The Book Review

It’s not often that the Academy Awards give the publishing world any gristle to chew on. But at this year’s Oscars ceremony — taking place on Sunday evening — one of the Best Picture contenders is all about book publishing: Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” is adapted from the 2001 novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, and it amounts to a scathing, satirical indictment of publishers, readers and the insidious biases that the marketplace can impose in determining who tells what stories.

Obviously, we recommend the movie. But even more, we recommend Everett’s novel. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib, also from the Book Review, and Reggie Ugwu, a pop culture reporter at The Times. Caution: Spoilers abound for both the book and the movie.

Have you read “Erasure” or seen “American Fiction,” or both? We’d love to know what you thought. Share your reactions in the comments and we’ll try to join the conversation.

We’ll get you started:

Joumana Khatib: “I’d read Percival Everett before. I love watching his mind on the page. He’s funny, he's irreverent, he’s sarcastic. There’s nobody that writes like him. And I have to tell you that ‘Erasure’ totally blew me away, just because of the sheer number of textures in this book. … It’s obviously a parodical novel. It’s obviously unbelievably satirical and it’s just outrageous enough that it keeps the momentum without feeling schlocky or shticky.” …

Reggie Ugwu: “He has a great sense of pace, like he never wastes time. … You can tell that it’s the work of a very sophisticated and mature writer who knows exactly what to leave on the page and exactly what he can cut. There are some moments where I marveled when he would just leap the plot forward in a few lines.”

Send your feedback about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general, to books@nytimes.com.

Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “There There” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018 — centered on a group of characters who all converge on an Indigenous powwow in modern-day Oakland, Calif. His follow-up, “Wandering Stars,” is both a prequel and a sequel to that book, focusing specifically on the character Orvil Red Feather and tracing several generations of his family through the decades before and after the events of “There There.” 

This week, Orange visits the podcast to discuss “Wandering Stars” as well as the book he has read most in his life, Clarice Lispector's "The Hour of the Star." 

Orange explained how he decided to write a historical novel while sticking with the characters and story line from his earlier book.

“I got drawn in by this part of history because it was so specific to my tribe,” Orange says. “I don’t necessarily love reading historical fiction, but if it’s driven from the interior and it’s character driven, it’s compelling to me. So figuring out the types of humans they might have been or things they might have thought or felt, that was a way for me to try to figure out how to make them real. and that’s sometimes on a sentence level and sometimes on a, like, what are their motivations or what are they doing in their day-to-day lives? What do they want?”

Tricia Romano’s new book, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” is an oral history of New York’s late, great alternative weekly newspaper The Village Voice, where she worked for eight years as the nightlife columnist. Our critic Dwight Garner reviewed the book recently — he loved it — and he visits the podcast this week to chat with Gilbert Cruz about oral histories in general and the gritty glamour of The Village Voice in particular.

“You would pick it up and it was so prickly,” Garner says. “The whole thing just felt like this production that someone had really thought through, from the great cartoons to the great photographs to the crazy hard news in the front to the different voices in back. It all came together into a package. And there are still great writers out there, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore. No one has really taken over, to my point of view. ... There’s no one-stop shopping to find the great listings at every club and every major theater, just a great rundown of what one might be interested in doing.”

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.

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “Demon Copperhead,” a riff on “David Copperfield” that moves Charles Dickens’s story to contemporary Appalachia and grapples engagingly with topics from poverty to ambition to opioid addiction, was one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2022. And — unlike an actual copperhead — “Demon Copperhead” has legs: Many readers have told us it was their favorite book in 2023 as well.

In this week’s spoiler-filled episode, MJ Franklin talks with Elisabeth Egan (an editor at the Book Review) and Anna Dubenko, the Times’s newsroom audience director, about their reactions to Kingsolver’s novel and why it has exerted such a lasting appeal.

