The True Story of a Married Couple Stranded at Sea
11 July - 31 minsSome time ago, the British journalist Sophie Elmhirst was reporting a story about people who try to escape the land and to live on the water. “I found myself trolling around as you do in these moments, online and on a website devoted to castaway stories and shipwreck stories,” she tells host Gilbert Cruz. “There were lots of photographs and tales of lone wild men who were pitched up on desert islands and had various escapades. And in among all of these was a tiny little black-and-white picture of a man and a woman."
The couple were Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a husband and wife who took to the seas from 1970s England, selling their suburban home to buy a boat and sail to New Zealand. Nine m...
Series Episodes
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
Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Safekeep'
MJ Franklin, who hosts the Book Review podcast’s monthly book club, says that whenever someone asks him, “What should I read next?,” Yael van der Wouden’s “The Safekeep” has become his go-to recommendation. So he was particularly excited to discuss the novel on this week’s episode. Set in the Netherlands in 1961, “The Safekeep” is one of those books it’s best not to know too much about, as part of its delight is discovering its secrets unspoiled.
39 mins
30 May Finished
