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This review was first published in June 2023 One Friday evening, a man and a woman caught the same bus, a No 57. “And that’s when she saw him. And he saw...

Author Jean-Baptiste del Amo ambitiously stretches the novel form’s possibilities

From left: Seb Shelton, Steve Shaw, Kevin Rowland, Helen O’Hara and Billy Adams of Dexys Midnight Runners in 1982

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The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

The Book Review The New York Times

• 4.1 • 3.3K Ratings
• MAY 17, 2024

Writing About NASA's Most Shocking Moment

The year 1986 was notable for two big disasters: the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in the United States. The journalist Adam Higginbotham wrote about Chernobyl in his 2019 book, “Midnight in Chernobyl.” Now he’s back, with a look at the American side of the ledger, in his new book, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space.” On this week’s episode, Higginbotham tells host Gilbert Cruz why he was drawn to both disasters, and what the Challenger explosion revealed about weaknesses in America’s space program.

• MAY 10, 2024

Fantasy Superstar Leigh Bardugo on Her New Novel

In the world of fantasy fiction, Leigh Bardugo is royalty: Her Grishaverse novels are mainstays on the young adult best-seller list and her adult novels “Ninth House” and “Hell Bent” established her as a force to reckon with in dark academia. This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks with Bardugo about her first work of historical fiction, "The Familiar."

• MAY 3, 2024

Colm Toibin on His Sequel to 'Brooklyn'

Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel “Brooklyn” told the story of a meek young Irishwoman, Eilis Lacey, who emigrates to New York in the 1950s and slowly begins building a new life for herself. On this week’s podcast, Tóibín talks to Sarah Lyall about the sequel, "Long Island," and how he came to write it.

• APR 26, 2024

Book Club: Dolly Alderton's 'Good Material'

In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses Dolly Alderton's hit book "Good Material" with his colleagues Emily Eakin and Leah Greenblatt. (Caution: Spoilers abound!)

• APR 12, 2024

100 Years of Simon & Schuster

The publisher has gone through a lot of changes since its founding in 1924. Its current chief executive, Jonathan Karp, talks about the company’s history and its hopes for the future.

• APR 5, 2024

Looking Back at 50 Years of Stephen King

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie.” On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks to the novelist Grady Hendrix, who read and re-read many of King’s books over several years for a writing project, as well as King superfan Damon Lindelof, the TV showrunner behind shows such as “Lost” and “The Leftovers.”

• © 2023 The New York Times Company

Customer Reviews

3.3K Ratings

I like the new book club feature (tho MJs speaking voice for radio needs oomph) but they would need to be more frequent to up the chance of even occasionally having read the book in question. And please at least 2x a month bring back the classic episodes with several books covered, author interview, etc.

Downhill slide REPLACE EVERYONE

This podcast certainly has gone downhill fast. Would like to see everyone replaced on this.

I prefer the old format. I’ve just about stopped listening to the new one. Seems like a hodgepodge no coherence.

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The Times review: how the newspaper of record survived – and thrived

Adam Nagourney’s rigorous reporting shines, though he misses chances to illuminate less well-known parts of the story

W hen the first great book about the New York Times was excerpted in Harper’s Magazine in 1969, the magazine’s cover proclaimed its scoop with an imaginary Times headline: The One Major Story America’s Foremost Newspaper Has Never Covered In Detail: The New York Times.

The headline was accurate, and when The Kingdom and the Power by Gay Talese was published, it was an immediate sensation. In that far-off decade, the story Talese told was fresh and captivating. The Times’ own review said it was unlike any other newspaper book because it was “done in the novelistic style of Truman Capote, William Manchester and Theodore White, moving real contemporary men through real contemporary events … the book is rich in intimate detail, personal insights and characterization”.

When I read it as a teenager, it was one of the two books that made me want to write nonfiction. The Making of the President 1960 , by Theodore H White, was the other.

