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Celebrating 15 Years of “The Book Review” Podcast

The podcast, which debuted in 2006, features the biggest names in literature.

The New York Times is thrilled to celebrate the 15th anniversary of “The Book Review” podcast this month, our show that takes listeners inside the literary world. Produced since 2006, “The Book Review” is the longest-running podcast at The Times.

Throughout the years, the show, hosted by Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review (Sam Tanenhaus was the founding host) and produced by Pedro Rosado of Headstepper Productions, has featured some of the biggest names in literature: from Gary Shteyngart, the very first author to appear on the show, to Toni Morrison to John Updike to John Grisham to Colson Whitehead, and in nonfiction, writers ranging from Michael Lewis to Calvin Trillin to Isabel Wilkerson. “The great joy of this podcast for me as host is in the guests,” Paul said. “It’s such a privilege to ask the writers I admire most about how and why they’ve written the books they’ve put out in the world.”

The podcast, which routinely appears at the top of the Arts chart on Apple Podcasts, has also featured voices from throughout The Times, including Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, Wesley Morris and Frank Bruni, Thomas Friedman and James B. Stewart, to name a few.

Over the past 15 years, “The Book Review” podcast has missed only three weeks — the first three weeks of quarantine in March 2020. “We were pretty desperate to get back,” Paul said. “The podcast crew here at the Book Review is small and works closely together. This allowed us both to keep one another company and to connect us to the outside world.”

You can read more about the history of the Book Review podcast, including some of the team’s fondest memories, here . To listen to Pamela’s favorite episodes from her eight years hosting the show (and interviews with more than 800 authors and critics), please head here .

Explore Further

Andrew lavallee named deputy, news and features, books, pamela paul to oversee daily and sunday book coverage, introducing “rabbit hole,” a new narrative audio series from the new york times.

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The Book Review

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

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;} Writing About NASA's Most Shocking Moment

The year 1986 was notable for two big disasters, both of them attributable to human error and bureaucratic negligence at competing super powers: 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 ...

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;} 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, her “Shadow and Bone” trilogy has been adapted for a Netflix series and her adult novels “Ninth House” and “Hell Bent” established her as a force to reckon with in the subgenre known as dark academia.

Now Bardugo is back with a new fantasy novel, “The Familiar,” and it’s also her first work of historic...

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 out of a sense of familial obligation and slowly, diligently begins building a new life for herself. A New York Times best seller, the book was also adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Saoirse Ronan — and now, 15 years after its publication, Tóibín has surprised himself by writing a sequel.

Book Club: Dolly Alderton's 'Good Material'

How to explain the British writer Dolly Alderton to an American audience? It might be best to let her work speak for itself — it certainly does! — but Alderton is such a cultural phenomenon in her native England that some context is probably helpful: “Like Nora Ephron, With a British Twist” is the way The New York Times Book Review put it when we reviewed her latest novel, “Good Material,” earlier this year.

“Good Material” tells th...

100 Years of Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster is not growing old quietly.

The venerable publishing house — one of the industry’s so-called Big 5 — is celebrating its 100th birthday this month after a period of tumult that saw it put up for sale by its previous owner, pursued by its rival Penguin Random House in an acquisition bid that fell apart after the Justice Department won an antitrust suit , then bought for $1.62 billion last fall by the private equity fir...

Looking Back at 50 Years of Stephen King

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie.” In the decades since, King has experimented with length, genre and style, but has always maintained his position as one of America’s most famous writers.

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, writing an essay on each as well as King su...

Books That Make Our Critics Laugh

Earlier this month, the Book Review’s staff critics — Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai — released a list of 22 novels they have found reliably funny since Joseph Heller’s landmark comic novel “Catch-22” came out in 1961. On this week’s episode, they tell Gilbert Cruz why “Catch-22” was their starting point, and explain a bit about their process: how they think about humor, how they made their choices, what books ...

Talking to Tana French About Her New Series

If you're familiar with Tana French, it's likely for her Dublin Murder Squad series of crime novels that kicked off in 2007 with "In the Woods." But her new book, "The Hunter," a sequel to 2020's "The Searcher," takes place outside of that series.

In this episode of the podcast, speaking to Sarah Lyall about her shift to new characters, French said, "I wasn't comfortable with sticking to the detective's perspective anymore. I think ...

Talking ‘Dune’: Book and Movies

Frank Herbert’s epic novel “Dune” and its successors have been entrenched in the science fiction and fantasy canon for almost six decades, a rite of passage for proudly nerdy readers across the generations. But “Dune” is experiencing a broader cultural resurgence at the moment thanks to Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptations starring Timothée Chalamet. (Part 2 is in theaters now.)

This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks to ...

Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘Erasure,’ by Percival Everett

It’s not often that the Academy Awards give the publishing world any gristle to chew on. But at this year’s Oscars ceremony — taking place on Sunday evening — one of the Best Picture contenders is all about book publishing: Cord Jefferson ’s “American Fiction” is adapted from the 2001 novel “ Erasure ,” by Percival Everett, and it amounts to a scathing, satirical indictment of publishers, readers and the insidious biases that the mark...

Tommy Orange on His "There There" Sequel

Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “ There There ” — one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018 — centered on a group of characters who all converge on an Indigenous powwow in modern-day Oakland, Calif. His follow-up, “ Wandering Stars ,” is both a prequel and a sequel to that book, focusing specifically on the character Orvil Red Feather and tracing several generations of his family through the decades before and after the even...

The Rise and Fall of The Village Voice

Tricia Romano’s new book, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” is an oral history of New York’s late, great alternative weekly newspaper The Village Voice, where she worked for eight years as the nightlife columnist. Our critic Dwight Garner reviewed the book recently — he loved it — and he visits the podcast this week to chat with Gilbert Cruz about oral histories in general and the gritty glamour of The Village Voice in particular.

Let's Talk About 'Demon Copperhead'

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “ Demon Copperhead ,” a riff on “David Copperfield” that moves Charles Dickens’s story to contemporary Appalachia and grapples engagingly with topics from poverty to ambition to opioid addiction, was one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2022 . And — unlike an actual copperhead — “Demon Copperhead” has legs: Many readers have told us it was their favorite book in 2023 as well.

In this week’s spoiler-fille...

