The Book Review

In this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz gathers a group of fellow editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year.

In this week's episode, host MJ Franklin leads a discussion about Maggie O'Farrell's "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.

It began with Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize in October, and continued this month with the Booker Prize and the National Book Awards. Our panel of editors discusses what it all means.

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. And, most pressingly, it’s an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin through the lens of love. Boggs joins MJ Franklin on this week's episode to talk about his new book.

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. Just in time for the disaster's fiftieth anniversary, John U. Bacon has written a new account of the story, “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald." In this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, Bacon spoke with Gilbert Cruz about his new book.