490 episodes

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 • 3.4K Ratings
  • JUN 7, 2024

Elin Hilderbrand on Her Final Nantucket Summer Book

For many years now, Elin Hilderbrand has published a novel every summer set on the island of Nantucket. With her 30th book, 'Swan Song,' the bestselling author says she will step off that hamster wheel and try something new. On this week's episode, she and host Gilbert Cruz talk about her career, what she's reading, and what's next.

  • MAY 31, 2024

Let's Talk About Percival Everett's 'James'

In this spoiler-filled conversation, a panel of Book Review editors discuss Percival Everett's reworking of Mark Twain's “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

  • 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!)

  • © 2023 The New York Times Company

Customer Reviews

3.4K 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.

I miss the old format

I looked forward to Fridays when the new podcast would drop but there are now weeks when I don’t even listen to it. I miss the discussions on what everyone is reading as well as the reviews of new books. Not sure why they have made it so short as well.

Miss the podcast

I loved the podcast and I’m looking forward to its return. I loved the interviews, the publishing news and especially enjoyed hearing about what everyone is reading. The reruns are ok but I’ve basically stopped listening and I just check in to see if it’s something I haven’t heard or don’t remember.🥲 So the new content is ok as far as it goes but we are only getting 25%. So sad 😞 5/26/24 Upped my stars because I love MJ’s book club! Appreciate the head’s up on upcoming titles. However the rest of the podcast has become more popular culture than literary. I used to look forward to each episode and now I have to remind myself to check on it.

Top Podcasts In Arts

You might also like, more by the new york times.

Profile Picture

  • ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

avatar

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

125 years of literary history.

edited by Tina Jordan & Noor Qasim ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2021

An ebullient celebration of literature.

A capacious history of the influential publication.

To commemorate the 125th anniversary of the New York Times Book Review , current deputy editor Jordan, assisted by Qasim, offers a fascinating selection of reviews, letters, interviews, essays, announcements, book lists, bits of gossip (Colette, on a ship, wore sandals without stockings!), and op-ed pieces published in the supplement since its first appearance on Oct. 10, 1896. Organized chronologically into five sections that comprise around three decades each, and profusely illustrated with author photographs, plates, advertisements, and assorted literary artifacts, the volume amply fulfills the editor’s goal of revealing how the Review “has shaped literary taste, informed arguments and driven the world of ideas in the United States and beyond.” Book critic Parul Sehgal prefaces the selections with an astute essay examining how the Review has covered works by women, writers of color, and writers in the LGBTQ+ community. In its early years, White male perspectives dominated, with reviewers worried about the proliferation and popularity of women writers. Overall, however, the collection amply represents reviewers “contemptuous of anxious gatekeeping,” bringing to their task “nerve, wariness and style.” Anxious gatekeeping, however, as well as wafts of condescension, can be found. For example, in 1904, the reviewer of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk remarked, “Many passages of the book will be very interesting to the student of the negro character who regards the race ethnologically and not politically, not as a dark cloud threatening the future of the United States.” In 1933, assessing two feminist histories, the Review ’s editor saw the success of the women’s movement as “one of the major tragedies in the history of mankind.” Reviews by acclaimed authors include Eudora Welty on Charlotte’s Web ; W.H. Auden on Tolkein’s The Fellowship of the Ring ; Kurt Vonnegut on Tom Wolfe; and Margaret Atwood on Toni Morrison’s Beloved . A long list of other famous reviewers appends the volume.

Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-23461-7

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Clarkson Potter

Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021

HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL NONFICTION

Share your opinion of this book

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Awards & Accolades

Readers Vote

Our Verdict

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

More by David Grann

THE <i>WAGER</i>

BOOK REVIEW

by David Grann

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

More About This Book

Brendan Fraser Joins Cast of ‘Flower Moon’ Film

BOOK TO SCREEN

Oct. 20 Release For 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES

by Amy Tan ; illustrated by Amy Tan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2024

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.

A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.

In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“ Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression .” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”

Pub Date: April 23, 2024

ISBN: 9780593536131

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | GENERAL NONFICTION

More by Amy Tan

WHERE THE PAST BEGINS

  • Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
  • News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
  • Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
  • Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
  • Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
  • More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
  • About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Go To Top

Popular in this Genre

Close Quickview

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Sign in with Google

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

  • Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

new york times book review october 24 2021

Boomers Daily

Boomers Daily

new york times book review october 24 2021

Previews: New York Times Book Review – October 24

And this weekend’s issue of the Book Review is a special print edition dedicated to our 125th anniversary. You won’t want to miss it! pic.twitter.com/FaNvk2FCpi — New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) October 21, 2021

Share this:

Leave a reply cancel reply, news, views and reviews for the intellectually curious.

