Shows
The Book ReviewIt's Still Summer. Let's Talk Road Trip Books.Summer is the season for road trips, and also for road trip stories. Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” may be the most famous example in American literature — but there are lots of other great road trip books, so this week the Book Review’s staff critics Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai presented readers with a list of 18 of their favorites. On this episode of the podcast they chat with host Gilbert Cruz about the project, their picks and the top-down, wind blown, carefree appeal of the road trip narrative as a genre.Books discussed in this ep...
2025-08-0131 min
The DailyThe Year in BooksAs 2024 comes to a close, critics, reporters and editors at The New York Times are reflecting on the year in arts and culture, including books.The deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle, Melissa Kirsch, speaks with the editor of The New York Times Book Review, Gilbert Cruz, about the best books of 2024 — and of the century. Also, The Times’s book critics detail their favorite reads of the year.Guest: Melissa Kirsch, the deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle for The New York Times.Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Revie...
2024-12-3126 min
Deborah Lebree's podcastThe Year in BooksAs 2024 comes to a close, critics, reporters and editors at The New York Times are reflecting on the year in arts and culture, including books.The deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle, Melissa Kirsch, speaks with the editor of The New York Times Book Review, Gilbert Cruz, about the best books of 2024 — and of the century. Also, The Times’s book critics detail their favorite reads of the year.Guest: Melissa Kirsch, the deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle for The New York Times.Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review.M.J. Franklin, an editor for T...
2024-12-3127 minThe DailyThe Year in BooksAs 2024 comes to a close, critics, reporters and editors at The New York Times are reflecting on the year in arts and culture, including books.The deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle, Melissa Kirsch, speaks with the editor of The New York Times Book Review, Gilbert Cruz, about the best books of 2024 — and of the century. Also, The Times’s book critics detail their favorite reads of the year.Guest: Melissa Kirsch, the deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle for The New York Times.Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Revie...
2024-12-3100 minThe Book ReviewOur Book Critics On Their Year in ReadingDwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — staff critics for The New York Times Book Review — join host Gilbert Cruz to look back on highlights from their year in books.Books discussed:"Intermezzo," by Sally Rooney"All Fours," by Miranda July"You Dreamed of Empires," by Álvaro Enrigue"When the Clock Broke," by John Ganz"Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring," by Brad Gooch"Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius," by Carrie Courogen"My...
2024-12-1331 minThe Book ReviewBooks That Make Our Critics LaughEarlier this month, the Book Review’s staff critics — Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai — released a list of 22 novels they have found reliably funny since Joseph Heller’s landmark comic novel “Catch-22” came out in 1961. On this week’s episode, they tell Gilbert Cruz why “Catch-22” was their starting point, and explain a bit about their process: how they think about humor, how they made their choices, what books they left off and what books led to fights along the way. (“American Psycho” turns out to be as contentious now as it was when it was first published.)“The...
2024-03-2930 minThe Book ReviewThe Rise and Fall of The Village VoiceTricia Romano’s new book, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” is an oral history of New York’s late, great alternative weekly newspaper The Village Voice, where she worked for eight years as the nightlife columnist. Our critic Dwight Garner reviewed the book recently — he loved it — and he visits the podcast this week to chat with Gilbert Cruz about oral histories in general and the gritty glamour of The Village Voice in particular.“You would pick it up and it was so prickly,” Garner says. “The whole thing just felt like this production that someone had really thought...
2024-02-2336 minThe Book ReviewOur Critics' Year in ReadingThe Times’s staff book critics — Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — do a lot of reading over the course of any given year, but not everything they read stays with them equally. On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz chats with the critics about the books that did: the novels and story collections and works of nonfiction that made an impression in 2023 and defined their year in reading, including one that Garner says caught him by surprise.“Eleanor Catton’s ‘Birnam Wood’ is in some ways my novel of the year,” Garner says. “And it’s not really my kind o...
2023-12-0837 minThe Book ReviewRemembering Cormac McCarthy and Robert GottliebRecently, two giants of modern American literature died within a single day of each other. Gilbert Cruz talks with Dwight Garner about the work of Cormac McCarthy’s work, and with Pamela Paul and Emily Eakin about the life and legacy of Robert Gottlieb.
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.
2023-06-2442 minThe Book ReviewRemembering Martin AmisThe writer Martin Amis, who died last week at the age of 73, was a towering figure of English literature who for half a century produced a body of work distinguished by its raucous wit, cutting intelligence and virtuosic prose.On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks with The Times’s critics Dwight Garner (who wrote Amis’s obituary for the paper) and Jason Zinoman (who co-hosts a podcast devoted to Amis’s career, “The Martin Chronicles”) about the life and death of a remarkable figure who was, as Garner puts it, “arguably the most slashing, articulate, devastatingly...
2023-05-2627 minThe Book ReviewEssential Neil Gaiman and A.I. Book FreakoutAre you ready to dive in to the work of the prolific and inventive fantasy writer Neil Gaiman? On this week’s episode, the longtime Gaiman fan J.D. Biersdorfer, an editor at the Book Review, talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about Gaiman’s work, which she recently wrote about for our continuing “Essentials” series.Also this week, Cruz talks with the Times critic Dwight Garner about “The Death of the Author,” a murder mystery that the novelist Stephen Marche wrote with the assistance of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs. Is A.I. in fact a harbinger...
2023-05-1931 minThe Book ReviewRevisiting 'Wisconsin Death Trip,' 50 Years LaterIt's been 50 years since Michael Lesy's influential cult classic "Wisconsin Death Trip" was published. A documentary text of found material, the book gathered prosaic historical photos of Wisconsin residents from the turn of the 20th century and paired them to haunting effect with fragmentary newspaper archives from the same time period reporting on often garish deaths — what our critic Dwight Garner, evaluating the book for its anniversary, called "horrific local news items that point, page by page, toward spiritual catastrophe. Nearly every person in it looks as if they are about to be struck by lightning."Garner ap...
2023-03-0323 min
The Book ReviewDinosaurs, the Master of Horror and Philip RothSteve Brusatte talks about “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs”; Victor Lavalle and Gilbert Cruz discuss the work of Stephen King; and Dwight Garner, A.O. Scott and Taffy Brodesser-Akner talk about the legacy of Philip Roth.
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.
2018-06-011h 05