The Book Review

For more than two decades, Bob Crawford has toured the country as the bassist for the Avett Brothers. But long before he began his career as a musician, he was obsessed with American history. After turning that obsession into two podcasts, he has now written his first book, “America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, From President to Political Maverick.”

On this week’s episode, Crawford talks with Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, about what it was like writing a book for the first time and the authors who have inspired him. In addition to discussing what he loves about John Quincy Adams, the country’s sixth president and the son of John Adams, Crawford also talks about the research he did for the book. That included scouring Adams’s 14,000-page diary.

“He’s not a perfect man — he’s far from perfect,” Crawford said of Adams. “But he’s so human. He’s suffered depression, and just the humanness in his diary, not to mention the actual historical narrative, is just incredible.”

Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

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Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is a tale of star-crossed lovers: Catherine, the wild daughter of an aristocratic family, and Heathcliff, an orphan whom Catherine’s father brings home unexpectedly. While Catherine’s brother and mother denigrate Heathcliff, depriving him of an education and forcing him into a servant-like role, Catherine forms an intense, almost spiritual bond with her family’s new charge.

Despite their deep connection, however, she marries the scion of a nearby wealthy family — a decision that leaves Catherine yearning, Heathcliff bent on revenge and everybody in their orbit on a path to calamity.

Brontë’s classic has long been a favorite among readers, and the novel is back in the zeitgeist thanks to Emerald Fennell’s recent film adaptation. On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin discusses “Wuthering Heights” with colleagues from the New York Times Book Review.

Other works discussed:

“Wuthering Heights,” the song by Kate Bush

“Twilight,” by Stephenie Meyer

“But Daddy I Love Him,” by Taylor Swift

“Wuthering Heights,” the 2026 film directed by Emerald Fennell

“The Safekeep,” by Yael van der Wouden

“Mexican Gothic,” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The “Wuthering Heights” comics in Kate Beaton’s “Hark! A Vagrant” series

“Villette,” by Charlotte Brontë

“Rebecca,” by Daphne du Maurier

“The Idiot,” by Elif Batuman

“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The Count of Monte Cristo,” by Alexandre Dumas

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The latest film from the writer and director Clint Bentley, “Train Dreams,” is nominated for four Oscars, including best adapted screenplay. The movie is based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name and tells the story of Robert Grainier, a logger in the Pacific Northwest, in stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear prose. This week, Gilbert Cruz talks with Bentley, who wrote the screenplay with Greg Kwedar, his longtime collaborator, about how he went about translating Johnson’s work into a visual medium.

Bentley first read “Train Dreams” just after college, long before he ever thought of making it into a movie. When producers with rights to the book approached Bentley, he was suddenly worried. “Going back and reading the book again,” Bentley said, “I was like, Oh, maybe this thing is unadaptable.” Set on capturing the spirit of the book, Bentley and Kwedar focused on “the vastness of this small little life,” he said.

“We very rarely have an understanding of our lives in the moment we’re actually living them,” Bentley said. “We only start to understand them when it’s too late.”

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For decades, the director Guillermo del Toro has built a career blending the grotesque and the beautiful in films like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Shape of Water” and “Pinocchio.” Now he’s earned his latest Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of “Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley’s classic novel. On this week’s episode, he talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about discovering the book as a lonely child, how it shaped his worldview and why this screenplay is the one he’s proudest of.

“I always felt the creature is me,” del Toro said of the first time he read the book. “I felt so alone at age 11, and so full of love to give and so full of rage to dispose of. It was a very complicated emotional scope for somebody that young.”

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Julia Quinn published "The Duke and I," the first book in the 'Bridgerton' series, in 2000. Seven books and a quarter century later, its adaptation remains one of the biggest series ever to air on Netflix. Quinn spoke to host Gilbert Cruz about the show, her books and why the heck that family has so many children.