' src=

  • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
  • Subscribe Subscribed
  • Copy shortlink
  • Report this content
  • View post in Reader
  • Manage subscriptions
  • Collapse this bar

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Best Books We Read in 2021

By The New Yorker

Illustration of hand writing

“ De Gaulle ,” by Julian Jackson

Black and white cover image of an archival photograph of Charles de Gaulle in military uniform with men in suits and the...

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

This superb biography of the former French leader brilliantly explores how he managed to dominate his country’s political life for decades. Jackson’s account of De Gaulle’s youth and conservative milieu only enhances one’s respect for De Gaulle’s stand, in 1940, against the Vichy government, and his account of De Gaulle’s war years in London makes clear why Churchill and Roosevelt found him almost impossible to deal with. The second half of the book—which deals with De Gaulle’s return to power during the conflict in Algeria, and his somewhat autocratic presidency—is even more compelling; together the two halves form as good an argument as one can make for believing that a single individual can alter the course of history. But Jackson, with sublime prose and a sure grasp of the politics and personalities of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, never allows that argument to overshadow De Gaulle’s extremely difficult and domineering personality, and why it never entirely fit the democracy he helped rescue and then presided over. —Isaac Chotiner

“ Segu: A Novel ,” by Maryse Condé

Red black and yellow book cover with an old drawing of 5 people and a horse.

In a year that began with an attempted coup, it was good to remember that zealotry and factionalism have menaced every society—and often make for excellent storytelling, too. Maryse Condé’s 1984 novel “Segu” opens in the ruthlessly competitive capital of the eighteenth-century Bambara Empire, in present-day Mali, where the ruling mansa uneasily monitors the rise of Islam and the mysterious arrival of white explorers. Griots sing the exploits of a noble family, the Traores, whose sons are destined to suffer every consequence of modernity’s upheavals. Condé, who was born in Guadeloupe but spent years in West Africa, is the great novelist of the Afro-Atlantic world, and “Segu,” her masterpiece, is the mother of diaspora epics. The novel follows the Traores as they are scattered across the globe, from Moroccan universities to Brazilian sugarcane fields, pulled every which way by their ambitions, lusts, and religious yearnings. Condé excels at evoking the tensions of a world in flux, whether it’s the ambivalence of a man torn between his family gods and Islam’s cosmopolitanism or the cynicism of a wealthy mixed woman who sells slaves on the coast of Senegal. Despite its magisterial scope, “Segu” is also warm and gossipy, and completely devoid of the sentimental attachment to heritage that turns too many family sagas into ancestral stations of the cross. Condé has a wicked sense of humor that doesn’t play favorites, especially with her mostly male protagonists, whose naïve adventurism and absent-minded cruelty (especially toward women) profoundly shape the history that eludes their grasp. —Julian Lucas

“ Upper Bohemia: A Memoir ,” by Hayden Herrera

Black and white image of two children leaning out of a vintage car window. The title of the book covers part of the image.

I came upon this recent memoir while browsing the shelves at the Brooklyn Public Library, and was immediately drawn in by its cover: a black-and-white photograph of two young girls, perched out the back window of a sports car, whose ruffled blouses and blond hair suggested a kind of patrician free-spiritedness. Herrera is known for her biographies of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, but in “Upper Bohemia” she turns to the story of her own family, a high-Wasp clan as privileged as it was screwed up. During the nineteen-forties and fifties, Herrera and her older sister Blair were shunted, willy-nilly, between their divorced parents, both of whom were possessed of great looks, flighty temperaments, and intense narcissism. Her mother and father—each married five times—often disregarded the girls, treating them as considerably less significant than their own artistic or sexual fulfillment, whose pursuit took them through urbane, artsy circles in Cape Cod and New York, Mexico City and Cambridge. Herrera tells a fascinating cultural history of a particular milieu, but what is most affecting is her ability to channel, in sensate detail, the life of a lonely child trying to make sense of the world around her. Her tone carries a measure of detachment, but I often found it immensely moving. “Blair and I had not spent much time with our mother since the fall of 1948 when, after putting us on a train to go to boarding school in Vermont, she drove to Mexico to get a divorce,” she writes. “Whenever our mother did turn up, she brought presents from Mexico, animals made of clay or embroidered blouses for Blair and me. She always made everything sound wonderful. She was like sunshine. Blair and I moved toward her like two Icaruses, but we never touched her golden rays.” This is a beautiful book. —Naomi Fry

“ Long Live the Post Horn! ,” by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

Photograph of a hand reaching up to a phone on a desk where two framed pictures one of a building and one of a redheaded...