Journalists have been waiting half a century for a worthy sequel to Talese’s book, and that is what Adam Nagourney has attempted with The Times : How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism, a history of the newspaper from 1976 to 2016, which he wrote with Talese’s encouragement and cooperation.

The new volume is the result of 300 interviews and years of impressive archival research by a veteran Times political reporter. But unlike its predecessor, it is almost completely without the shock of the new. This is not the author’s fault, bur rather an inevitable result in our time. Press criticism of the Times has been a gigantic industry over many decades, the New Yorker running long profiles of nearly every new editor and publisher and everyone from Vanity Fair and the Washington Post to Spy and Gawker contributing often vicious descriptions of the most political newsroom.

On top of that, almost every former top editor from Max Frankel and Gerald Boyd to Howell Raines have written either memoirs or long pieces about their time at the paper. And after a couple of its own worst screwups, the Times has sometimes analysed its own failings, including its disastrous coverage of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and its seduction by a young reporter, Jayson Blair, who turned out to be addicted to plagiarism and invention.

As a result, if you’re a Times junkie, like I am, there are almost no completely new stories in the 478 pages of Nagourney’s book. Instead there are familiar anecdotes, bolstered by a few juicy new details produced by rigorous reporting.

The book begins with a portrait of the legendary Abe Rosenthal, top editor from 1969 to 1986. As I wrote after his death in 2006, Rosenthal “inspired more admiration, emulation and vilification than any other journalist of his generation”. Besides having the finest news judgement of his time, Rosenthal was famous for his homophobia, which kept every gay person who worked for him firmly in the closet. (Nagourney accurately names me and Richard Meislin, two former Rosenthal clerks, as members of this club.)

After he married his second wife, Shirley Lord, a former editor at Vogue with many gay friends in the fashion industry, Rosenthal pretended he had never hated gay people. But Nagourney has unearthed his true feelings, in a previously unknown journal entry:

“He wrote … that while he would hire a homosexual as a critic, he would not appoint one to cover a sensitive beat like the Pentagon or city hall. And he had a dark view of their presence at the newspaper. ‘The real problem of hiring homosexuals,’ Rosenthal wrote, was that they formed cliques. ‘The homosexual clique was a problem because it was usually subterranean, which gave it a kind of conspiracy atmosphere, and because homosexuals in the clique always were convinced or tried to convince themselves that they were wiser, more acute, “better” than the others – the old breed,’ he wrote.”

Rosenthal’s well-known prejudices often discouraged sycophantic colleagues from assigning stories on gay subjects, which led to the widespread belief that the Times botched its coverage of the Aids epidemic – even though Lawrence K Altman, the paper’s chief medical reporter, was the first to write about the new, still unnamed disease in a mainstream publication, in July 1981.

Nagourney endorses this point of view, noting the paper’s failure to cover an early fundraiser for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis that attracted 17,601 people, and the fact the paper ran no page-one article about Aids until 25 May 1983. He also says the Times “largely refrained from writing … about anal intercourse, the sexual practice that was soon identified as a potent means of transmission of the virus”.

However, he misses a crucial article published in the Times Magazine 10 weeks before that uncovered fundraiser. Written by Robin Marantz Henig, Aids, A New Diseases’s Deadly Odyssey was a 6,000-word piece that was probably the most important, most useful and most comprehensive article on this subject published in any mainstream outlet up to that time. Even though the precise method of transmission had not yet been determined, the piece said Aids was probably a virus spread by blood and semen. Crucially, it also said many doctors had urged patients “to eliminate anal intercourse”.

In all there were 28 articles in the Times about Aids in the first two years of the epidemic, and 114 in the year after that.

T he biggest problem with Nagourney’s book is the way he treats Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the publisher of the Times during most of the period covered here and therefore the most important person in this saga. Nagourney repeats all criticisms of Sulzberger made by other critics, because of the executive editors he fired (Howell Raines and Jill Abramson) and a broad perception that he wasn’t completely ready when he took over from his father in 1992. But the true story of Sulzberger’s life is that all of his critics were wrong.