The early part of a year can mean new books to read, or it can mean catching up on older ones we haven’t gotten to yet. This week, Gilbert Cruz chats with the Book Review’s Sarah Lyall and Sadie Stein about titles from both categories that have held their interest lately, including a 2022 biography of John Donne, a book about female artists who nurtured an interest in the supernatural, and the history of a Jim Crow-era mental asylum, along with a gripping new novel by Janice Hallett.

“It’s just so deft,” Stein says of Hallett’s new thriller, “The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels.” “It’s so funny. It seems like she’s having a lot of fun. One thing I would say, and I don’t think this is spoiling it, is, if there comes a moment when you think you might want to stop, keep going and trust her. I think it’s rare to be able to say that with that level of confidence.”

Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne,” by Katherine Rundell

“The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World,” by Jennifer Higgie

“The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels,” by Janice Hallett

“Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum,” by Antonia Hylton

(Briefly mentioned: "You Dreamed of Empires," by Álvaro Enrigue, "Beautyland," by Marie-Helene Bertino, and "Martyr!" by Kaveh Akbar.)

Former New York Times film critic A.O. Scott joins to talk both David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon," which continues to sit near the top of the bestseller list, and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated film adaptation. 

Spoilers abound for both versions. (Also, for history.)

Molly Roden Winter and her husband, Stewart, have been married for 24 years. But since 2008, by mutual agreement, they have also dated other people — an arrangement that Winter details in her new memoir, “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage.”

In this week’s episode, The Times’s Sarah Lyall chats with Winter about her book, her marriage and why she decided to go public.

“I didn’t see any representations of either people who were still successfully married after having opened it up or people who were honest about how hard it was,” Winter says. “The stories that were coming out were either, ‘Oh, we tried it. It didn’t work,’ or ‘We’re born polyamorous and it’s just the best and I just feel love pouring out of me 24/7.’ Neither of those things was true for me. I felt like I had learned something really profound through this journey of opening my marriage, and I wanted to share it."

It's gonna be a busy spring! On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Tina Jordan and Joumana Khatib about some of the upcoming books they’re anticipating most keenly over the next several months.

Books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Knife,” by Salman Rushdie

“James,” by Percival Everett

“The Book of Love,” by Kelly Link

“Martyr,” by Kaveh Akbar

“The Demon of Unrest,” by Erik Larson

“The Hunter,” by Tana French

“Wandering Stars,” by Tommy Orange

“Anita de Monte Laughs Last,” by Xochitl Gonzalez

“Splinters,” by Leslie Jamison

“Neighbors and Other Stories,” by Diane Oliver

“Funny Story,” by Emily Henry

“Table for Two,” by Amor Towles

“Grief Is for People,” by Sloane Crosley

“One Way Back: A Memoir,” by Christine Blasey Ford

“The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir,” by RuPaul

Every January on his website Extension765.com, the prolific director Steven Soderbergh looks back at the previous year and posts a day-by-day account of every movie and TV series watched, every play attended and every book read. In 2023, Soderbergh tackled more than 80 (!) books, and on this week's episode, he and the host Gilbert Cruz talk about some of his highlights. 

Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode:

"How to Live: A Life of Montaigne," by Sarah Bakewell

"Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining,'" by Lee Unkrich and J.W. Rinzler

"Cocktails with George and Martha," by Philip Gefter

The work of Donald E. Westlake

"Americanah," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Pictures From an Institution," by Randall Jarrell

"Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," by Robert M. Sapolsky

James McBride’s novel “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” was one of the most celebrated books of 2023 — a critical darling and a New York Times best seller. In their piece for the Book Review, Danez Smith called it “a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel” and praised its “precision, magnitude and necessary messiness.”

On this week’s episode, the Book Review editors MJ Franklin, Joumana Khatib and Elisabeth Egan convene for a discussion about the book, McBride, and what you might want to read next.