4 Early-Year Book Recommendations

The early part of a year can mean new books to read, or it can mean catching up on older ones we haven’t gotten to yet. This week, Gilbert Cruz chats with the Book Review’s Sarah Lyall and Sadie Stein about titles from both categories that have held their interest lately, including a 2022 biography of John Donne, a book about female artists who nurtured an interest in the supernatural, and the history of a Jim Crow-era mental asylu...

'Killers of the Flower Moon': Book and Movie Discussion

Former New York Times film critic A.O. Scott joins to talk both David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon," which continues to sit near the top of the bestseller list, and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated film adaptation. 

Spoilers abound for both versions. (Also, for history.)

Talking the Joys and Rules of Open Marriage

Molly Roden Winter and her husband, Stewart, have been married for 24 years. But since 2008, by mutual agreement, they have also dated other people — an arrangement that Winter details in her new memoir, “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage.”

In this week’s episode, The Times’s Sarah Lyall chats with Winter about her book, her marriage and why she decided to go public.

“I didn’t see any representations of either people who were still suc...

Our Early 2024 Book Preview

It's gonna be a busy spring! On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Tina Jordan and Joumana Khatib about some of the upcoming books they’re anticipating most keenly over the next several months.

Books discussed in this week’s episode:

“Knife,” by Salman Rushdie

“James,” by Percival Everett

“The Book of Love,” by Kelly Link

“Martyr,” by Kaveh Akbar

“The Demon of Unrest,” by Erik Larson

“The Hunter,” by Tana French

“Wandering Stars,...

Steven Soderbergh on His Year in Reading

Every January on his website Extension765.com , the prolific director Steven Soderbergh looks back at the previous year and posts a day-by-day account of every movie and TV series watched, every play attended and every book read. In 2023, Soderbergh tackled more than 80 (!) books, and on this week's episode, he and the host Gilbert Cruz talk about some of his highlights. 

Here are the books discussed on this week’s episode:

"How to Li...

Book Club: 'The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store'

James McBride’s novel “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” was one of the most celebrated books of 2023 — a critical darling and a New York Times best seller. In their piece for the Book Review, Danez Smith called it “a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel” and praised its “precision, magnitude and necessary messiness.”

On this week’s episode, the Book Review editors MJ Franklin, Joumana Khatib and Elisabeth Egan conven...

How to Tell the Story of a Giant Wildfire

John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” takes readers to the petroleum boomtown of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in May 2016, when a wildfire that started in the surrounding boreal forest grew faster than expected and tore through the city, destroying entire neighborhoods in a rampage that lasted for days.

On this week’s episode, Vaillant (whose book was one of our 10 Best for 2023) calls it a “bell...

