The Book Review

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 Book Award, was a Pulitzer finalist, and an Oprah Book Club pick. (Until it wasn’t.)

The book arrives at its 25th anniversary this month, and in today’s episode of the “Book Review” podcast, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a writer for The New York Times magazine and novelist, about why this novel is so essential to modern American literature. And that’s not just her take: “The Corrections” ranks fifth on our list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, as voted on by hundreds of influential readers.

“The Corrections” is a book about America at the turn of the century; it was published just a week after 9/11. Brodesser-Akner, who admits to having read the novel 20 times, says that Franzen’s work “became the defining book of America’s golden moment, which ended on Sept. 10.”

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Credits

The “Book Review” Podcast is hosted by Gilbert Cruz, produced by Amy Pearl, Sarah Diamond and Patricia Sulbarán. The show is mixed by Pedro Rosado. Special thanks to Dahlia Haddad.

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.

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Jordan Baker said it best: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

In just one short sentence, the character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” sums up that wonderful feeling of anticipation that comes with autumn. For bookish people, the season comes with its own set of expectations; some of the year’s biggest books are released in September and October. On this episode of the “Book Review” podcast, Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin join our host, Gilbert Cruz, to go over some of the titles they’re most looking forward to.

Books discussed on this episode:

• “The Disappearers,” by Marlon James
• “The Radiance,” by Ayad Akhtar
• “American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump,” by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark
• “Switzy,” by Emma Cline
• “The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia,” by Robert Kolker
• “Dead Beat,” by Leigh Bardugo
• “American Hagwon,” by Min Jin Lee
• “Mazywood,” by Tananarive Due
• “Public Access Afterworld,” by Jane Schoenbrun
• “Other Worlds Than These,” by Stephen King and Peter Straub
• “Partita,” by Barbara Kingsolver
• “Music Against the Night,” by Yiyun Li
• “The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War and the Making of the Modern World,” by Nathaniel Philbrick
• “The Occidental Book of the Dead,” by T. Geronimo Johnson
• “The Brightness,” by Chad Harbach
• “Stations,” by Louise Kennedy
• “On the Calculation of Volume (Book V),” by Solvej Balle
• “Dodge City,” by Patrick DeWitt
• “Under Story,” by Chloe Benjamin
• “Our Noble Selves,” by Kate Atkinson
• “Taipei Story,” by R.F. Kuang
• “Exit Party,” by Emily St. John Mandel
• “Ply,” by Hernan Diaz
• “Hollywood, Ending,” by John Green
• “No Land to Stand On: Notes From Detention,” by Mahmoud Khalil
• “Life Out of Order,” by Audrey Niffenegger
• “Every Story Is a Love Story,” by Imbolo Mbue
• “Peck & Peck,” by Bonnie Garmus
• “A Court of Splintered Harmony,” by Sarah J. Maas
• “Take My Word for It,” by LeVar Burton
• “Promise Me, America,” by Joe Biden

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Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We Want to Hear From You

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to thebookreview@nytimes.com.

Credits

The “Book Review” podcast is hosted by Gilbert Cruz and produced by Amy Pearl, Sarah Diamond and Patricia Sulbarán. The show is mixed by Pedro Rosado.

Special thanks to MJ Franklin, Dahlia Haddad and Brooke Minters.

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.

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At the center of Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, “London Falling,” is a mystery: In 2019, a young man named Zac Brettler disappeared, and a few days later his body was found in the Thames River. Surveillance footage showed what appeared to be Zac jumping off the balcony of a nearby luxury tower, leading some to speculate that he had taken his own life. His family, though, didn’t quite believe that theory; though troubled, Zac, in their view, hadn’t seemed suicidal. Then the Brettlers learn that before his death, Zac had pretended to be the rich son of a Russian oligarch, and fallen in with a dangerous crowd in London’s criminal scene.

So what happened? That’s what Keefe attempts to answer in “London Falling.”

On this episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Jennifer Szalai and Sadie Stein. You can follow along and add your own comments to the discussion here.

Books discussed on this episode:

“Say Nothing” and “Empire of Pain,” by Patrick Radden Keefe

“Reunion,” by Fred Uhlman

“Putin’s People,” by Catherine Belton

“Strangers to Ourselves,” by Rachel Aviv

“Days of Love and Rage,” by Anand Gopal

“Bad Blood,” by John Carreyrou

“Catch and Kill,” by Ronan Farrow

Listen to and Follow ‘The Book Review’

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Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We Want to Hear From You

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to thebookreview@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.

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What is it about a bookstore? You walk in planning to browse for a few minutes, and somehow an hour later you’re still wandering the stacks with an armful of books you can’t seem to put down.

For this week’s episode, our guest host, MJ Franklin, and the producer Sarah Diamond take a field trip to a local bookstore, McNally Jackson Seaport, at the southern tip of Manhattan. There, they talk with the owner, Sarah McNally, about what it’s actually like to run a bookstore. Then MJ sits down with Jennifer Harlan, an editor at the Book Review, to talk about The Times’s new bookstore crawl series, the bookstores she grew up loving and why bookshops seem to be having a moment.

Of course, no bookstore episode would be complete without some book recommendations. MJ and Jen share some of their favorite books about bookstores and booksellers, including a romance set in a small-town bookshop and a memoir about living inside Shakespeare and Company in Paris.

Books discussed on this episode:

“Switzy,” by Emma Cline

“Delicate Edible Birds,” by Lauren Groff

“Book Lovers,” by Emily Henry

“Monogamy,” by Sue Miller

“Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare and Co.,” by Jeremy Mercer

“The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” by Evan Friss

“A Marvelous Light,” by Freya Marske

“The Rachel Incident,” by Caroline O’Donoghue

Listen to and Follow ‘The Book Review’

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadio

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We Want to Hear From You

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to thebookreview@nytimes.com.

Credits

“The Book Review” podcast is hosted this week by MJ Franklin and produced by Amy Pearl, Sarah Diamond and Patricia Sulbarán. The show is edited by Tracy Mumford and mixed this week by Daniel Ramirez.

Special thanks to Dahlia Haddad and Brooke Minters.

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.

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Imagine, if you will, that for unknown reasons North Korea has just launched a nuclear bomb at the United States. What happens next?

The journalist Annie Jacobsen has imagined exactly that, and spent more than a decade interviewing dozens of experts while mastering the voluminous literature on the subject — some of it declassified only in recent years — for her 2024 book “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” which walks readers through the 72 minutes from launch to global annihilation. In the Book Review, Barry Gewen said the book was “gripping” and declared it essential reading “if you want to understand the complex and disturbing details that go into a civilization-destroying decision.”

Jacobsen now has another book out: “Biological War: A Scenario.” Our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review that it “moves like a meteor.”

For this week’s episode, we revisit the conversation the host Gilbert Cruz had with Jacobsen last year, in which she discussed why she wrote “Nuclear War,” and how she managed to compile so many details about topics that are among the most secret in the world.

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.

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