Nagourney does report the sense of conviction that distinguished Sulzberger from every other American newspaper scion of his generation. But he doesn’t give the publisher anywhere near the credit he deserves, because this was the core quality that would make him a success in an era when every other important American newspaper family would give up on the news business, including the Los Angeles Chandlers, the Washington Grahams and the Louisville Binghams.

Just two years after he took over as publisher, Sulzberger declared : “The paper in newspaper is not central to our function. My point is a simple one: I am absolutely agnostic regarding methods of distribution.”

In 2010, he once again showed the courage of his convictions by going against the advice of the man running the Times website and deciding to force online readers to pay to read his paper. And that decision was the whole reason that when his son, AG Sulzberger, succeeded him in 2020, he could toast his father this way: “The only publisher of his generation who was handed a great news organization and left it even better than he found it.”

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‘New York Times’ Reveals Its Best Books of 2021

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 29, 2021

The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year , with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.

Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This , while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were . The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist.

Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth .

Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle,  The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency , translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath . The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020; when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained , “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over [to the] following year. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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A mother’s eloquent plea for justice in perilous times

Emily Raboteau’s “Lessons for Survival” wades through the many challenges that face us — and finds reason to hope.

Emily Raboteau was 10 when her father gave her “the talk.” Growing up in America “would be tough,” he told his young daughter and her two brothers. “Because of White supremacy, some people would think negatively of us, no matter how smart we were, no matter how poised, how well-dressed, well-spoken, or well-behaved. We would have to work twice as hard to get half as far.” Raboteau’s father, a professor at Princeton, punctuated his warning with a piece of family history: His father had been shot by a White man who was never punished.

In her new book, “ Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against ‘the Apocalypse,’ ” Raboteau writes that it was then she realized she had to figure out a way not only to stay safe but also to embrace her history and culture. As her father had put it: “Our Blackness wasn’t a life sentence but a gift. Our people had survived unspeakable atrocities and shaped history. Our ancestors kept faith, made music and community, found love and joy. Our culture was joyful. We belonged to a loving Black family. We should be cautious, but more than that, we should be grateful for our heritage.”

As she got older, Raboteau came to realize that embracing her culture included understanding that people of color and people without much money are much more likely to suffer not only from police attacks but also from pandemics, regional conflicts, rising seas, pollution, unaffordable health care and the indifference of politicians.

“Lessons for Survival” brings together essays Raboteau has written over the past dozen years, inspired by the births of her two sons and the fears, hopes and insights that caring for them has prompted. She finds reason for both fear and hope in birds, and one of her pleasures is birdwatching and viewing images of birds that have been painted on buildings in Upper Manhattan , photographs of which appear throughout the book. Her writing about being a mother is perceptive and eloquent: At one point, she and her husband are taking the boys, then 2 and 4, to a local park on a hot day. The 4-year-old is “stubborn,” and, she writes, “The heat knocked out the two-year-old as if it were a club.” But then, “our son was coaxed down the vertiginous stairs by the magical horn of an Amtrak train on the railway beneath the bridge.”

Raboteau — author of two previous books, “Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora” and the novel “The Professor’s Daughter” — is a natural investigator. She not only explores her neighborhood and her city, she travels. About halfway into the book is an essay about a trip she took to the Middle East in 2016. It was an assignment and also a way to visit one of her oldest friends, who works at an electric plant in the Hebron Hills.

Raboteau’s week in the Middle East is in June. The weather is dry and hot, and the world she finds herself in gives her a strong sense of what could happen in the near future if the issue of climate change doesn’t move to the very front of governmental concerns. The man who shows her around says, at one point, “In the spring, this is the most beautiful place in the world.” When he perceives that Raboteau doesn’t understand how he could think so, he adds, “It’s so calm.” His remark pushes Raboteau to pay attention to (and write perceptively about) how the people she talks to and watches make their way through the hardships of their lives: For one thing, according to her guide, the locals are allowed only 20 gallons of water per day, but they put up with it and are determined to stay. As Raboteau explores, she sees many similarities between the way Palestinians are treated and the way Black people are treated, and always have been treated, in the United States. These days, that is something more people, especially young people, seem to be aware of.