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The Book Review

By The New York Times

Writing About NASA's Most Shocking Moment

Fantasy superstar leigh bardugo on her new novel, colm toibin on his sequel to 'brooklyn', book club: dolly alderton's 'good material', 100 years of simon & schuster, looking back at 50 years of stephen king, books that make our critics laugh, talking to tana french about her new series, talking ‘dune’: book and movies, book club: let’s talk about ‘erasure,’ by percival everett, tommy orange on his "there there" sequel, the rise and fall of the village voice, let's talk about 'demon copperhead', 4 early-year book recommendations, 'killers of the flower moon': book and movie discussion, talking the joys and rules of open marriage, our early 2024 book preview, steven soderbergh on his year in reading, book club: 'the heaven and earth grocery store', how to tell the story of a giant wildfire, our critics' year in reading, 10 best books of 2023, talking barbra streisand and rebecca yarros, why is shakespeare's first folio so important, happy halloween: scary book recommendations, how did marvel become the biggest name in movies, what big books have yet to come out in 2023, what it's like to write a madonna biography, audiobooks are the best, zadie smith on her new historical novel, elon musk's biography and profiling naomi klein, talking to stephen king and september books to check out, amor towles sees dead people, what to read in august, ann patchett on her summery new novel, it's getting hot out there, colson whitehead and his crime novel sequel, great books from the first half of 2023, the magic of literary translation and 'bridget jones' at 25, remembering cormac mccarthy and robert gottlieb, what it’s like to write an mlk jr. biography, summer book preview and 9 thrillers to read, on reading ‘beloved’ over and over again, remembering martin amis, essential neil gaiman and a.i. book freakout, pulitzer winners, book bans and what to read in may, eleanor catton on ‘birnam wood’, david grann on the wreck of the h.m.s. wager, the enduring appeal of judy blume and gabriel garcía márquez, what we're reading, victor lavalle talks about horror and ‘lone women’, books about the oscars, revisiting 'wisconsin death trip,' 50 years later, on reading "a wrinkle in time", public libraries, and profiling paul harding, "lives of the wives: five literary marriages", a look ahead at the season's big books, the critics’ picks: a year in reading, the 10 best books of 2022, bringing down harvey weinstein, taffy brodesser-akner discusses “fleishman is in trouble”, mark harris on his biography of mike nichols, n.k. jemisin on multiverses, revolution and the ‘soul’ of cities, jason zinoman talks about david letterman, siddhartha mukherjee talks about ‘the gene’, george saunders on ‘lincoln in the bardo’, revisiting baldwin vs. buckley, celeste ng on race, class and suburbia, the life and times of jann wenner and rolling stone, andrew sean greer on writing ‘less’, jennifer egan and the goon squad, david sedaris’s diaries, john lithgow on “drama” and maggie o'farrell on “hamnet”, robert caro on his career, roaring through paris with ‘kiki man ray’, poems in practice and in theory, chaos among spies after the berlin wall crumbles, diana goetsch on ‘this body i wore’, ‘son of elsewhere’ recounts life as a young immigrant, alice elliott dark on ‘fellowship point’, a novel about brilliant young game designers, sensing the world anew through other species, jackie, before marrying jack, tom perrotta on the return of tracy flick, one island, two men and lots of big questions, remembering the ‘great stewardess rebellion’, brian morton on ‘tasha: a son’s memoir’, john waters talks about his first novel, hernan diaz on ‘trust’ and money in fiction, jennifer egan talks about 'the candy house', liana finck reimagines the story of genesis, elizabeth alexander on 'the trayvon generation', fiction about lives in ukraine, life in an e.r. during covid, a personal tour of modern irish history, the science behind mental afflictions, how people first arrived 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politics of language, samantha power on what she's learned, two times reporters on ‘the education of brett kavanaugh’, trump, tv and america, the ruining of the american west, the politicization of academic life, jia tolentino on life with the internet, toni morrison's legacy, the fight for the supreme court, fiction about unprecedented situations, colson whitehead talks about 'the nickel boys', george f. will on conservatism’s homelessness, picking the best memoirs since 1969, taffy brodesser-akner talks about her first novel, jill lepore on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, the world's far corners and deepest depths, rethinking the epidemic of domestic violence, thrillers for summer, a trilogy about the american revolution begins, harper lee's unwritten true-crime book, the real life of a diplomat, told like a novel, laila lalami on 'the other americans', connecting the dots between reconstruction and jim crow, ruth reichl's delicious new memoir, the chernobyl disaster in 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michael lewis and tana french on their latest books, kate atkinson on 'transcription', the end of the ‘struggle’, esi edugyan on her booker-shortlisted 'washington black', a memoir from the hard-working ‘heartland’, 'the most secretly interesting place in america', the uses and misuses of identity, interrogating the change makers, rethinking the 'tangled tree' of life, lydia millet on 'fight no more', beth macy on 'dopesick', drawing history, true crime starring the creator of sherlock holmes, making a killing, from transcribing for obama to writing her own story, an inside view of putin, the latest in cyberwarfare, the life of atticus finch, the things we inherit, michael pollan on his acid test, dinosaurs, the master of horror and philip roth, david sedaris on ‘calypso’, lost at sea, amy chozick on 'chasing hillary', there is nothin' like a tune, julian barnes on 'the only story', jo nesbo reimagines ‘macbeth’, parenting in the age of omnipresent screens, tara westover on 'educated', 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new books about parenting, amy schumer on ‘girl with the lower back tattoo’, 'lights on, rats out', steve bannon's road to the white house, the world of jane austen fans, the history of the london zoo, silk on a stick, 'the boy who loved too much', china's world, al franken on life in the senate, david sedaris talks about his diaries, paris, london and new york in the age of revolution, joshua ferris on ‘the dinner party’, elizabeth warren on fighting for the middle class, gabourey sidibe and neil degrasse tyson, sheryl sandberg on life after tragedy, 'hamlet globe to globe', power and punishment, lives on the line, the charm of 'the idiot', 'ties' to ferrante, the definition of adulthood, points of no return, happy trails, the history of race and racism in america, neil gaiman's myths, george saunders on lincoln and lost souls, a brave look at depression, from brooklyn to the gulag, barack obama's legacy, edward snowden: hero, traitor or spy, should you stop eating sugar, how octopuses are like aliens, the year in reading, michael lewis and arianna huffington, the 10 best books of 2016, 100 notable books of 2016, thomas friedman on 'thank you for being late', michael chabon talks about 'moonglow', war stories, john grisham on 'the whistler', thrillers and true crime, beth macy’s ‘truevine’, the rise of hitler, 'sing for your life', american apartheid, simon schama's 'the face of britain', maureen dowd on clinton and trump, inside the new york times book review: mark thompson's 'enough said', inside the new york times book review: the attica uprising, inside the new york times book review: ‘adhd nation’, inside the new york times book review: ‘i contain multitudes’, inside the new york times book review: colson whitehead and jeffrey toobin, inside the new york times book review: colson whitehead, inside the new york times book review: ‘how to be a person in the world’, inside the new york times book review: megan abbott’s ‘you will know me’, inside the new york times book review: ‘we are not such things’, inside the new york times book review: the life of helen gurley brown, inside the new york times book review: ‘you’ll grow out of it’, inside the new york times book review: ‘hogs wild’, inside the new york times book review: why populism now, inside the new york times book review: susan faludi’s ‘in the darkroom’.

7 Book Review Podcasts for Discovering New Books

Arvyn Cerézo

Arvyn Cerézo is an arts and culture writer/reporter with bylines in Book Riot , Publishers Weekly , South China Morning Post , PhilSTAR Life , the Asian Review of Books , and other publications. You can find them on arvyncerezo.com and @ArvynCerezo on Twitter.

View All posts by Arvyn Cerézo

Book review podcasts are an engaging and accessible way to discover new books. Most of us only have so much time to read these days, much less read a book review from our favorite publications, magazines, or blogs. This makes book review podcasts a convenient alternative as you only have to let them run in the background.

Here to look for book review podcasts to listen to while on commute or while doing other stuff at home or work? Look no further because I’ve got lots of them in this list.

These book review podcasts release episodes weekly (or bi-weekly), with an exception to one, feature diverse authors, and underrepresented genres. What’s more, some of the book review podcasts below have lively author discussions that allow for authors to tell more about their books, their writerly lives, and their writing process, among other things.

And if that’s not your cup of tea, there are also shows in here that offer unbiased takes from other folks — without bringing the author into the discussion. Whatever your listening preference is, I’m sure that you can find podcasts in here that are tailored for your ears.

Ahead are seven of the best book review podcasts to get book recommendations and more.

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1. All The Books

This is one of Book Riot’s many podcasts that focuses on new releases every week. Sometimes, however, it also features backlist titles in special episodes called “All The Backlists.”

All The Books runs weekly and is hosted by Liberty Hardy and the editors of Book Riot. What I love about the show is that the hosts go in-depth in discussing books. I like the thoughtful commentary they provide to each title, even giving content warnings if there are. It’s an all-around fun and engaging show!

2. The Book Review by The New York Times

The editors at the New York Times talk about the week’s top books, what they are reading, some news in the book world, and a whole lot more in this podcast. They interview authors and have them tell more about their books. Episodes usually run 45-50 minutes, but sometimes they go up to an hour.

The show has been going on for some 15 years now, so they have a massive archive to listen to. What I love about it is that they feature prominent authors who provide unique insight on their works and answer questions the readers might have.

3. NPR’s Book of the Day

The show runs less than 15 minutes, so it has the perfect length to get your literary fix quickly, keep abreast of new and interesting books, and more. They also talk to authors in this show, chatting with them about their current releases. Borrowing language of the show’s promo, it’s “snackable and skimmable.” Despite its short length, you’ll get to learn a lot from the insightful literary discussions and reviews.

