
The Book Review
The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world.
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The True Story of a Married Couple Stranded at Sea
In "A Marriage at Sea," British journalist Sophie Elmhirst tells the gripping story of a British husband and wife in 1970s England who took to the high seas and found themselves stranded in the middle of the Pacific after a whale sank their boat. As Elmhirst tells host Gilbert Cruz, it's a story of personal survival, but it's also one about how a marriage holds together under the most stressful circumstances imaginable.
31 mins
11 July Finished

Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Mrs. Dalloway" at 100
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”: So reads one of the great opening lines in British literature, the first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s classic 1925 novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.” The book tracks one day in the life of an English woman, Clarissa Dalloway, living in post-World War I London, as she prepares for, and then hosts, a party. That’s pretty much it, as far as the plot goes. But within that single day, whole worlds unfold, as Woolf captures the expansiveness of human experience through Clarissa’s roving thoughts. On this week’s episode, Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses it with his colleagues Joumana Khatib and Laura Thompson.
42 mins
27 June Finished

A.O. Scott on the Joy of Close Reading Poetry
On this week's episode, A.O. Scott joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about the value of close reading poetry. And New York Times Book Review poetry editor Greg Cowles recommends four recently published collections worth reading.
33 mins
20 June Finished

50 Years After ‘Jaws’ Terrified Filmgoers, a Reporter Looks Back
The culture critic Brian Raftery, who wrote about “Jaws” for the Book Review last year, discusses the movie’s anniversary with Gilbert Cruz.
37 mins
14 June Finished

S.A. Cosby on Writing Southern Crime Fiction
In S.A. Cosby’s latest thriller, “King of Ashes,” a successful and fast-living financial adviser is called suddenly back to the small Virginia hometown he fled, where his family runs the local crematory and his father is in a coma stemming from a car crash that may not be as accidental as it seems. Cosby himself is from a small Virginia town, and on this week’s podcast he discusses the allure of homecoming, the tricky emotional terrain of complicated families and the reason he keeps revisiting the rural South in his fiction.
37 mins
6 June Finished