"I don't even remember why I made eight kids," said Quinn. "I just, I wanted her to have a big family and somehow that's how many kids there were. And if I had planned on eight, I would've plotted things out better. There were a number of places where I really wrote myself into a corner."

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Keza MacDonald, the video games editor at The Guardian and author of the new book “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play,” chose to write her first book about Nintendo because it has been so central for so long to the culture of games. “It was the company that got me into video games,” she says. “I know that’s the same story that millions of other people have had as well." She speaks with host Gilbert Cruz about the iconic Japanese company as well as how the perception of gaming has changed over the decades.

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Xenobe Purvis’s slim but powerful debut novel, “The Hounding,” opens with a jolt: “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body. Marching up the river path, the villagers.”

How did we get here, with five young sisters living in 1700s England being hunted by an angry mob that suspects them not only of murder but also of the demonic ability to transform themselves into a pack of wild dogs? That is the tale “The Hounding” unfolds, in a gothic parable about male ego, cultural misogyny and the dangers of gossip run amok.

On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin discusses “The Hounding” with his fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.

Other books and works mentioned in this podcast:

“The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson

“The Sound of Music,” directed by Robert Wise

“The Testament of Yves Gundron,” by Emily Barton

“The Scarlet Letter,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch,” by Rivka Galchen

“Delicate Edible Birds,” by Lauren Groff

“Paradise,” by Toni Morrison

The podcast “Normal Gossip”

“You Didn’t Hear This From Me,” by Kelsey McKinney

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The journalist, novelist and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman is best known for writing about rock music and pop culture in astute essay collections like “The Nineties,” “X” and “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.” But Klosterman got his start in college as a sports journalist, and with his new book, “Football,” he has finally devoted an entire collection to the sport that has fundamentally shaped him alongside American society at large.

“I’ve unconsciously been thinking about football for most of my life,” Klosterman tells host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s episode. “I decided at some point, I do want to write a book about sports. You know, I’d always mentioned sports here and there in the culture writing I had done, or the kind of conventional pop culture writing I’d done, but I wanted to do a real sports book. And initially my idea was it would be about basketball — but over time it became very clear to me it had to be about football, for a variety of reasons. … It seemed as though if you’re going to do a sports book, particularly as it relates to society, there is only one choice in the United States.”

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A new year means new books are on the way! So many new books. On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin about the upcoming fiction and nonfiction titles they’re most anticipating between now and April.

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

• “Vigil,” by George Saunders
• “Where the Serpent Lives,” by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• “Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings and the Rebirth of White Rage,” by Heather Ann Thompson
• “Five Bullets,” by Elliot Williams
• “Lost Lambs,” by Madeline Cash
• ”Half His Age,” by Jennette McCurdy
• “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” by Michael Pollan
• “On Morrison,” by Namwali Serpell
• “Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon,” by Toni Morrison
• “Clutch,” by Emily Nemens
• “Murder Bimbo,” by Rebecca Novack
• “Kin,” by Tayari Jones
• “Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks,” by Benjamin Hale
• “Lake Effect,” by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
• “Now I Surrender,” by Alvaro Enrigue
• “The Keeper,” by Tana French

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.

Virginia Evans’s debut novel, “The Correspondent,” was published last April and became one of the publishing industry’s heartwarming champions of 2025: a slow-burn success story that gathered momentum over the summer and fall and finally topped the New York Times hardcover best-seller list in December. For Evans, who had written and failed to sell seven previous novels, the book’s popularity has felt magical, as she explains to host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s podcast.

“I went on a kind of a brief book tour in the fall, meeting hundreds of people,” Evans says, “and … different bookstores were starting to say, this is becoming a thing, we can’t keep it in the store. We keep running out of stock. And then they were going back, reprint after reprint. So then I started to think, oh, it’s getting bigger. But I think, I just didn’t have a context. I still don’t understand publishing. So I thought every step of the way was the mountaintop. I keep getting a new mountaintop.”

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.