John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” takes readers to the petroleum boomtown of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in May 2016, when a wildfire that started in the surrounding boreal forest grew faster than expected and tore through the city, destroying entire neighborhoods in a rampage that lasted for days.

On this week’s episode, Vaillant (whose book was one of our 10 Best for 2023) calls it a “bellwether,” and tells the host Gilbert Cruz how he decided to put the fire itself at the center of his story rather than choosing a human character to lead his audience through the narrative.

“It was a bit of a leap," he says. "It was a risk. But it also felt like, given the role that fire is increasingly playing in our world now, it really deserved to be focused on, on its own merit, from its own point of view, if you will.”

The Times’s staff book critics — Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — do a lot of reading over the course of any given year, but not everything they read stays with them equally. On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz chats with the critics about the books that did: the novels and story collections and works of nonfiction that made an impression in 2023 and defined their year in reading, including one that Garner says caught him by surprise.

“Eleanor Catton’s ‘Birnam Wood’ is in some ways my novel of the year,” Garner says. “And it’s not really my kind of book. This is going to sound stupid or snobby, but I’m not the biggest plot reader. I’m just not. I like sort of thorny, funny, earthy fiction, and if there’s no plot I’m fine with that. But this has a plot like a dream. It just takes right off. And she’s such a funny, generous writer that I was just happy from the first time I picked it up.”

Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode:

“Be Mine,” by Richard Ford

“Onlookers,” by Ann Beattie

“I Am Homeless if This Ia Not My Home,” by Lorrie Moore

“People Collide,” by Isle McElroy

“Birnam Wood,” by Eleanor Catton

“Biography of X,” by Catherine Lacey

“Madonna: A Rebel Life,” by Mary Gabriel

“The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune,” by Alexander Stille

“The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions,” by Jonathan Rosen

“Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State,” by Kerry Howley

“The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight,” by Andrew Leland

“Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets,” by Burkhard Bilger

“King: A Life,” Jonathan Eig

“Larry McMurtry: A Life,” Tracy Daugherty

“Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey,” by Robert “Mack” McCormick

“Roald Dahl, Teller of the Unexpected: A Biography,” by Matthew Dennison

“The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” by William Egginton

“Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” by Naomi Klein

“The Notebooks and Diaries of Edmund Wilson”

“Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair,” by Christian Wiman

“Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” by Oliver Burkeman

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.

It’s that time of year: After months of reading, arguing and (sometimes) happily agreeing, the Book Review’s editors have come up with their picks for the 10 Best Books of 2023. On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz reveals the chosen titles — five fiction, five nonfiction — and talks with some of the editors who participated in the process.

Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode:

“The Bee Sting,” by Paul Murray

“Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

“Eastbound,” by Maylis de Kerangal

“The Fraud,” by Zadie Smith

“North Woods,” by Daniel Mason

“The Best Minds,” by Jonathan Rosen

“Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” by Kerry Howley

“Fire Weather,” by John Vaillant

“Master Slave Husband Wife,” by Ilyon Woo

“Some People Need Killing,” by Patricia Evangelista

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.

Book Review reporter Alexandra Alter discusses two of her recent pieces. The first is about Georgette Heyer, the "queen of Regency romance," and recent attempts to posthumously revise one of her most famous works in order to remove stereotypical language. The second looks at Rebecca Yarros, author of one of this year's most surprising and persistent bestsellers: the "romantasy" novel "Fourth Wing."

Then, staff critic Alexandra Jacobs joins Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz to discuss her review of Barbra Streisand's epic memoir, "My Name is Barbra."

In 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare died, two of his friends and fellow actors led an effort to publish a single volume containing 36 of the plays he had written, half of which had never been officially published before. Now known as the First Folio, that volume has become a lodestone of Shakespeare scholarship over the centuries, offering the most definitive versions of his work along with clues to his process and plenty of disputes about authorship and intention.

