The Book Review

• Our Book Critics on Their 2025 in Reading

  Here we are in mid-December, which means that along with all of the other year-end lists we produce and avidly consume at this time each year, The New York Times Book Review's staff critics are also looking back on everything they read in 2025, and toasting the books that have stayed with them.On this episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai about their standout fiction and nonfiction of the past 12 months.Books mentioned:"What We Can Know," by Ian McEwan"Flesh," by David Szalay"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny," by Kiran Desai"Playworld," by Adam Ross"When the Going Was Good," by Graydon Carter"I Regret Almost Everything," by Keith McNally"When All the Men Wore Hats," by Susan Cheever"Notes to John," by Joan Didion"A Flower Traveled in My Blood," by Haley Cohen Gilliland"38 Londres Street," by Philippe Sands"Wild Thing," by Sue Prideaux"Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life," by Dan Nadel"Class Clown," by Dave Barry"Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel," by Frances Wilson"Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson," by Ted Geltner"Shadow Ticket," by Thomas Pynchon"Selected Letters of John Updike," edited by James Schiff"Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford," by Carla Kaplan"More Everything Forever, AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity," by Adam Becker 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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• The 10 Best Books of 2025

  All year long, the staff of The New York Times Book Review conducts a running discussion over what belongs on its year-end Top 10 list. In this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz gathers a group of fellow Book Review editors to talk about the most exciting fiction and nonfiction of the year. Here are the books discussed in this week’s episode:Fiction“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai“Angel Down,” by Daniel Kraus“The Sisters,” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri“The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann“Stone Yard Devotional,” by Charlotte WoodNonfiction“A Marriage at Sea,” by Sophie Elmhirst“Wild Thing,” by Sue Prideaux“Mother Emanuel,” by Kevin Sack“There Is No Place for Us," by Brian Goldstone“Mother Mary Comes to Me,” by Arundhati Roy 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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• Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Hamnet'

  History has not graced us with many details about Shakespeare as a person, but we do know that he and his wife had three children, including a son named Hamnet who died at the age of 11 in 1596, four years before Shakespeare went on to write his great tragedy “Hamlet.”Maggie O’Farrell’s novel “Hamnet” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2020, and the source of Chloé Zhao’s new movie of the same name — starts from those scant facts, and spins them into a powerful story of grief, art and family steeped in the textures of late-16th-century life.In this episode of the Book Review Book Club, host MJ Franklin discusses “Hamnet” with his colleagues Leah Greenblatt, Jennifer Harlan and Sarah Lyall. Other works mentioned in this podcast:“Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “The Winter’s Tale,” by William Shakespeare“Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott“Grief Is the Thing With Feathers,” by Max Porter“Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders“Fi,” by Alexandra Fuller“Things In Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li“The Accidental Tourist,” by Anne Tyler“Will in the World” and “Dark Renaissance,” by Stephen Greenblatt“Gabriel,” by Edward Hirsch“Once More We Saw Stars,” by Jayson Greene“The Dutch House,” by Ann Patchett 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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• Welcome to Literary Award Season

  Literature isn’t a horse race. Taste is subjective, and artistic value can’t be measured in terms of “winners" and “losers.”That doesn’t mean it’s not fun to try.The book world’s awards season officially kicked off on Oct. 9, when the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize, and continued this month when the Booker Prize in England went to the novel “Flesh,” by the British writer David Szalay (also of Hungarian descent, as it happens). Then this week, five National Book Award winners were crowned in various categories at a ceremony in New York.On this episode of the podcast, the host MJ Franklin talks with his fellow Book Review editors Emily Eakin, Joumana Khatib and Dave Kim about the finalists, the winners and what this year’s big book awards might tell us about the state of literature in 2025.We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected]. 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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• Nicholas Boggs on Writing a James Baldwin Biography

  Nicholas Boggs’s “Baldwin: A Love Story,” is many things at once. It’s a comprehensive biography of James Baldwin. It’s a nimble excavation of Baldwin’s work, filled with astute literary analysis of his books and prose. And, most pressingly, it’s an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin through the lens of love. The biography is structured around Baldwin’s relationships with a series of men — relationships that, as Boggs outlines, shaped Baldwin’s life and writing in crucial ways. Boggs joins MJ Franklin on this week's episode to talk about his new book.Other works mentioned in this discussion:Zadie Smith’s essay “Conscience and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person,” from her new collection “Dead and Alive”“James Baldwin: A Biography,” by David Leeming“Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood,” by James Baldwin, illustrated by Yoran Cazac, edited by Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody“Goodbye Days,” by Jeff Zentner“Virginia Woolf,” by Hermione Lee 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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