The Book Review

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.”

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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. 

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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

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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

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