Book Club: Let’s Talk About Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘Our Evenings’
The novel “Our Evenings,” by Alan Hollinghurst, follows a gay English Burmese actor from childhood into old age as he confronts confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate in the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s the story of a life — beautifully related by a literary master whose 2004 novel “The Line of Beauty” won the Booker Prize and was named to the Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.Reviewing “Our Evenings” for us last year, Hamilton Cain wrote that the book “is that rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language, surrounding us like a Wall of Sound.”You can join our book club discussion in the comments here.We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com. 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.
31 Jan 202547min
Alafair Burke On Writing Crime Novels and Teaching Law
In Alafair Burke’s new thriller, “The Note,” three friends are vacationing together in the Hamptons when they have an unpleasant run-in with a couple of strangers and decide to exact drunken, petty revenge. But the prank they pull — a note reading “He’s cheating on you” — snowballs, eventually embroiling them in a missing-persons investigation and forcing each woman to wonder what dark secrets her friends are hiding.Burke joins host Gilbert Cruz and talks about how she came up with the idea for “The Note,” and how she goes about writing her books in general.“I always have a few ideas, just, like the setup in my head,” she says. “And then I also have characters in my head. They’re not aligned together initially. I might just be thinking about a character who’s interesting to me for various reasons. It might be the back story that’s interesting, or it might be a personality trait that’s interesting. And then I’ll have a setup, like, three women go on vacation and stir up some nonsense that gets them in trouble. And for me, when I can start writing is when — it’s almost like matchmaking: Oh, OK, if I take that character that I’ve been thinking about with that back story and that set of anxieties and I put her in this scenario, that’s going to get interesting.” 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.
24 Jan 202534min
How a Wildfire Sent Pico Iyer in Search of Silence
Decades ago, after he lost in home in a California wildfire, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer started to go to a small monastery in Big Sur in search of solitude. On this week's episode he discusses those retreats, which he writes about in his new book "Aflame: Learning from Silence.""It's true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery or convent and I felt a kind of longing, the way other people feel a longing when they see a delectable meal or a Pistachio gelato." 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.
17 Jan 202542min
The Books We’re Excited About in Early 2025
And we're back! Happy new year, readers. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the upcoming books they’re most anticipating over the next several months.Books discussed on this episode:"Stone Yard Devotional," by Charlotte Wood"Aflame: Learning from Silence," by Pico Iyer"Onyx Storm," by Rebecca Yarros"Glyph," by Ali Smith"The Dream Hotel," by Laila Lalami"The Colony," by Annika Norlin"We Do Not Part," by Han Kang"Playworld," by Adam Ross"Death of the Author," by Nnedi Okorafor"The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary," by Susannah Cahalan"Tilt," by Emma Pattee"Dream Count," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie"Hope: The Autobiography," by Pope Francis"Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church," by Philip Shenon"The Antidote," by Karen Russell"Source Code: My Beginnings," by Bill Gates"Great Big Beautiful Life," by Emily Henry"Sunrise on the Reaping," by Suzanne Collins 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.
10 Jan 202537min
The 20th Anniversary of "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell"
The Book Review podcast is off for the holidays, but please enjoy this episode of the The New York Times's Culture Desk show from earlier this fall.In 2004, Susanna Clarke published her debut novel, the sprawling 800-page historical fantasy “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.” It was a sensation. Clarke sold millions of copies, won literary awards and landed on best-seller lists.After just one book, Clarke was regarded as one of Britain’s greatest fantasy novelists. It would be 16 years before she resurfaced with her second novel, “Piranesi.”So, where did she go? And what is she doing now?On the 20th anniversary of her masterpiece, the Times reporter Alexandra Alter visited Clarke at her limestone cottage in England’s Peak District to discuss her winding path to literary stardom and, above all else, her complex relationship with magic. 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.
27 Dec 202416min
Book Club: "Small Things Like These," by Claire Keegan
Clare Keegan's slim 2021 novella about one Irishman's crisis of conscience during the Christmas season, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has also been adapted into a film starring Cillian Murphy. In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib, Lauren Christensen, and Elisabeth Egan. Keegan's book was also one of The New York Times Book Review's 100 best books of the 21st century. As we wrote, "Not a word is wasted in Keegan’s small, burnished gem of a novel, a sort of Dickensian miniature centered on the son of an unwed mother who has grown up to become a respectable coal and timber merchant with a family of his own in 1985 Ireland. Moralistically, though, it might as well be the Middle Ages as he reckons with the ongoing sins of the Catholic Church and the everyday tragedies wrought by repression, fear and rank hypocrisy." 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.
20 Dec 202451min
Our Book Critics On Their Year in Reading
Dwight 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 Beloved Monster," by Caleb Carr"Rejection," by Tony Tulathimutte"Beautyland," by Marie-Helene Bertino"Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society," by Daniel Chandler"Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera," by Ricky Ian Gordon 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.
13 Dec 202431min
Book Club: Dolly Alderton's 'Good Material' (Rerun)
Following our Top 10 Books of 2024 episode, we are re-running our book club discussion about one of the novels on our year-end list: "Good Material."How to explain the British writer Dolly Alderton to an American audience? It might be best to let her work speak for itself — it certainly does! — but Alderton is such a cultural phenomenon in her native England that some context is probably helpful: “Like Nora Ephron, With a British Twist” is the way The New York Times Book Review put it when we reviewed her latest novel, “Good Material,” earlier this year.“Good Material” tells the story of a down-on-his-luck stand-up comic dealing with a broken heart, and it has won Alderton enthusiastic fans in America. In this episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Emily Eakin and Leah Greenblatt. 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.
6 Dec 202446min