In honor of its 400th anniversary, the British Library recently released a facsimile version of the First Folio. On this week’s episode, The Times’s critic at large Sarah Lyall talks with Adrian Edwards, head of the library’s Printed Heritage Collections, about Shakespeare’s work, the library’s holdings and the cultural significance of that original volume.

You don’t need Halloween to justify reading scary books, any more than you need sand to justify reading a beach novel. But the holiday does give editors here a handy excuse to talk about some of their favorite spooky reads. On this week’s episode, the host Gilbert Cruz talks with his colleagues Tina Jordan and Sadie Stein about the enduring appeal of ghost stories, Gothic novels and other scary books.

Titles discussed:

“Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death,” by Deborah Blum

“Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by Ray Bradbury

“Rebecca,” by Daphne du Maurier

“Don’t Look Now: And Other Stories,” by Daphne du Maurier

“The Exorcist,” by William Peter Blatty

“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” by Alvin Schwartz

“Ghosts,” by Edith Wharton

“Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of Ghost Stories,” by various

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” by M.R. James

“The Hunger,” by Alma Katsu

“The Terror,” by Dan Simmons

“The Little Stranger,” by Sarah Waters

“Affinity,” by Sarah Waters

“The Paying Guests,” by Sarah Waters

“The Haunting of Hill House,” by Shirley Jackson

“Hell House,” by Richard Matheson

“House of Leaves,” by Mark Z. Danielewski

“A Haunting on the Hill,” by Elizabeth Hand

“The Virago Book of Ghost Stories,” edited by Richard Dalby

“The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James

In 2008 — the same year that Robert Downey Jr. appeared in the action comedy “Tropic Thunder,” for which he would earn his second Oscar nomination — he also appeared as the billionaire inventor and unlikely superhero Tony Stark in “Iron Man,” the debut feature from the upstart Marvel Studios.

Downey lost the Oscar (to Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”), but Marvel won the day. In the 15 years since “Iron Man” came out, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has expanded to 32 films that have earned a staggering $26 billion and changed the world of moviemaking for a generation. 

In a new book, “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” the writers Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards explore the company’s scrappy beginnings, phenomenal success and uncertain hold on the future, with lots of dish along the way.

On this week’s episode, Gonzales and Robinson join the host Gilbert Cruz to talk all things Marvel.

On this week’s episode, a look at the rest of the year in books — new fiction from Alice McDermott and this year’s Nobel laureate, Jon Fosse, a journalist’s investigation of state-sanctioned killings in the Philippines, and a trio of celebrity memoirs. 

Discussed in this week’s episode:

“The Vulnerables,” by Sigrid Nunez

“Day,” by Michael Cunningham

“Absolution,” by Alice McDermott

“A Shining,” by Jon Fosse

“Romney: A Reckoniung,” by McKay Coppins

“Class,” by Stephanie Land

“Some People Need Killing,” by Patricia Evangelista

“The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” by Tim Alberta

“My Name is Barbra,” by Barbra Streisand

“The Woman in Me,” by Britney Spears

“Worthy,” by Jada Pinkett Smith

Madonna released her first single in 1982, and in one guise or another she has been with us ever since — ubiquitous but also astonishing, when you consider the usual fleeting arc of pop stardom. How has she done it, and how have her various personae shaped or reflected the culture she inhabits? These are among the questions the renowned biographer Mary Gabriel takes up in her latest book, “Madonna: A Rebel Life,” which casts new light on its subject’s life and career.

On this week’s episode, the host Gilbert Cruz chats with Gabriel about all things Madonna, and revisits the context of the 1980s’ music industry that she conquered.

You love books. You love podcasts. Ergo, we assume you love audiobooks the way we do — we hope you do, anyway, because this week we’ve devoted our entire episode to the form, as Gilbert Cruz is joined by a couple of editors from the Book Review, Lauren Christensen and Tina Jordan, to discuss everything from favorite narrators to regional accents to the ideal listening speed and the way audiobooks have to compete with other kinds of media.