Vigdis Hjorth’s “Long Live the Post Horn!”—a swift, darkly funny novel about existential despair, collective commitment, and the Norwegian postal service—buoyed me during this strange, roiling year. Ellinor, the novel’s narrator, is a thirty-five-year-old public-relations consultant whose projects and relationships are characterized by a bleak, steady detachment. When her colleague Dag leaves town, Ellinor grudgingly inherits one of his clients: Postkom, the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, which wants to fight an E.U. directive that would usher in competition from the private sector. For Ellinor, the project begins creakily; gradually, she gets swept up. What results is a personal awakening of sorts—a newfound desire to live, connect, and communicate—and a genuinely gripping treatment of bureaucratic tedium. “Long Live the Post Horn!” is rich with political and philosophical inquiries, and gentle with their delivery. They arrive in the form of dissociative diary entries, awkward Christmas gift exchanges, and the world’s loneliest description of a sex toy (“he had bought the most popular model online, the one with the highest ratings”). There’s also a long yarn told by a postal worker, which makes for a wonderful, near-mythic embedded narrative. “What exactly did ‘real’ mean?” Ellinor wonders, experiencing a crisis of authenticity while desperately trying to produce P.R. copy for the Real Thing, an American restaurant chain. “Was the man behind the Real Thing himself the real thing, I wondered? I googled him; he looked like every other capitalist.” Expansive and mundane—this novel was, for me, sheer joy. —Anna Wiener

“ Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History ,” by Lea Ypi

A statue against a red background.

Some people feel free to imagine their lives unbounded by history. Lea Ypi did not have that luxury. Born in 1979 in Albania, then one of the most sealed-off countries in the Communist bloc, she had little reason to question her love for Stalin until the day, in 1990, that she went to hug his statue and found that protesters had decapitated it. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the edifice of Albanian socialism collapsed, too. Even more disorienting was the fact that Ypi’s parents turned out never to have believed in it—they’d just talked a good line to prevent their dissident, bourgeois backgrounds from tainting her prospects. Ypi’s new book, “Free,” out in the U.K. and to be published stateside in January, is a tart and tender childhood memoir. But it’s also a work of social criticism, and a meditation on how to live with purpose in a world where history, far from having ended, seems energized by disinformation. Ypi, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, is interested in how categories of thought—“proletariat,” for instance—were replaced by reductive rallying cries like “freedom.” “When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen,” she writes. “We chewed little, swallowed fast and remained hungry.” Her parents became leaders in the new democratic opposition but lost their savings to a shady investment scheme, and when the country devolved into civil war, in 1997, her formidable mother had to leave for Italy, where she worked cleaning houses. When Ypi studied abroad, her leftist friends didn’t want to hear about her experience: their socialism would be done right, and Albania’s was best forgotten. But Ypi is not in the business of forgetting—neither the repression of the system she grew up in nor the harshness of capitalism. Her book is a quick read, but, like Marx’s spectre haunting Europe, it stays with you. —Margaret Talbot

“ Harrow: A Novel ,” by Joy Williams

Bright green cover with an illustration of a horse stuck in black oil at the center.

I have already written at length about the wonder of Joy Williams’s most recent novel , “Harrow.” But I feel compelled to re-state my case. The book is set in a world that climate change has transformed into a grave, and it’s dense with wild oddity, mystical intelligence, and with a keenness and beauty that start at the sentence level but sink down to the book’s core. “Harrow” tracks a teen-ager named Khristen across the desert, where she eventually meets up with a sort of “terrorist hospice” of retirees determined to avenge the earth. Her companion, Jeffrey, is either a ten-year-old with an alcoholic mother or the Judge of the Underworld. Williams, the real Judge of the Underworld, moonlights here as a theologist, animal-rights activist, mad oracle, social historian, and philosopher of language. Her comic set pieces—e.g., a birthday party in which the hastily provisioned cake depicts a replica, in icing, of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”—unlock tears, and her elegies wrest out laughter, if only because it’s absurd to find such pleasure in a study of devastation. When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me. —Katy Waldman

“ A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera ,” by Vivien Schweitzer

Blue image of an opera stage where one character points a sword at another character who lies on the floor in the...

