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.” 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.” 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.” 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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." 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 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.

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.” 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.

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.

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “What We Can Know,” is many things at once: It’s a science fiction imagining of a future world devastated by climate catastrophe; it’s a literary mystery about a scholar’s search for a long-lost poem; it’s a deep dive into complicated marriages; and it’s a meditation on how the past lingers and how history morphs with time. “It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review. “It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.” In this episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses “What We Can Know” with his colleagues Sarah Lyall (who profiled McEwan for the Book Review this year) and Leah Greenblatt. You can follow along, and add your own comments to the discussion here. Other Books mentioned in this discussion: “Atonement,” “Saturday,” “On Chesil Beach,” “The Comfort of Strangers,” “The Cement Garden” and “Enduring Love,” by Ian McEwan “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner “Fates and Furies,” by Lauren Groff “Marston Meadows: A Corona for Prue,” by John Fuller “How the Word Is Passed,” by Clint Smith “The Stranger’s Child,” “The Line of Beauty” and “Our Evenings,” by Alan Hollinghurst 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. 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.

From political tell-alls to the continued triumph of romantasy novels, it’s been an eventful year in the publishing world. On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin talks with his Book Review colleagues Alexandra Alter, Tina Jordan and John Maher about the biggest book stories and most significant reading trends of 2025. 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.

Here we are in mid-December, which means that along with all of the other year-end lists we produce and avidly consume at this time each year, The New York Times Book Review's staff critics are also looking back on everything they read in 2025, and toasting the books that have stayed with them. On this episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai about their standout fiction and nonfiction of the past 12 months. Books mentioned: "What We Can Know," by Ian McEwan "Flesh," by David Szalay "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny," by Kiran Desai "Playworld," by Adam Ross "When the Going Was Good," by Graydon Carter "I Regret Almost Everything," by Keith McNally "When All the Men Wore Hats," by Susan Cheever "Notes to John," by Joan Didion "A Flower Traveled in My Blood," by Haley Cohen Gilliland "38 Londres Street," by Philippe Sands "Wild Thing," by Sue Prideaux "Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life," by Dan Nadel "Class Clown," by Dave Barry "Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel," by Frances Wilson "Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson," by Ted Geltner "Shadow Ticket," by Thomas Pynchon "Selected Letters of John Updike," edited by James Schiff "Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford," by Carla Kaplan "More Everything Forever, AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity," by Adam Becker 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.

All year long, the staff of The New York Times Book Review conducts a running discussion over what belongs on its year-end Top 10 list. In this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz gathers a group of fellow Book Review editors to talk about the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year.  Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode: Fiction “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai “Angel Down,” by Daniel Kraus “The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri “The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann “Stone Yard Devotional,” by Charlotte Wood Nonfiction “A Marriage at Sea,” by Sophie Elmhirst “Wild Thing,” by Sue Prideaux “Mother Emanuel,” by Kevin Sack “There Is No Place for Us," by Brian Goldstone “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” by Arundhati Roy 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.

History has not graced us with many details about Shakespeare as a person, but we do know that he and his wife had three children, including a son named Hamnet who died at the age of 11 in 1596, four years before Shakespeare went on to write his great tragedy “Hamlet.” Maggie O’Farrell’s novel “Hamnet” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020, and the source of Chloé Zhao’s new movie of the same name — starts from those scant facts, and spins them into a powerful story of grief, art and family steeped in the textures of late-16th-century life. In this episode of the Book Review Book Club, host MJ Franklin discusses “Hamnet” with his colleagues Leah Greenblatt, Jennifer Harlan and Sarah Lyall.  Other works mentioned in this podcast: “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “The Winter’s Tale,” by William Shakespeare “Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” by Max Porter “Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders “Fi,” by Alexandra Fuller “Things In Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li “The Accidental Tourist,” by Anne Tyler “Will in the World” and “Dark Renaissance,” by Stephen Greenblatt “Edward,” by Edward Hirsch “Once More We Saw Stars,” by Jayson Greene “The Dutch House,” by Ann Patchett 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.

Literature isn’t a horse race. Taste is subjective, and artistic value can’t be measured in terms of “winners" and “losers.” That doesn’t mean it’s not fun to try. The book world’s awards season officially kicked off on Oct. 9, when the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize, and continued this month when the Booker Prize in England went to the novel “Flesh,” by the British writer David Szalay (also of Hungarian descent, as it happens). Then this week, five National Book Award winners were crowned in various categories at a ceremony in New York. On this episode of the podcast, the host MJ Franklin talks with his fellow Book Review editors Emily Eakin, Joumana Khatib and Dave Kim about the finalists, the winners and what this year’s big book awards might tell us about the state of literature in 2025. 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. 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.

Nicholas Boggs’s “Baldwin: A Love Story,” is many things at once. It’s a comprehensive biography of James Baldwin. It’s a nimble excavation of Baldwin’s work, filled with astute literary analysis of his books and prose. And, most pressingly, it’s an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin through the lens of love. The biography is structured around Baldwin’s relationships with a series of men — relationships that, as Boggs outlines, shaped Baldwin’s life and writing in crucial ways. Boggs joins MJ Franklin on this week's episode to talk about his new book. Other works mentioned in this discussion: Zadie Smith’s essay “Conscience and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person,” from her new collection “Dead and Alive” “James Baldwin: A Biography,” by David Leeming “Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood,” by James Baldwin, illustrated by Yoran Cazac, edited by Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody “Goodbye Days,” by Jeff Zentner “Virginia Woolf,” by Hermione Lee 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.

On Nov. 10, 1975, during a calamitous storm, the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk below the waves of Lake Superior. All 29 men aboard went down with the vessel. With no survivors and no eyewitnesses, there’s always been a sense of mystery to what is arguably the most famous shipwreck in American history. The story itself was almost immediately immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s surprise hit ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Fifty years on, John U. Bacon has written a new account of the disaster. In “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he humanizes the story, telling stories of each man on the ship as well as several of the families left behind. (Readers will also learn a good deal about the history of industry and shipping on the Great Lakes.). In this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, Bacon spoke with the host Gilbert Cruz about his new book. 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.

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones, is two things at once: a searching historical novel that examines America’s past sins and also a gory horror thriller. The book opens in 2012, when a construction worker in a dilapidated church parsonage finds a 100-year-old journal written by a pastor named Arthur Beaucarne. The journal recounts a strange tale: In 1912, a mysterious Indigenous man, Good Stab of the Blackfeet tribe, walked into Arthur’s church and revealed the harrowing and disturbing story of how he had been transformed into a vampire who sought revenge for the violence done unto his people. In this Halloween episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” with his colleagues Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib.  Other books and movies mentioned during this discussion: “Dracula,” by Bram Stoker “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil,” by V.E. Schwab “Sinners,” directed by Ryan Coogler “Twilight,” by Stephenie Meyer “Twin Peaks: The Return,” created and directed by David Lynch “Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears,” by Diane Glancy “Lone Women,” by Victor LaValle “The Reformatory,” by Tananarive Due 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.

May October never end! As Halloween approaches, we present you with two conversations from years past with great horror authors. Joe Hill, whose latest, "King Sorrow," is out now, recommends several great spooky reads. And Victor LaValle ("Lone Women") talks about the book he has read the most in his life: Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House." 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.