My favorite episodes are when they feature Constance Wu and Celeste Ng.

4. Asian Review of Books

This is a book review publication that focuses on books by Asian authors and books about Asia. In its podcast version, the host talks to authors about their relevant works and also touches on the current issues in the region. I love that this show focuses on authors from a marginalized community, which is kind of rare in bookish podcasts these days.

In here, they mostly discuss fiction and nonfiction books, and the topics can be “newsy” and a bit academic.

5. The Sapphic Book Review

This is a unique book review podcast that features sapphic books written by diverse authors. For the uninitiated, sapphic “includes lesbians, bisexual women, and nonbinary people who align with the term…All lesbian books are sapphic.”

In here, they mostly interview authors, digging deeper about their works. Sometimes, there are casual discussions, too. I love that I get recommended noteworthy books that are not on my radar yet.

6. Fully Booked by Kirkus Reviews

Every week, this show brings in authors for interviews, features the current best-selling titles, and more. When discussing a book, the host mostly quotes from the book reviews published in the magazine itself, and then the author joins the conversation for more context.

It’s a worthwhile podcast if you want to keep yourself posted with new, notable releases. If you read Kirkus Reviews magazine, then this is a must-listen show.

7. The Stack by Comic Book Club

A podcast dedicated to comics? That’s somewhat uncommon. In here, the hosts usually talk about new comic releases. The episodes go over an hour since they discuss titles, issues, artworks, and sometimes, the film counterparts, in depth.

If you read a lot of comics and want to stay in the know, then it’s a no-brainer.

Book review podcasts keep us entertained and at the same time informed of new releases. Since some of us are caught up in our lives, these podcasts make it easier for us to discover new favorites.

If you want more bookish content on audio, here are 33 of the Best Book Podcasts for All Genres and New Bookish Podcasts to Listen to in 2022 .

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Audio formatted version of the New York Times Book Review, weekly. Aftersight is a media organization that serves individuals with barriers to print. This podcast is produced by AINC under the Chafee Amendment to the Copyright Act which states that authorized nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide copyrighted works in specialized formats to individuals with barriers to print are exempt. By continuing to listen, you verify you have an eligible need.

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Customer reviews, new format a fall off in quality.

Big fall off in quality. Basically just a person reading text with no intonation. Old format, featured interviews with the authors and a lively interchange between staff members, was much more interesting and entertaining.

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About that new york times 401(k) podcast.

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“Have you listened to this?” I received several messages this morning asking if I’d listened to the New York Times New York Times New York Times The Daily podcast , titled “Was the 401(k) a Mistake?” The podcast interviews Times Magazine writer Michael Steinberger, who authored a recent article of the same title. I spoke to the author during the writing process.

But the article, and the podcast, unfortunately make clear that the real story was effectively already written: that 401(k)s have been a failure and Americans’ retirement security is suffering for it.

Consider two (alleged) facts that open the podcast, setting the stage for what will follow. Here’s the transcript:

Michael Steinberger, New York Times Magazine. “The concern is that [401(k)s] didn't work as well for many others and that a lot of Americans are now reaching retirement age without having adequate money put aside for their retirements.”

Host. “Just how inadequate is that retirement picture?”

Steinberger. “One estimate is that 49% of people in the 55 to 65 age [group] have nothing put aside for retirement….”

Host. “Half of the population of those at retirement, have nothing put away.”

Steinberger. “That's what the numbers indicate, and depending on the estimate we're looking at maybe 10 to 20% of all seniors already are living in poverty.”

Just at the open, where they’re setting the baseline, we have two inflammatory but provably false statements.

“The numbers” don’t in any way indicate that half of near-retirees have no retirement savings. Rather, about half of near-retirees have no retirement account , according to Federal Reserve data. But 35% of 55-64 year olds report they’re entitled to a traditional pension (think: pretty much anyone who worked in federal, state or local government).

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Another Fed survey includes retirement savings outside of traditional plans, such as taxable investment accounts, real estate or a small business. According to those data , 88% of Americans age 60 and over have retirement savings. So this statistic is simply wrong, and indeed has been fact-checked before .

What about the claim that 10 to 20% of all seniors already are living in poverty? It’s just wrong. In 2022, the official poverty rate among 65+ Americans was 10.8%, which is 1.6 percentage points below the rate for under-65 Americans. But as retirement experts well know, the data used to calculate the official poverty rate – the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey – defines “income” as money “received on a regular basis,” such as a monthly paycheck or Social Security benefit. Irregular payments, such as as-needed withdrawals from retirement accounts, aren’t counted as income. And, as Syl Schieber and I showed a decade ago in the Wall Street Journal , the data show that most retirement account withdrawals are not in fact counted as income.

The Census Bureau is trying to fix this problem. Last year, it released new figures that incorporated IRS data, which do include retirement account withdrawals as income. The Census Bureau found that, “For householders aged 65 and over, median household income is 27.3 percent higher, and poverty is 3.3 percentage points lower than in survey estimates.” Those new Census figures show just 6.4% of seniors with incomes below the poverty threshold. That’s down from 9.7% in 1990.

Now, if you want to know how many seniors are living in poverty – meaning, their actual spending on food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and the rest is less than the poverty threshold – we have data on that as well. Economists at the University of Chicago use the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey to track how much seniors actually spend. Spending, not income, is what determines our material standard of living. And these data, which are accessible at the Poverty Measurement Dashboard , shows that “spending poverty” declined from 23.9% in 1973 – when participation in traditional defined benefit pensions was at its peak – to 0.9% in 2022. Sure, the retirement system is broken.

Almost no seniors today have annual spending that is below the poverty threshold.

In short, from the get-go the picture painted of retirement security in the New York Times podcast is just incorrect. It doesn’t have to be incorrect. But the Times chose to promote a narrative that has very little rigorous evidence in its favor.

“The first generation to be fully reliant on 401(k) plans is now starting to retire,” the New York Times tells us. “As that happens, it is becoming clear just how broken the system is.”

What really is broken is the news media’s commitment to telling a story that’s based in reality and backed by facts and data.