My late grandfather spent most of his weekends holed up in his study—a sunken room, adorned with a ratty Chesterfield sofa and posters from various international chess championships—listening to opera. As a child, I found this practice impenetrable. I didn’t understand the languages blaring out of his record player, and I wasn’t old enough to grasp the rhapsodic emotion inherent in the form. Opera is about Big Feelings; it radiates youth, yet it remains a passion that most people age into. (Perhaps that has something to do with the cost of a Met ticket.) Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly all I wanted to do was listen to Maria Callas, whose unhinged arias clicked into place as the soundtrack for my anxious, pacing mind. My grandfather was no longer around to discuss my fixation, but, fortunately, I found Vivien Schweitzer’s 2018 book, “A Mad Love,” which is a sparkling cultural history of opera’s greatest composers and their obsessive brains. Beginning with Monteverdi and barrelling through to Philip Glass, the book is about the blood and sweat that goes into writing an opera (an often lunatic effort, it seems), and about the feverish attachment fans have to the resulting work. I found myself tearing through it in the bathtub, delighted not just to inhale the gossipy backstories of the “Ring” cycle and “La Traviata” but to join the society of opera nuts of which my grandfather was a card-carrying member. I finally understood what he was listening for on those Sunday afternoons: anguish, joy, love, betrayal. —Rachel Syme

“ Not One Day ,” by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan

Pink and orange abstract art cover with the title 'Not one day printed in large text.

It is a peculiar feeling, reading a book that seems to have been written for you but wasn’t. The friend who recommended the Oulipian writer Anne Garréta’s “Not One Day” must have known that I would find this merger of intimacy and anonymity irresistible. While recovering from an accident that has left her body immobile, the book’s narrator, a nomadic literature professor, decides that she will write about the women she has desired. Each woman will be identified by a letter of the alphabet; to each letter, she will devote five hours a day for precisely one month. She knows that narrating desire requires discipline—and she finds that desire always, always exceeds it. Letters are skipped and jumbled, so that the table of contents reads, “B, X, E, K, L, D, H, N, Y, C, I, Z.” The narrator takes a long break from the project and, when she comes back to it, one of the stories she writes is fiction. Slowly, the categories that keep desire and its creation of “our little selves” in check—self and other, past and present, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, solipsistic alienation and shared passion—get wonderfully and terrifyingly muddled. Instead of a confession written in the familiar “alphabet of desire,” we glimpse the making of a whole new language. I could smother the book with adoration—it is aching and maddening, intelligent and wildly sexy. But it would be simpler to say that reading it is like meeting someone new and feeling the world come undone. Here is a book that insists that the desire for fiction, for its mimicry and its mirage, is indistinguishable from the desire for another person. —Merve Emre

“ Tom Stoppard: A Life ,” by Hermione Lee

Black and white photograph of Tom Stoppard with the title and author's name printed over it in blue and white type.

For a time this year, Lee’s newest biography just seemed to be around , and during a couple weeks when I was ostensibly reading other things, I found myself opening it in odd moments—over breakfast, waiting for the pasta pot to boil—until I realized that I’d worked my way through the whole thing. The biography is nearly nine hundred pages, so my experience of it as a side pleasure, a lark, is a testament to Lee’s craft. Much of Stoppard’s history is widely known: his passage from peripatetic refugee youth to Bristol newspaperman and radio-drama hack, and then, with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” to fame and fortune as a witty playwright. What Lee adds is detail, particularly around interesting career turns, plus a big serving of her own admiration. (Not entirely to its credit, I think, this is the sort of biography that everyone dreams of having written about them; our protagonist is always brilliant, invariably a delight. Stoppard, on reading it, was apparently moved to clarify that he was “not as nice as people think.”) What Stoppard contributes is an air of whimsy on the ride up his great tower of success. There is pleasant cohesion to his body of work, with its blend of bookish intellection and breezy verbal humor. Off the page, it becomes clear, he pairs casual social climbing with the cheery pursuit of material ease, often courtesy of Hollywood. He has maintained a stream of scriptwriting work, on projects such as the Indiana Jones franchise, and his constant efforts to boondoggle more luxury out of what’s offered him—his budget must be increased to accommodate a high-end hotel suite, he tells a studio, “because I prefer not to sleep and work in the same room”—are among the smaller charms of this book. Lee’s biography is ultimately such a pleasure, though, because it is a writer’s book: full of respect for the thrill of the craft, able to keep the progress of the life and the work aloft in the right balance. To read it is to be excited about the act of literature all over again. —Nathan Heller

“ Novel 11, Book 18 ,” by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

Beige cover with a simple drawing of a shirt and tie and green die.

