The Book Review21 Feb 2025

Celebrating 100 Years of Edward Gorey

You’re familiar with Edward Gorey, whether you know it or not. The prolific author and illustrator, who was born 100 years ago this week, was ubiquitous for a time in the 1970s and 1980s, and his elaborate black-and-white line drawings — often depicting delightfully grim neo-Victorian themes and settings — graced everything from book jackets to the opening credits of the PBS show “Mystery!” to his own eccentric storybooks like “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” in which young children come to unfortunate but spectacular ends.

On this week’s episode, the Book Review’s Sadie Stein joins Gilbert Cruz for a celebration of all things Gorey.

“He was so incredibly prolific,” Stein says. “He was Joyce Carol Oates-like in his output. And it’s amazing when you look at the work because the line drawings, as you mentioned, are so intricate. It looks almost like pointillism sometimes, like it would have taken hundreds of hours. But he was either preternaturally disciplined or incredibly fast, and each one that I’ve ever seen at least is beautiful. And complete in a way.”

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. 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.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(600)

Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Switzy'

David Hastings is a retired business executive on a grim mission: He’s going to end his life.That’s the dramatic setup of Emma Cline’s latest novel, “Switzy.”When the story opens, David is on a plane,...

30 Okt 56min

What to Read This Halloween, According to Two Best-Selling Writers

Halloween is the season for scary stories, but what actually makes a book frightening? And where should you start if you’re not already a horror reader?This week on “The Book Review” podcast, Gilbert ...

23 Okt 51min

A Book Review Critics’ Roundtable

As much as we love hearing from authors on “The Book Review” podcast, there are precious few who have read more than our staff book critics — Jennifer Szalai, Alexandra Jacobs and Dwight Garner. The t...

16 Okt 41min

Min Jin Lee Wants Us to Rethink Education

For Min Jin Lee, the process of writing fiction usually begins with a deep dive into reality. She spends years researching, traveling and interviewing people.That process underscored her belief that e...

9 Okt 56min

Decades Later, Stephen King Is Finishing What He and Peter Straub Started

There are few living writers as closely associated with a genre as Stephen King is with horror. Over a career spanning more than 50 years, 70 novels and hundreds of short stories, King has terrified g...

2 Okt 36min

Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘Etna,’ by Paul Yoon

Paul Yoon’s new novel, “Etna,” follows a haunted, battle-scarred war veteran who wants desperately to go home. He also happens to be a dog — a mixed-breed shepherd trained to sniff out bombs for an un...

26 Sep 55min

John Green Knows a True Hollywood Ending is Complicated

MJ Franklin is in the host chair this week, in for Gilbert Cruz. MJ spoke with New York Times book critic Dwight Garner about Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers.” Dwight recently reviewed the...

18 Sep 57min

The Best Books of the 21st Century: Taffy Brodesser-Akner on ‘The Corrections’

If you were a reading adult in the early 2000s, you probably tackled, or at least heard about, “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s best-selling and much discussed book.The novel won the National Boo...

11 Sep 47min