But she felt a moment of hope when she looked up at the night sky, “now punched through with a thousand stars and streaked with meteors. Its perfect clarity made me gasp.”

What will save us? The lesson from Raboteau’s book is that it has to be curiosity, willingness to learn, patience and love — not only for your children and your spouse, but also for nature, even the sparse nature around Spuyten Duyvil Creek, a tidal estuary between the Hudson and Harlem rivers. When Raboteau walks there, she sees and connects to trees, plants, birds and a strip of “lowland swamp forest,” and contemplates the way that the Lenape Native Americans managed to live there for far longer than we have.

The question is, how do we push politicians and corporations to figure out how to save our environment and acknowledge the economic and ecological discrepancies that plague our culture? I suggest that every single one of them be required to read “Lessons for Survival.” Even for someone like me, always sympathetic to ecological concerns, it is eye-opening.

Jane Smiley is the author of many books and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for “A Thousand Acres.” Her latest is the novel “Lucky.”

Lessons for Survival

Mothering Against ‘the Apocalypse’

By Emily Raboteau

Henry Holt. 304 pp. $29.99

A previous version of this article misstated the title of a previous book by Emily Raboteau. It is "Searching for Zion," not "Searching for Survival." The article has been corrected.

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Check out our coverage of this year’s Pulitzer winners: Jayne Anne Phillips won the fiction prize for her novel “ Night Watch .” The nonfiction prize went to Nathan Thrall, for “ A Day in the Life of Abed Salama .” Cristina Rivera Garza received the memoir prize for “ Liliana’s Invincible Summer .” And Jonathan Eig received the biography prize for his “ King: A Life .”

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Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) charts his process — as a writer, reader and for living life

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Book Review

And Then? And Then? What Else?

By Daniel Handler Liveright: 240 pages, $26.99 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission form Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

To begin, a confession: I’ve never read much Lemony Snicket, neither the 13-book sequence “A Series of Unfortunate Events” nor the four-volume follow-up, “All the Wrong Questions.” This is not a matter of aesthetics but pragmatics. When my kids were young, their tastes ran in other directions: Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, “Twilight.” Although we read “The Bad Beginning” and perhaps part of “The Reptile Room” — I can’t remember — they never warmed to the author’s gothic sensibilities or allusive style.

This, I fully accept, represents a parental failing on my part.

Let me admit, too, that I had a little difficulty at first with “And Then? And Then? What Else?” by Daniel Handler, the writer behind the Snicket franchise — “aka Lemony Snicket,” he identifies himself on the cover. This has to do with the nature of the writing, which can feel diffuse before it grows into one of the enduring charms of the book. The reason? “And Then? And Then? What Else?” is a bit of a grab bag, starting in the middle and ending in the middle, while telling a series of stories that both connect and overlap.

That something similar might be said of the Lemony Snicket novels is the whole idea. Handler is skilled and nuanced as a writer, with a developed voice and point of view. He has never fit the categories, so why would we expect him to start here?

As an example, there’s the question of form or genre. “And Then? And Then? What Else?” comes positioned as a memoir, but that’s not quite accurate. Neither is “craft book,” although there are a lot of notes on craft. More accurately, it’s what I want to label a process book, walking us through the author’s process as writer and reader. It is also a book that means to tell us how to make a life.

Handler gets at this from the outset: “What am I doing?” the book begins. It’s not a rhetorical question but a reflective one, and it opens a line of free association, of opinions and observations, that push back against our expectations. Yes, the author recognizes, we will have preconceptions; how, after all, could we not? Regardless of whether we’ve read the saga of the orphaned Baudelaire children, Handler’s reputation, the work he’s produced, carries its own cultural weight.