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Kristi Noem’s latest memoir received 'dagger of death' on New York Times Best Sellers list

Gov. Kristi Noem’s recently released memoir, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” spent about a week in May listed at No. 9 on The New York Times Best-Sellers List for combined print and e-book nonfiction, but it was also branded with the Times’ ominous “dagger of death” symbol (†). 

The little mark is used to identify books on the bestseller list with sales figures that include retailers who reported "receiving bulk orders," according to The New York Times website . But, research shows colloquially that little dagger can cast doubt about whether those behind the books allegedly "bought" their way onto the list with such orders or reached the list in a questionable way. Hence, the symbol's nickname.

The book, released May 7, has already faced significant controversy, and Noem is one of several being considered for former President Donald Trump’s 2024 vice-presidential pick. Those controversies include a passage that describes her shooting her 14-month-old hunting dog Cricket and a goat ,  and at least two corrections needed to be issued tied to false statements inside.

No. 1 international and Wall Street Journal bestselling ghostwriter of more than 80 books, Joshua Lisec , has previously provided insight into the ghostwriting process, and where some of the missteps and factual errors in Noem's book may unfolded along the way.

“This raises suspicions that these are not 'real' book sales but rather the author's own organization(s) placing bulk orders for the book and shipping to a myriad of different addresses to look like ‘real’ bulk purchases," Lisec said of the dagger's meaning. "It is considered a stain on one’s reputation in the publishing industry, …and you become marked for life as an ‘authentic fake.'"

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

The book was on the list for the week of May 20-26. As of May 27, the book was no longer on the list, though it's unclear why.

“Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, if and when they are included, are at the discretion of The New York Times Best-Seller List Desk editors based on standards for inclusion that encompass proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations," Melissa Torres, manager of external communications for The New York Times said of the symbol. "When included, such bulk purchases appear with a dagger."

The Times’ Best-Seller lists are derived from a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of bookstores and online retailers, applied consistently to ensure an accurate reflection of what’s overly popular now.

But the impact of the Best-Seller list is clear: Books on it can gain substantial credibility and commercial momentum. Appearing on this list can significantly boost a book's visibility and sales and often solidify an author's reputation in the literary, and in Noem’s case, political worlds.

The South Dakota Governor’s first book, “Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland” also made the New York Times Bestseller List when it was first released in June 2022 at No. 14. This publication did not, however, possess the dagger of death symbol. 

A shadow of a doubt

Written with the intent of delving deeper into her political career, the focus of Noem’s book has been overshadowed. And that shadow looms over 14-month-old hunting dog Cricket, and the fact Noem did not meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, as the narrative initially portrayed.

More: Did Kristi Noem shoot her dog? 'No Going Back' and its various controversies, explained

The inaccuracy of meeting Kim Jong-un, as well as the false claim that in late 2016 Sen. Mike Rounds called for Donald Trump to drop out of the presidential race , has prompted Noem’s publisher to make corrections and reissue the book in print.

Noem's team acknowledged the errors and assured corrections in future editions, but the controversies have led to the cancellation of some national interviews and the evasion of inquiring local media outlets.

More: A ghostwriter explains why Kristi Noem’s new memoir might be hard to find in Sioux Falls

After reaching out to Noem’s Chief of Communications, Ian Fury, multiple times for comment about the symbol her book has received, the Argus Leader has yet to hear back.

What does this say about Kristi Noem?

Associate Professor Emeritus Michael Card, who has a Ph.D. in political science, public policy and administration at the University of South Dakota, said purchasing books in bulk is fairly common, especially for political books “that otherwise wouldn’t sell very well.”

Card said selling the book in bulk is not necessarily a character flaw, but only a method to sell them.  

“We know that Gov. Noem is fairly popular among the conservative speaking circuit,” Card said. “She seems to be able to raise lots of money, so it may have been one of the donors to conservative or Republican causes that may have purchased those books.”

More: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem speaks before Trump supporters in Florida book event

When it comes to addressing the contents of the bestseller though, Card said Noem could have handled the inaccuracies a little differently.

“To a large extent, you know, the cues that seemed to work I mean, ironically, for ‘No Going Back’ is to use the Donald Trump method and either not address it, just keep moving on, or to say, ‘I'm not going to talk about that,’ and just move on, and that just didn't work,” Card said. 

Card said denying these mistakes “just makes it seem worse.” In the end, Card said these controversies over Noem’s memoir may or may not be temporary.

“It's very clear that Gov. Noem believes that she has a recipe for… how to lead America out of its current malaise," he said.

The Best Relationship Advice No One Ever Told You

The Mel Robbins Podcast with Matthew Hussey

Listen to the Mel Robbins Podcast twice per week, every Monday and Thursday, to create a better life.

Do you want to know the best relationship advice no one has ever told you before? 

In today’s episode, Mel is revealing the one rule about relationships you must know.

There is a game-changing framework that will help any relationship go the distance, and once you hear it, you’ll want to share it with everyone you know. 

It reveals why some relationships fail, and it also gives you the secret to sustaining a strong and successful relationship.

Here to explain this “4 Levels” framework is New York Times bestselling author Matthew Hussey. 

Matthew has been helping people for more than 17 years to feel more confident and in control of their relationships. His YouTube channel is number one in the world for love life advice, with over half a billion views.

By the end of today’s episode, you’ll know when it’s time to let go of a relationship, when it’s worth fighting for, and the 4 habits of all successful relationships.

If you liked this episode, you’ll want to listen to this one next: 3 Simple Ways to Get the Love You Want

Connect with Mel:

• Watch the episodes on YouTube 
• Follow Mel on Instagram 
• The Mel Robbins Podcast Instagram
• Mel's TikTok 
• Sign up for Mel’s newsletter 

In this episode:

