The Book Review

For Min Jin Lee, the process of writing fiction usually begins with a deep dive into reality. She spends years researching, traveling and interviewing people.

That process underscored her belief that education was a common and central value for Koreans in diaspora. But it was also a complicated value, one that often resulted in extreme competitiveness and impossible expectations.

In her new novel, “American Hagwon,” she t...

There are few living writers as closely associated with a genre as Stephen King is with horror. Over a career spanning more than 50 years, 70 novels and hundreds of short stories, King has terrified generations of readers with books like “Carrie,” “The Shining” and “It” while also writing across multiple genres like fantasy, science fiction and crime — producing books that resist easy categ...

Paul Yoon’s new novel, “Etna,” follows a haunted, battle-scarred war veteran who wants desperately to go home. He also happens to be a dog — a mixed-breed shepherd trained to sniff out bombs for an unnamed military in the throes of an unnamed conflict — and he has no idea where he is anymore, or if his old farm is even still standing after so much violence. Undeterred, he ventures into the great unknow...

MJ Franklin is in the host chair this week, in for Gilbert Cruz. MJ spoke with New York Times book critic Dwight Garner about Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers.” Dwight recently reviewed the book, calling it "the novel of the decade, if not the century." With praise like that, the review itself has become a topic of conversation. Dwight talks about the novel, the moment he realized it was a masterpiece a...

If you were a reading adult in the early 2000s, you probably tackled, or at least heard about, “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s best-selling and much discussed book.

The novel won the National Book Award, was a Pulitzer finalist, and an Oprah Book Club pick.

The book arrives at its 25th anniversary this month, and in today’s episode of the “Book Review” podcast, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Ta...

Jordan Baker said it best: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

In just one short sentence, the character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” sums up that wonderful feeling of anticipation that comes with autumn. For bookish people, the season comes with its own set of expectations; some of the year’s biggest books are released in September and October. On this epis...

At the center of Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, “London Falling,” is a mystery: In 2019, a young man named Zac Brettler disappeared, and a few days later his body was found in the Thames River. Surveillance footage showed what appeared to be Zac jumping off the balcony of a nearby luxury tower, leading some to speculate that he had taken his own life. His family, though, didn’t quite believe that theory; t...

What is it about a bookstore? You walk in planning to browse for a few minutes, and somehow an hour later you’re still wandering the stacks with an armful of books you can’t seem to put down.

For this week’s episode, our guest host, MJ Franklin, and the producer Sarah Diamond take a field trip to a local bookstore, McNally Jackson Seaport, at the southern tip of Manhattan. There, they talk with the owner, Sarah Mc...

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 walk...

What are the best thrillers published since 2000?

That was the question that the team at The New York Times’s Book Review posed to hundreds of writers of every kind of crime fiction, from legal thrillers to spy novels to cozy mysteries, as well as librarians, editors, critics and bookstagrammers. We counted up all those votes and came up with a list of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century, available here.

In this episode...

Early in Douglas Stuart’s new novel, “John of John,” the Booker Prize-winning author describes a peculiar irony: “What skinned him was that the closer he got to home, the more lost he felt.”

It’s a passing line, but it captures the tension at the heart of this magnificent book: Here is a story of two men, each profoundly isolated, trying to figure out how to exist in a small, claustrophobic world...

The editors at The New York Times Book Review spend almost the entire year discussing, debating and sometimes arguing about the year’s best books. We’re halfway through 2026, which means it’s time for the host Gilbert Cruz and the Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin to talk about some of the best releases of the year as well as a few hidden gems that captured their attention and affection.

Fiction

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Today we want to bring back an episode from our archives. 

It’s about a book that has real beach read vibes. There’s a lot of water. It’s a relationship drama. Andit’s also a daring story of survival. 

“Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck" made it onto the Book Review Top 10 Books of 2025 and the paperback edition just came out a few weeks ago. It tells the unbeliev...

If you can’t tell your Eurylochus from your Telemachus, fear not: Your primer on “The Odyssey” is here, just in time for Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of the 3,000-year-old epic.

Madeline Miller, who reinvented “The Odyssey” in her best-selling novel “Circe,” explains why you shouldn’t be intimidated by the classic.

Plus, our critic at large A.O. Scott explains how nea...

The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday this summer, giving Americans a chance to reflect on the nation’s past and imagine its future.

Who better to help us make sense of this moment than Jill Lepore? The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and author of “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” joined the “Book Review” podcast to recommend so...

“Yesteryear,” Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, tells the story of Natalie Heller Mills: an ultrasuccessful tradwife influencer who posts about her life on Yesteryear Ranch, a homestead where she grows her own food, tends to cows and chickens, raises her six children and models a particular brand of conservative Christian womanhood. But not all is as it seems. Behind the cameras, nannies care for the children, Nata...

In April 1989, a newspaper clipping about an art exhibit landed in the mailbox of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the founder of a conservative evangelical group, the American Family Association.

Partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the exhibit included a now-infamous photograph by Andres Serrano that showed a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s own urine. Incensed, Wildmon sent a copy of the photo to every member of Co...

In 2024, The New York Times Book Review gathered more than 500 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets and literary enthusiasts to help pick the best books of the 21st century so far. One of those books was Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Road,” which came in at No. 13. That book tells the story of a man and his young son trying to survive in a postapocalyptic United States. Like other books by M...

June is here and the long summer days are stretching out ahead, which means it’s time to settle in front of the air-conditioner with a pile of books. (Just us?) But which ones should you read this summer? The “Book Review” podcast’s Gilbert Cruz talks with the Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin about the titles they’re most excited about.

Books discussed in this episode:

“Red Shee...