Lemony Snicket: ‘a strange writer in whom nobody took any interest’?

April 14, 2014

“I’m hunched over, headphoned,” he explains, describing himself writing on a legal pad in a cafe not far from his San Francisco home, “I look like a lunatic, which is likely the wrong word. It feels right, though.”

There it is, right from the get-go, a conditionality that might feel like a gimmick were it not also true to life. Likely the wrong word but it feels right? Here we get a glimpse of how Handler works. Throughout “And Then? And Then? What Else?” he highlights the tension between thought and feeling, the way we can infer something without fully knowing it. That’s a sensation familiar to every kid who reads “A Series of Unfortunate Events”: What adults are saying and what they’re doing are very different things.

For Handler, such suspicions didn’t disappear with childhood. Early in “And Then? And Then? What Else?” he recalls a party he attended where “real estate and traffic were the mandatory conversation topics,” all the boredom of the grown-up world. Eventually, he met a 6-year-old “and asked him what was up, in the hopes of a better conversation.” The child answered: “Last night I dreamed I was a horse.”

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It’s an instructive anecdote, Handler insists, because children “generally have a firmer grasp on what is interesting to say.” By way of elaboration, he continues: “If you had to sum up lasting literature in a single sentence, you could do worse than ‘I dreamed I was a horse’ — prophetic dreams and animal transformation appear much more frequently in the old epics than, say, which neighborhoods have the best schools.” A perception of the world, in other words, as magical, as inexplicable, as full of wonder, fear and awe. Isn’t this the reason so many of us started reading? Isn’t that what we look for most when we pick up a book?

In “And Then? And Then? What Else?” (the title, fittingly, comes from Baudelaire), Handler returns repeatedly to this notion, whether he’s discussing his books or the details of his life. He is frank without being overly revealing and always seeks out some larger integration, a place where thought and feeling might intersect. As an undergraduate, he suffered from recurring nightmares, populated by ghost-like figures, “naked, bald, painted or powdered white.” The resulting sleep deprivation led to seizures, as well as hallucinations in which these characters began to appear in the waking world.

Or perhaps, Handler conjectures, “hallucinations” is not the proper word. “Nabokov,” he writes, “famously said that reality was ‘one of the few words which means nothing without quotes,’ and this was an idea that kept visiting, bringing me comfort and bliss.”

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What he means is that we never know anything, not truly, and that what we think of as the real world is just another construct, built out of our desires and preconceptions (that word again), as subjective as the angle of our minds. That’s the craft lesson here, and the life lesson also: Be curious. Accept nothing at face value. Why couldn’t the figures from his dream exist — an acceptance that ultimately frees Handler from their influence — even if most of us don’t see them?

Of course, to believe that requires a creative leap. That disposition, that openness leads Handler to an especially acute critique of the pieties of cancel culture, with its distrust of work that some might suggest is “problematic” — a word, he explains, that “describes the entire human condition, which is to say it describes nothing.” Given the subjects and scenarios of his fiction, Handler has found himself in the cross-hairs of various self-appointed cultural guardians on more than one occasion, but while he shares some of those details, that is not what interests him. Rather, it is the question of human personality, human weirdness, which is, as it has ever been, the only source of art.

“The peculiarities of individual works,” he argues, “come from the peculiarities of the individuals who make them. All these peculiarities — all of them — are problematic to somebody or other. Luckily, your own choices about preferences, dictating what you decide to read, are problematic, too.”

If that’s the case, “And Then? And Then? What Else?” counsels, why not opt for joy? This, Handler wants us to understand, is the most important component of storytelling — of reading and writing — and of living too. I keep thinking of the conversation with the 6-year-old at that stultifying party, and the unalloyed pleasure of both the teller and the listener as they discover in the moment their own shared humanity.

“ Last night I dreamed I was a horse . You don’t say. Tell me more.” That is everything and all we need to know.

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion. He is the former book editor and book critic of The Times.

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