The Book Review

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 Wood

Nonfiction

• “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

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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.

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 books@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.

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.

On Nov. 10, 1975, during a calamitous storm, the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk below the waves of Lake Superior. All 29 men aboard went down with the vessel. With no survivors and no eyewitnesses, there’s always been a sense of mystery to what is arguably the most famous shipwreck in American history. The story itself was almost immediately immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s surprise hit ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Fifty years on, John U. Bacon has written a new account of the disaster. In “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he humanizes the story, telling stories of each man on the ship as well as several of the families left behind. (Readers will also learn a good deal about the history of industry and shipping on the Great Lakes.). In this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, Bacon spoke with the host Gilbert Cruz about his new book.

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.