• 2:38: Do you want to feel more confident and in control of your relationships? 
• 3:48: What the 4 level framework for any relationship is.  
• 4:56: The level that is the most dangerous level to be stuck in with someone.  
• 7:47: How to really know if someone is willing to commit to you. 
• 9:45: How to have the “what is this” conversation with the person you are newly dating. 
• 11:43: How to calmly communicate what you need in a relationship.
• 17:10: If you feel resentment and anger in your relationship, listen to this. 
• 21:03: How Matthew almost messed up his relationship with his wife. 
• 23:46: When you are getting mixed signals from someone, text them this. 
• 28:12: What you need to know if someone you love is wasting your time. 
• 30:35: How to bring up the conversation around wanting kids in a relationship. 
• 31:52: What Matthew means when he says this is THE hardest conversation you will ever have.
• 34:07: How to truly understand what you want and what matters to you. 
• 36:34: Date the person, not their potential. 
• 39:35: Why love is not all you need for a healthy and long relationship. 
• 42:34: How to know if you are compatible with someone you are with. 
• 44:23: What it looks like to value yourself in a relationship.
• Matthew Hussey’s book, Love Life: How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily (No Matter What). 
• Matthew’s website.
• Matthew’s Instagram.
• Matthew’s YouTube.
• Matthew Hussey: How to have ‘that’ conversation 
• Harvard Business Review: How to have difficult conversations
• Harvard Business Review: 4 things to do before a tough conversation
• New York Times: The best relationship advice we’ve gotten so far this year
• New York Times: Can new love survive mismatched texting styles
• Chicago Tribune: How to have the “what are we?” conversation
• Forbes: A psychologist explains relationship eclipsing 
• Forbes: How to make room for more meaningful relationships in your life
• John Hopkins University: 12 elements of healthy relationships 

Harvard University: How to let your purpose find you

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‘NYT’ Shares List of Best Books of 2024 So Far

BY Michael Schaub • yesterday

The New York Times has named a dozen books the best of 2024 so far.

The newspaper’s books staff gave its imprimatur to seven novels and five works of nonfiction, writing, “We suspect that some (though certainly not all) will be top of mind when we publish our end-of-year, best-of lists.”

Percival Everett’s James , a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , made the list, with the staff writing that the narrator, Jim, “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.”

The newspaper also recommended Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland , which it called a “funny-sad novel,” alongside Dolly Alderton’s Good Material , Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! , Tana French’s The Hunter , Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars , and Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot .

In nonfiction, the newspaper’s books staff praised Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder , as a “candid, plain-spoken and gripping new memoir,” as well as Alexandra Fuller’s memoir Fi , which they called “elegant and honest.”

The other nonfiction books to make the list were Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis , Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook , and Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon .

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.

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Talking About the Best Books of 2021

Hosted by Pamela Paul

On a special episode of the podcast, taped live, editors from The New York Times Book Review discuss this year’s outstanding fiction and nonfiction.

[THEME MUSIC]

This week, our episode features our annual 10 Best Books list, which was recorded live via Zoom earlier this week. We’ll be back with our regular podcast next Friday, December 10.

Good morning, everyone, and good afternoon to those joining us from Europe and points further east. And good “very early in the morning” to our West Coast friends. I’m Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review. Welcome to our announcement of the 10 Best Books of 2021. We’re so happy to have you here with us today.

And a reminder that we are recording for the Book Review Podcast. If you’re not already a podcast subscriber, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

This is our second year holding the 10 Best Books announcement event in a virtual format. And while we miss seeing people in person, one of the great joys of doing it virtually is that it opens the event up to more people. And it’s a chance for us to bring together book people from all around the world.

So we’re thrilled to have you here. I also want to give a big thank you for being a Times subscriber. Your subscriptions make our work here possible. Choosing the 10 best books each year is actually a yearlong process. Believe it or not, my colleagues and I have already started work on the 2022 list. So thank you for supporting our journalism.

Speaking of my colleagues, I am thrilled to welcome some of my colleagues from the Book Review who are joining us here today. We have our West Coast correspondent Gal Beckerman, Lauren Christensen, Gregory Cowles, Emily Eakin, Elisabeth Egan, MJ Franklin, Tina Jordan, Dave Kim and John Williams.

Good morning, everyone. I know all of us who work on the Book Review are excited to finally share this list. And I want to give all of you some context about how the list comes together.

People ask us all the time, “What makes a book a best book?” For us a best book is a book that stands on the merits of its prose and its storytelling, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, and succeeds on the terms that the author set out for it. The book may be of the moment, but it’s also a book that we think transcends the moment and will stand the test of time.

We don’t choose books because we necessarily agree with them, support a political or intellectual message forwarded by them, or personally like the authors. We don’t choose books merely because we consider them important or worthy.

The best books have to succeed in all ways, on all levels. We choose these books because we think these books offer a level of achievement that readers have come to expect from The New York Times. It’s impossible to fully convey what it takes to get here.

But let me say this. When I call this a yearlong process, I mean it. We start this list as soon as we end the last one. As I mentioned, we’ve already begun work on 2022. The bulk of the work is reading, of course, and a lot of it. But after that comes deep discussion in which editors at the Book Review, many of whom are here today, talk about these books with no holds barred.

We discuss, we debate, we strongly disagree with one another, but we listen to one another’s arguments. And we continue to read ourselves. And ultimately, after months of deliberation, we vote.

One major change this year — and speaking of years — we used to cut off the contenders with our holiday issue at the beginning of December. This year, we included books for the full calendar year 2021, which we will do moving forward, in addition to books that were published at the end of 2020 but not in time for Best Books. And we wind up with what we have here today, five fiction and five nonfiction books that we consider to be the best of 2021.

So without further ado, let’s get into it, starting with fiction, and in no particular order. Our first fiction book is “How Beautiful We Were,” by Imbolo Mbue. Elisabeth, can you tell us a little bit more about this book.

Of course, Pamela, thank you. The author of “Behold the Dreamers” brings us a second novel that is anything but sophomoric. In this book, we go to Kosawa, a fictional African village where kids are dying as a result of environmental mayhem caused by an American oil company called Pexton.

The fields are fallow, the water is poisoned, and Mbue launches readers into a David-and-Goliath story that spans decades, told from multiple perspectives, perhaps most powerfully the perspective of Thula, who leads a resistance movement, and also the voices of a chorus of children who demonstrate how the devastation has affected their own lives and how they summon their own power to do something about it.

“How Beautiful We Were” is not a sad book, despite how I am making it sound right now. It’s ambitious, elegant, wise, and Mbue lets in light and hope where you least expect it. The vibe is perhaps best summed up by a line toward the end of the book from one of the villagers who says “why do we all fight when we want the same things?”

Gal, I know you loved this book too. So maybe you can weigh in a little bit about what you thought.