I first encountered “Novel 11, Book 18,” by the great Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, on a bright, warm day, on a walk with some friends who were visiting from out of town. Buzzed on the weather and the handsome paperback cover—deep green on cream—and, above all, on the nearness of my friends, I bought it. It was almost funny, then, to discover how relentlessly bleak the book is. Published in 1992, but released in the United States this year, by New Directions, with an English translation by Sverre Lyngstad, it tells the story of Bjørn Hansen, a mild-mannered civil servant who has left his wife and son in pursuit of his lover, Turid Lammers. The change of life means a change of locale: Hansen leaves Oslo and settles in Kongsberg, a small, airless town where he soon joins an amateur theatre troupe, of which Turid is widely considered the most talented performer and a kind of spiritual leader. In probably the best and darkest bit of situational comedy that I read all year, Hansen tries to persuade the troupe—usually a vehicle for light musicals—to put on a production of Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” He wins out, but the show is a terrible flop—and, worse in Hansen’s eyes, Turid gives a cynical, crowd-pleasing performance that inoculates her, and only her, from the more general disapproval of the audience. The relationship is soon over. Solstad tells the story in deceptively simple sentences that repeat themselves in a fugal fashion, gathering new and ever sadder aspects of meaning as they recur. Hansen, wading through the disappointing wash of his life—he’s having the worst midlife crisis imaginable—eventually cooks up a scheme of revenge that’s so sad and absurd it’s almost slapstick. The book’s generic title implies that tiny tragedies like Hansen’s are happening everywhere, all the time, as a simple cost of being alive. For Solstad, what feels like a reprieve—sun and intimacy, the company of friends—is just another step on a tightrope that stretches across the void. Maybe save this one for summer. —Vinson Cunningham

“ Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes ,” by Claire Wilcox

White image of an embroidered piece of fabric with buttons and a needle and thread with text over it.

Among the books that most surprised and most moved me this year was “Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes,” a memoir by Claire Wilcox. Wilcox is senior curator of fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and she writes about clothing with an intoxicating specificity: century-old gowns are made from “narrow lengths of the finest Japanese silk, hand-stitched together and then pleated into rills like the delicate underside of a field mushroom.” But this fragmentary, dreamlike book is not about fashion as it is often understood. There is no industry gossip, no analysis of trends. Rather, Wilcox uses her encounters with objects—the bags of lace in the museum’s collection, the pair of purple velvet trousers she borrowed from a charismatic friend—to explore themes of love and loss, birth and bereavement, family and tribe. The book, which is as skillful and oblique in its structure as the precious gowns she describes, is stitched together with loving care from narrative scraps and images, ultimately revealing how materiality and memory operate on one another, so that the sensation of holding a button in her fingers brings Wilcox back to her earliest memory of fastening her mother’s cardigan: “buttoning and unbuttoning her all the way up, and then all the way down again.” —Rebecca Mead

“ Sabbath’s Theater ,” by Philip Roth

Red cover of a detail of Sailor and Girl  by German painter Otto Dix.

Over the course of the pandemic, the actor John Turturro and I have been adapting Roth’s novel for the stage, so I’ve read the book probably twenty times now. I have been astonished again and again. It’s never the adulterous urinating or alte kaker underwear-sniffing that shock me. It’s Roth’s singular capacity for conjuring death—its promises, its terrors, its reliability, and the relentless ache that it leaves behind. There are times when Roth approaches the subject with a cosmic lightheartedness: “Exactly how present are you, Ma? Are you only here or are you everywhere?” Mickey Sabbath, the aging, insatiable puppeteer, asks his dead mother’s ghost. “Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is ‘knowing’ no longer an issue?” When it pertains to Drenka, Sabbath’s Croatian mistress—his “sidekicker,” as she puts it—death is tinged with so much yearning that it’s almost too much to bear, for both Sabbath and the reader (this one, anyway). “Got used to the oxygen prong in her nose. Got used to the drainage bag pinned to the bed,” Sabbath thinks, recalling the last of many nights he spent at her hospital bedside. “Cancer too widespread for surgery. I’d got used to that, too.” For all of Sabbath’s lubricious opportunism, Drenka is his one love. “We can live with widespread and we can live with tears; night after night, we can live with all of it, as long as it doesn’t stop.” But it does, of course. It always stops. Though not, in this book, for Sabbath, Roth’s most unrepentantly diabolical hero, despite his relentless flirtation with suicide: “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” —Ariel Levy

“ Warmth ,” by Daniel Sherrell

Orange cover with an image of an orange flower field and white and black text.

