died. He died when I was 8. And it was a really lost time. And I think what mostly appealed to me about the book was the notion that you actually could get your father back. And that you as the girl, as the girl who felt so clueless, actually had means within yourself to pull yourself together and be brave enough to do it."

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At a time when public libraries and librarians are facing budget headwinds and sometimes intense political scrutiny for the roles they play in their communities, the Times photo editor Erica Ackerberg last fall dispatched photographers to seven libraries in cities, suburbs and rural areas across the country to document what daily life in those public institutions really looks like in today's world. The resulting photographs, published this week with an accompanying essay by the Book Review editor Elisabeth Egan, revealed libraries to be essential community centers and far more than the hushed and beloved book depositories you may remember from your childhood. On this week's podcast, Egan and Ackerberg talk to the host Gilbert Cruz about how their article came together, and what libraries mean in their lives and in society at large.

"Books are what draw you to the library, but there are so many other things happening there that have nothing to do with books," Egan says. "The modern library encompasses 20 other things based on the needs of its community. ... What the library needs shows you what the community it's in is all about."

Ackerberg says: "I was actually thinking about one of the libraries, the Northtown Library in Chicago — they call themselves an 'intergenerational community hub,' and I felt like that kind of sums up all these libraries. Every generation, and everybody from all communities are welcome there, and hang out there, and spend time there. It's a warm place to be."

Also this week, MJ Franklin, an editor at the Book Review, talks to Cruz about his recent profile of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Paul Harding, whose new book is "This Other Eden." 

"What I was interested in was, What is Paul Harding up to now?" Franklin says. "What is his writing process? He has such a distinctive and singular voice, that I wanted to get closer to that."

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Admit it: It's fun to look at other people's marriages — and all the more fun if those marriages are messy. In a new group biography, "Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages," the author Carmela Ciuraru peers into some relationships that are very messy indeed: the tumultuous marriages of Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy; Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal; Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard; Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge; and Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. As Ciuraru's title suggests, the book focuses especially on the role — and toll — of being a wife, stifling one's own creative impulses for the sake of a temperamental artist.

On this week's podcast, Sadie Stein — an editor at the Book Review, who commissioned the literary critic Hermione Hoby to write about Ciuraru's book for us — talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about "Lives of the Wives."

"They're all complicated people,"  Stein says. "I don't want to oversimplify it. Everyone knows you can't see inside anyone else's marriage. But these couples, you can see a little more. And in some cases, a little more than maybe you want to."

"It's a very gossipy book," Cruz says. "And I, to my own embarrassment, was not as up on 20th-century European literary gossip as maybe I should have been. So a lot of this stuff came as a total surprise, total shock to me. ... It's so juicy, but it also made me feel bad in a certain way." 

And that, we can all agree, is good.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

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How do you define a "big book"? It might be a new offering from a beloved author or a deep dive into a timely subject or a story that has generated unusual enthusiasm among editors and other early readers: One way or another, these are the books that build "buzz" and create momentum in the weeks and months before their publication. On this week's podcast, the Book Review's editor, Gilbert Cruz, talks with Tina Jordan, the deputy editor, about the books they're most looking forward to this season, including new fiction from Salman Rushdie, Eleanor Catton and Victor LaValle, and nonfiction from Matthew Desmond, Claire Dederer and David Grann.

Among other things, Cruz and Jordan discuss cancel culture, spoilers from "Macbeth" and the concept of what's known in publishing circles as a "make book."

"A 'make book' is a book a publisher has usually, although not always, spent a great deal of money for and earmarked a lot of money for a marketing campaign," Jordan says. "In other words, they are going to get the news out about this book. You are going to hear about it." 

The books discussed on this week's podcast are:

"Victory City," by Salman Rushdie

"Birnam Wood," by Eleanor Catton

"Pineapple Street," by Jenny Jackson

"Poverty by America," by Matthew Desmond

"Lone Women," by Victor LaValle

"Monsters," by Claire Dederer

"The Wager," by David Grann

"The Covenant of Water," by Abraham Verghese

"Oscar Wars," by Michael Schulman

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

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Last week’s podcast featured members of The New York Times’s Books staff discussing the Book Review’s picks for the best books of 2022. The paper’s staff book critics participated in that selection process — but as readers inevitably do, they also cherished a more personal and idiosyncratic set of books, the ones that spoke to them on account of great characters or great writing, surprising information or heartfelt vulnerability or sheer entertainment value. On this week’s podcast, our critics Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs discuss the books that stayed with them throughout 2022.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

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Heads up! The Book Review podcast returns with a new episode this week, recorded Tuesday during a live event in which several of our editors and critics discussed the Book Review’s list of the year’s 10 Best Books. (If you haven’t seen the list yet and don’t want spoilers before listening, the choices are revealed one by one on the podcast.)