I did. You know, I can’t even remember reading such a humane and even sort of joyful book about neocolonialism. I love that it’s essentially the story of Kosawa, the village that you mentioned, and what it means to the people who live there, how it’s spoiled by outside forces, and how it is defended over the generations that we see covered within the span of this book.

And I was just so impressed with how deeply she brings us into the world of this village, of its rhythms, its characters, and that age cohort that you mentioned that we watch grow up, over time, as they’re struggling to figure out how to resist.

Some of the most satisfying parts of the book to me were actually these sort of almost intellectual, philosophical arguments between the villagers about the best way to make change, which is a hard thing to dramatize. They’re talking about the most effective forms of resistance. There’s scenes where the elders are pleading caution and negotiation, and the younger, militant people want to resort to violence.

But what she does so wonderfully there is she shows us their helplessness and how hard it is to escape the feeling that nothing will change, but also their constant attempts at agency in the face of it, the sense of their persistence and resilience that seems to constantly renew itself.

You both make me want to reread it. All right, our second fiction book is “Intimacies,” by Katie Kitamura. MJ, over to you.

I am so excited to talk about this book, “Intimacies,” by Katie Kitamura. I fell in love with it when I first read it. And I feel like I’ve been keeping it a secret, and just wanting to share it with so many people.

The book is about a woman who moves to The Hague. And she’s just figuring out her life. She’s trying to figure out what home means to her after the loss of her parents. She starts a relationship with a man who is separated from his wife, but may or may not be over her. She’s trying to settle into this new place.

And all of a sudden, she is assigned to work as an interpreter for a man on trial in the international court for war crimes. And all of a sudden she realizes that she is now the voice of this man who has done unspeakable things.

And so the book is about her trying to figure out who she is as she’s in this very malleable, untethered place. At the same time, she’s trying to figure out who this war criminal is and what does it mean that she is his voice. Who is this man that she started this romance with?

She befriends a woman whose brother is attacked in The Hague. And she’s trying to figure him out.

What I loved about this book is it’s so layered. You get the sense that every single sentence is doing double and triple duty in the way that it is revealing and obscuring something about these characters. And when I read it, I think I frantically tweeted something like, have you ever read something that is written so precisely that it’s exciting? That’s what this book is. It is exciting to see, on a sentence by sentence level, what Katie Kitamura is doing.

And then, when you get to the end of the book, you almost want to reread it immediately to figure out, what did I miss? Now that I know all of these things from these characters, what was Katie signaling in her prose initially that I just didn’t understand because I didn’t know these characters?

The last thing I’ll say about this book is there’s something so revealing about the way it approaches the idea of intimacies, how we know someone. It’s almost, to me, a little bit funny that the more you get to know some of these characters, the more slippery they seem. They don’t seem unimpeachable in the way that you initially think they are. Minus the war criminal, he’s pretty impeachable.

But some of the other characters that you meet, you really get closer to them and you start to question them, and in the process, start to question the narrator and the narrator’s fixation on them. It is so layered. It is so thoughtful. It is so precise. And it is brilliant. Greg, I know you loved this book as well.

I did love it, and for a lot of the same reasons that you’re talking about, especially that doubling and tripling of meaning there. It’s a very spare, very precise, very elegant book. It’s not a long book. It feels like everything extraneous has been chiseled away. But what’s left just resonates. It chimes on so many different registers.

One of the things I love about this book is how destabilizing it is. It builds its story out of a steady series of misapprehensions and adjustments on the narrator’s part, from the very beginning, when she realizes that The Hague’s kind of sterile and civilized personality is, in fact, a strictly enforced facade covering up chaos, to a painting that she sees at the Mauritshuis museum whose significance keeps shifting as she notices new details, to her impressions of a house she’s about to visit, the sister of the man who was attacked. And she’s viewing it from the street before she realizes that’s actually not the right house at all. She’s looking at the downstairs neighbor’s apartment.

So she’s an interpreter who keeps misinterpreting things. And it just reinforces the book’s sense of contingency. You can’t be certain of anything in it. She can’t be certain of anything in it. But you still have to somehow make a life in the midst of all this uncertainty.

Our third book in fiction is “When We Cease to Understand the World,” by Benjamín Labatut. John, you were an early fan.

Thanks, Pamela. I was a huge fan. In fact, this is one of those books I’m sure I annoy people with with my proselytizing. You know, you step up to that edge of getting on people’s nerves when you love a book so much.

In this job, I’m sure all of us would agree, it’s rare enough to admire something strongly enough to consider it one of the year’s best books. It’s even more rare when something gets you sitting bolt upright in your chair within the first page or two of reading it. And that’s what happened with me with this book. And the feeling never went away.

The short way to describe Labatut’s book is that it’s about physics. Not an easy sell for fiction readers, not all of them. So hear me out. For a writer to mix fact and fiction is a cliche at this point. And yet the feeling I had while reading Labatut’s book — and that’s what he does in it — is that he had somehow created something entirely new, a new format. In less than 200 pages, he takes us through the history of 20th century physics using real-life figures like Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrodinger.

But this is not in the least a dry book. He uses incredible details to make very cinematic moments happen, including one, early on, in which the scientist Karl Schwarzschild, from the battlefield, solves the equations of Einstein’s general relativity, and sends Einstein a letter from the battlefield saying that he’s done this, and showing him, and introducing, essentially, the concept of black holes.

And Einstein, who didn’t expect this to be solved in his lifetime, gathers himself after realizing what he’s looking at, and writes back to Schwarzschild. And as Labatut says, “not realizing that he was writing to a dead man,” because he had died during the war. There are episodes like that throughout the book that keep you just glued to the page.

It starts with a riveting, mostly nonfiction chapter about the grim delirium of the final days of the Nazi regime and about Fritz Haber, a chemist who not only saved much of the world from starvation with his science, but also developed and weaponized poisonous gases to use during war. And there, in that dichotomy, you have what Labatut is after in this book, the incredible advances of science and the grim ways in which people often use it.

Pamela mentioned, up top, the fact that the prose and a book succeeding on the terms an author set for it are a big part of this criteria. And I have to say that, in both cases, this, for me, is a standout book. I have to mention here the translation work of Adrian Nathan West, who brings Labatut’s book to us in all its glory. The prose is stunning throughout.