In “Warmth,” the writer and organizer Daniel Sherrell’s bracing début memoir , he refers to climate change as “the Problem”—the horrifying, galvanizing fact that should cause all sentient people to lose sleep, to shout themselves hoarse, to reorient their lives in fundamental ways. And yet, apart from a small minority, most people seem content to listen to the string ensemble on the deck of the Titanic, shushing anyone who tries to interrupt the music. To be clear, this is my harsh indictment, not Sherrell’s. For an unabashed climate alarmist, he is mostly compassionate to the quietists, in part because, like all Americans, he used to be one. Sherrell was born in 1990. His father, an oceanographer, took long research trips to the polar ice caps. Of all people, the Sherrells understood what an emergency climate change was—and yet their household was a normal one, in the sense that the Problem didn’t come up much. “Even when all the evidence was there before us,” Sherrell writes, “it was difficult to name.” The book is marketed as a climate-grief memoir, and it certainly is that, but what came through for me, even more clearly than the grief, was a kind of existential irony: not only are we apparently unable to solve the Problem, we can’t even seem to find an honest way to talk about it. Most Americans claim to believe the science; the science says that, unless we make drastic changes, the future will be cataclysmic; and yet, Sherrell observes, “it still sounded uncouth, even a little ridiculous, to spell this all out in conversation.” This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, and not even with much of a whimper. “Warmth,” written in the form of a letter to a child that Sherrell may or may not conceive, is not a thesis-y sort of book. But, if it has a central claim, it’s that the activist chestnut “Don’t mourn, organize!” is a facile mantra, a false choice. Why not both? —Andrew Marantz

“ Brothers and Keepers ,” by John Edgar Wideman

Orange and yellow illustration of two hands reaching out for one another.

John Edgar Wideman was teaching at the University of Wyoming in the mid-seventies when, one day, his brother, Robert, showed up in town unannounced. Wideman had a young family and a steady job as a writer and an academic. Robert was on a more tumultuous path; he was on the run after a botched robbery back home, in Pittsburgh, had ended with one of his accomplices shooting a man, who later died from his injuries. Published in 1984, “Brothers and Keepers” is Wideman’s attempt to reckon with their diverging lives, and with the bond that they will never relinquish. He sifts through episodes from their childhood, searching for overlooked turning points. No single genre can tell such a complex story. Sometimes, the book is about the deprivations of the criminal-justice system, as Wideman describes in granular detail his visits to the prison where Robert serves a life term. (Robert would pursue education himself in prison, and, in 2019, his sentence was commuted.) At other times, the book feels surreal and fantastical, as Wideman entertains the possibility that their lives might have taken them elsewhere. And there are moments of austerity and dread, as he contemplates the ethics of turning his brother into a character. I often find that memoirs flatten the degree to which “the personal is political” is an idea rife with contradictions. What makes “Brothers and Keepers” so absorbing is that Wideman feels love but not sympathy—not for his brother, and certainly not for himself. —Hua Hsu

2021 in Review

  • Richard Brody on the best movies .
  • Doreen St. Félix on essential TV shows .
  • Ian Crouch on the funniest jokes .
  • Amanda Petrusich on the best music .
  • Alex Ross on notable performances and recordings .
  • Michael Schulman on the greatest onscreen and onstage performances .
  • Kyle Chayka on the year in vibes .
  • Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

new york times book review october 24 2021

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Can State Supreme Courts Preserve&-or Expand&-Rights?

By Eyal Press

What Does Freud Still Have to Teach Us?

By Merve Emre

Why Liberals Struggle to Defend Liberalism

By Adam Gopnik

Briefly Noted

new york times book review october 24 2021

Locus Online

The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field

new york times book review october 24 2021

The New York Times Best Books of 2021

new york times book review october 24 2021

They also listed 100 Notable Books of 2020 , including the following titles of genre interest:

  • Appleseed , Matt Bell (Custom House)
  • Bewilderment , Richard Powers (Norton)
  • Build Your House Around My Body , Violet Kupersmith (Random House)
  • A Calling for Charlie Barnes , Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown)
  • Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth , Wole Soyinka (Pantheon)
  • Cloud Cuckoo Land , Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
  • Detransition, Baby , Torrey Peters (One World)
  • Harlem Shuffle , Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
  • How Beautiful We Were , Imbolo Mbue (Random House)
  • Klara and the Sun , Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf)
  • Light Perpetual , Francis Spufford (Scribner)
  • The Lincoln Highway , Amor Towles (Viking)
  • The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois , Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (HarperCollins)
  • The Magician , Colm Tóibín (Scribner)
  • The Morning Star , Karl Ove Knausgaard (Penguin)
  • My Year Abroad , Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)
  • One Last Stop , Casey McQuiston (St. Martin’s Griffin)
  • Our Country Friends , Gary Shteyngart (Random House)
  • The Sentence , Louise Erdrich (Harper)
  • Something New Under the Sun , Alexandra Kleeman (Hogarth)
  • Strange Beasts of China , Yan Ge (Melville House)
  • The Sun Collective , Charles Baxter (Pantheon)
  • Velvet Was the Night , Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)
  • What Strange Paradise , Omar El Akkad (Knopf)

For more information, see The New York Times  website .

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

new york times book review october 24 2021

You May Also Like...

new york times book review october 24 2021

2020 Locus Awards Finalists

The orange wins short film award.

new york times book review october 24 2021

2019 Aspen Words Finalists

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

text reads, join our patreon & support what we do

We are a READER-SUPPORTED VENUE! That means you!

If you enjoy our book reviews, news, recommendations, and resources… if you value keeping up on new books and staying in touch with the field…

Support our work via Locus  Patreon and show the love, so we can keep doing the magazine, the website, and the Locus Awards! Books, short fiction, art, conventions, publishing industry news, international reports, recommended reading lists – don’t let them disappear!

We use essential cookies to make our site work. With your consent, we may also use non-essential cookies to improve user experience, analyze website traffic, and serve ads to our users based on their visit to our sites and to other sites on the internet. By clicking “Accept,“ you agree to our website’s cookie use as described in our Cookie Policy .  Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Ads Settings.

This is a grid showing parts of nine book covers.

The Best Books of the Year (So Far)

The nonfiction and novels we can’t stop thinking about.

Supported by

  • Share full article

By The New York Times Books Staff

  • Published May 24, 2024 Updated June 7, 2024

Fiction | Nonfiction

We’re almost halfway through 2024 and we at The Book Review have already written about hundreds of books. Some of those titles are good. Some are very good. And then there are the following.

We suspect that some (though certainly not all) will be top of mind when we publish our end-of-year, best-of lists. For more thoughts on what to read next, head to our book recommendation page .

The cover of “James” is black. The title is in yellow, and the author’s name is in white.

James , by Percival Everett

In this reworking of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River, is the narrator, and he recounts the classic tale in a language that is his own, with surprising details that reveal a far more resourceful, cunning and powerful character than we knew.

Local bookstores | Barnes and Noble | Amazon

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Advertisement

More from the Review

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

June 20, 2024

Current Issue

2024 Publication Schedule

This is the publication schedule and mailing dates for the print edition of  The New York Review of Books .

Volume LXXI

1 January 18, 2024   December 28, 2023
2 February 8, 2024   January 18, 2024
3 February 22, 2024   February 1, 2024
4 March 7, 2024   February 15, 2024
5 March 21, 2024   February 29, 2024
6 April 4, 2024   March 14, 2024
7 April 18, 2024 Spring Books March 28, 2024
8 May 9, 2024 Art Issue April 18, 2024
9 May 23, 2024   May 2, 2024
10 June 6, 2024   May 16, 2024
11 June 20, 2024 University Press May 30, 2024
12 July 18, 2024 Fiction Issue June 27, 2024
13 August 15, 2024 Summer Issue July 25, 2024
14 September 19, 2024 Fall Books August 29, 2024
15 October 3, 2024   September 12, 2024
16 October 17, 2024   September 26, 2024
17 November 7, 2024 Election Special October 17, 2024
18 November 21, 2024   October 31, 2024
19 December 5, 2024   November 14, 2024
20 December 19, 2024 Holiday Issue November 28, 2024

new york times book review october 24 2021

Subscribe and save 50%!

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in

IMAGES

  1. The New York Times Book Review

    new york times book review october 24 2021

  2. new york times 10 best books of 2021

    new york times book review october 24 2021

  3. Reviewing the Book Review

    new york times book review october 24 2021

  4. How The New York Times Book Review Evolved Over 125 Years

    new york times book review october 24 2021

  5. new york times recommended books 2021

    new york times book review october 24 2021

  6. new york times best books 2021 list

    new york times book review october 24 2021

COMMENTS

  1. Book Review

    Reviews, essays, best sellers and children's books coverage from The New York Times Book Review.