In addition to the 10 Best Books, the editors discuss on this episode some of their favorite works from the year that didn’t make the list. Here are those additional books the editors discuss:

The Passenger and Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

Avalon, by Nell Zink

If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

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.

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

In their best-selling book “She Said” — the basis for the Maria Schrader-directed film of the same title, currently in theaters — the Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey recount how they broke the Harvey Weinstein story, work that earned them the Pulitzer Prize, led to Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crimes and helped solidify #MeToo as an ongoing national movement.

When the book was published in 2019, Twohey and Kantor were guests on the podcast and discussed the difficulties they had faced in getting women to speak on the record about Weinstein’s predation. They also said that their coverage of workplace sexual harassment would not end with Weinstein: “Our attitude is that you can’t solve a problem you can’t see,” Kantor told the host Pamela Paul. “Megan and I can’t adjudicate all of the controversies around #MeToo, but what we can continue to do is bring information to light in a responsible way and uncover this secret history that so many of us are still trying to understand.”

Also this week, we revisit Neal Gabler’s 2020 podcast appearance, in which he talked about “Catching the Wind,” the first volume of his Ted Kennedy biography. (The second and concluding volume, “Against the Wind,” has just been published.) “I approached this book as a biography of Edward Kennedy, but also, equally, a biography of American liberalism,” he said at the time.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

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.

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2019 and 2017, respectively.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner's debut novel, “Fleishman Is in Trouble” — a best seller when it was published in 2019 — is back in the public eye, as the source material for Hulu’s new mini-series of the same name. The show, like the novel, follows a man’s life as his marriage of 14 years crumbles.

Brodesser-Akner visited the podcast when her book came out, and told the host Pamela Paul that her time writing celebrity profiles for The New York Times Magazine and other outlets had helped her investigate the psychologies of her fictional characters: “What all the profiles taught me about is not people who want to be known, but what people say when they want you to know a version of themselves that isn’t the truth,” she said. “It taught me a lot about how people talk about themselves, and about how deluded we all are.”

Also this week, we resurface Neil Gaiman’s 2017 podcast appearance, in which he talked about his book “Norse Mythology,” a reimagining of the traditional northern stories about Thor, Odin, Loki and company.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

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.

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2021 and 2019, respectively.

In his first two books, “Pictures at a Revolution” and “Five Came Back,” the entertainment journalist Mark Harris offered an ensemble look at Hollywood history, focusing first on five seminal movies and then on five wartime directors. But for his third book, in 2021, Harris trained his spotlight on a single individual: “Mike Nichols: A Life” is a biography of the renowned writer, director and performer whose many credits included “The Graduate” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“He was remarkably open,” Harris said of Nichols on the podcast last year. “There are few bigger success stories for a director to look back on than ‘The Graduate,’ and I was asking Mike about it 40 years and probably 40,000 questions after it happened. But I was so impressed by his willingness to come at it from new angles, to re-examine things that he hadn’t thought about for a while, to tell stories that were frankly not flattering to him. I’ve never heard harsher stories about Mike’s behavior over the years than I heard from Mike himself. He was an extraordinary interview subject.”

Also this week, we revisit Adam Higginbotham’s 2019 appearance, in which he discussed his book “Midnight in Chernobyl,” about the nuclear disaster in that city. Higginbotham visited the site enough times “to lose count,” he told the host Pamela Paul. “And I never really stopped being afraid of it.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

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.

For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the archives. This week we turn the mic over to our sibling podcast “The Ezra Klein Show,” for a discussion that aired last month between Klein and the novelist N.K. Jemisin.

The novelist and former Book Review columnist N.K. Jemisin is one of the most celebrated science-fiction and fantasy writers at work today: The winner of multiple Hugo Awards — including an unprecedented three in a row for her remarkable “Broken Earth” trilogy — she is renowned for her ability to build fictional worlds that reflect the complex social and political dynamics of our own.  Her latest novel, “The World We Make,” is a sequel to “The City We Became,” and like that book it examines the ways cities come to take on their own personalities and characters, and how they respond to the forces threatening those identities. Jemisin visited “The Ezra Klein” show in October to discuss the books and the real world that informed them. “I felt like writing about our world,” she told the host Ezra Klein. “And if I’m going to do that, then I would do the world a disservice by treating it as some fantasy land. I don’t want to depict New York, as much as I love it, as all joy and all light and all happiness.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

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.