  2. Best Sellers

    The New York Times Best Sellers are up-to-date and authoritative lists of the most popular books in the United States, based on sales in the past week, including fiction, non-fiction, paperbacks ...

  3. The Best Books of 2021

    When We Cease to Understand the World. By Benjamín Labatut. Translated by Adrian Nathan West. Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century's greatest thinkers to explore ...

  4. Book Review: 'The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois ...

    The title "The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois" brings to mind, of course, the T. S. Eliot poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.". Jeffers is an award-winning poet, and she is never ...

  5. Jonathan Franzen Takes On the Domestic Ills of the 1970s

    For the civically careworn Franzen, "Crossroads" must feel almost like escapist fiction. The Hildebrandts of New Prospect, Ill., just outside Chicago, now join the Lamberts and the Berglunds ...

  6. ‎The Book Review on Apple Podcasts

    Connecting to Apple Music. If you don't have iTunes, download it for free. If you have iTunes and it doesn't open automatically, try opening it from your dock or Windows task bar. 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 ...

  7. List of The New York Times number-one books of 2021

    Fiction. The following list ranks the number-one best-selling fiction books, in the combined print and e-books category. [1] The most frequent weekly best seller of the year was The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah with 5 weeks at the top of the list, followed closely by The Duke and I by Julia Quinn with 4 weeks. Date. Book.

  8. 'New York Times' Reveals Its Best Books of 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.

  9. Table of Contents

    A Mind in Pain. For Robert Burton, describing melancholy was a way of describing the world. Two recent books on depression suggest that today, virtually all we know about the subject is still open to debate. The Anatomy of Melancholy. by Robert Burton, edited by Angus Gowland. The Empire of Depression: A New History.

  10. The New York Times Book Review

    0028-7806. The New York Times Book Review ( NYTBR) is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. [2] The magazine's offices are located near Times Square in ...

  11. Richard Powers on 'Bewilderment'

    In "Bewilderment," Richard Powers's first novel since he won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Overstory," an astrobiologist named Theo Byrne looks for life on other planets while struggling to ...

  12. The New York Times Book Review

    About The New York Times Book Review. A "delightful" (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years.Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public.

  13. The New York Times Best Seller list

    The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. Since October 12, 1931, The New York Times Book Review has published the list weekly. In the 21st century, it has evolved into multiple lists, grouped by genre and format, including fiction and nonfiction, hardcover, paperback and electronic.

  14. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

    A capacious history of the influential publication. To commemorate the 125th anniversary of the New York Times Book Review, current deputy editor Jordan, assisted by Qasim, offers a fascinating selection of reviews, letters, interviews, essays, announcements, book lists, bits of gossip (Colette, on a ship, wore sandals without stockings!), and op-ed pieces published in the supplement since its ...

  15. The New York Times

    Editors' Choice / Staff Picks From the Book Review. Paperback Row / Bad Trip. THE WIDE WIDE SEA. Up Close / 'North Korea: The People's Paradise,' by Tariq Zaidi. The Book Review Podcast. Previous issue date: The New York Times - Book Review - June 02, 2024

  16. Previews: New York Times Book Review

    Previews: New York Times Book Review - October 24 October 21, 2021 boomersdaily Leave a comment And this weekend's issue of the Book Review is a special print edition dedicated to our 125th anniversary.

  17. The Best Books We Read in 2021

    Illustration by June Park. " De Gaulle ," by Julian Jackson. 2021 in Review. New Yorker writers reflect on the year's highs and lows. This superb biography of the former French leader ...

  18. Fintan O'Toole

    Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Email Address. Continue. June 20, 2024. Current Issue. ... Fintan O'Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His most recent book is Shakespeare is Hard, ... October 21, 2023 Defying Tribalism.

  19. The New York Times Best Books of 2021

    The editors of The New York Times Book Review selected their ten best books of the year, including The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (HarperCollins) and How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue (Random House). They also listed 100 Notable Books of 2020, including the following titles of genre interest:

  20. The Best Books of 2024 (So Far)

    The Hunter, by Tana French. For Tana French fans, every one of the thriller writer's twisty, ingenious books is an event. This one, a sequel to "The Searcher," once again sees the retired ...

  21. 2024 Publication Schedule

    This is the publication schedule and mailing dates for the print edition of The New York Review of Books. Volume LXXI Issue No. Cover Date Special Issue Mail Date 1 January 18, 2024 December 28, 2023 2 February 8, 2024 January 18, 2024 3 February 22, 2024 February 1, 2024 4 March 7, […]