And Labatut has taken us inside the feeling of creating and wrestling with these ideas. It’s a feeling that can be exhilarating, claustrophobic and maddening. And he sits us in this uncomfortable space where science allows us to know so much, to create so much, while also taunting us with the limits of our knowledge.

Dave, I know that you were someone who was also pushing this book on people. What did you think of it?

I loved it. Yeah, I mean, there’s just something naturally enticing about stories of unlocking some forbidden knowledge, where it comes with huge power but also a lot of danger and risk. I mean, it goes back to some of our oldest myths and legends. And while the subjects are 20th century figures and their discoveries are very much colored by the two world wars, there’s still a timeless quality to the book, just the feeling that we’re reading a sort of mythic text about knowledge quests.

And for me, the book kept coming back to two related points. And the first is that it seems that the closer we get to this forbidden knowledge and this grand unifying theory of everything that some of these thinkers are chasing, the more terrifying that potential becomes. And in fact, some of the thinkers get to the brink and end up just walking back away from it because they glimpse what’s beyond that edge and decide it’s better just leaving it alone. And they see that the closer we get to that knowledge, ironically, the darker and more incomprehensible the world becomes.

The second related point that I got is that all things exist in two ways. For example, there’s a section devoted to the discovery, if you think back to high school physics, that light can exist in both wave and particle form. And it’s just one of many moments in which the world gets ordered through these contradictory forms that seem like they should cancel each other out. You see it in knowledge and darkness, discoveries that, as John mentioned, advance human life, but also wipe it out.

And you even see it in the form of the book, as he starts to invent more and more, as the book progresses. By the end of it, the work is both nonfiction and fiction. That might be a little bit unsettling. And I honestly wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it.

But I kind of have to believe that this is just a small taste of that first point, that in this world we don’t understand, the truth is really multiple truths. And that there may actually be such a thing as alternative facts; maybe not in politics, but at least in the quantum world.

So it’s definitely not a book about the human mind triumphantly finding all the right answers. And I think it’s way better for it.

Dave, thank you. Our fourth book in fiction is a debut novel by the essayist and poet Honorée Fannone Jeffers. And that book is “The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois.” Lauren, tell us about this book.

There are a lot of strands within this 800-page novel, which really tells no less than the history of America, through multiple generations of one Black family whose roots trace back to enslaved Africans and white slaveholders, and also the Indigenous Creek people of what’s now modern-day Georgia.

I don’t want anyone to be intimidated by the scale. What you need to know is that this is the story of a young girl. Her name is Ailey Pearl Garfield. And she’s growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s with two older sisters. Her father is a doctor in D.C., which is referred to throughout as “the city in the north.” But in the summers, the family travels down to their ancestral home of Chicasetta, Georgia. And this is really where the pathos of the novel takes place.

It’s where Ailey learns from her great uncle Root, who’s one of my favorite characters, about W.E.B Du Bois’s notions of double consciousness as well as the talented tenth concepts that really inform Ailey’s entire coming of age through her education at an HBCU, her reckoning with sexual trauma, and for me, this is the most moving part of the novel, her relationship with, her devotion to, her older sister Lydia, who, as she grows up, falls victim to the crack epidemic.

This is Jeffers’s first novel after several award-winning books of poetry. And you can really hear the poet’s precision with language throughout, which is really even more astounding in a book of this length to me. It’s truly epic. I mean, it’s historical fiction that goes as deep as it does wide.

My favorite books are the ones that make you miss the characters when it’s over. And just talking about them now makes me want to read it again. MJ, I know you felt strongly about this one as well.

I did, I did. And I think what you said about how it goes as deep as it does wide is so — hits it right on the nail, or the nail on the head. That’s how that goes.

I kept thinking of a camera lens zooming in and out. It focuses so closely on Ailey, and her coming of age, and what that means for her as she’s dealing with her family and trying to figure out how to be a person in the world. And then, by flashing back to the songs of their ancestors, by flashing back to the founding of the Georgia landscape, of the American landscape, to flashing back to the stories of her sister and her mother, you get incrementally more and more of what makes up Ailey’s world and how she fits within it and this total lineage. It has scope and range. And wow, does this book have the range.

I also just wanted to say, in its portrayal of a Black American family, it is so raw and empathetic. It had me hooting and hollering. Ailey Pearl knows how to drop a one-liner, let me tell you. It also had me mourning and grieving with this family, and cheering with this family.

And at the same time, then, it flashes back to the past. And it makes you think about America differently. It makes you think about how many untold stories go into the founding of this land, of the people here. A note about the length — I have the book here — it’s a big book. And do not be intimidated by it. It is 800 pages. And at the end, I wanted more. Because you immerse yourself so deeply into this one family and their lineage that it pained me to step away from them. And that’s a tremendous thing to do. And wow, this book is incredible. So please run and do not walk to go read it.

MJ, thank you. Our fifth and final book on the fiction side is “No One Is Talking About This,” by Patricia Lockwood. Gal, tell us your thoughts

Patricia Lockwood some might know as a poet. She’s the author of a previous memoir, “Priestdaddy,” and something of a Twitter performance artist, I think you could say. And this book is billed as a novel. But I came to think of it more as sort of a prose poem, especially just because its language is so exquisite.

And the subject, her subject — and it seems to be her universal subject — is the way we write and exist online, that constant churn that I know we all feel, from the banal to the sublime, within the space of a minute. Many authors have tried to capture that feeling, but I think that Lockwood nails it here in this book better than I’ve seen.

And the most striking metaphor that she uses to describe this feeling, in a book that’s full of extraordinary metaphors, is the notion of us, on the internet, as a kind of a school of fish. This is just to read you a bit of Lockwood making this point. she says that: “Attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.” So that’s Lockwood.

It’s hard to effectively describe the plot of this book, I should say. You sort of have to submit to its language and to Lockwood’s strange and interesting mind. But essentially, it’s divided into two parts. The first has the narrator existing entirely within what she calls the portal, which is sort of Twitter or social media stand-in, capturing its ever-shifting gaze and how this way of being and communicating changes about how she thinks and sees the world, the way she feels thrown into this big blender of memes. So you’re there with her in it.

And then the second half of the book shifts in tone, and has the narrator dramatically thrust out of the portal by a real-world event. And that’s the pregnancy of her sister, who is carrying a child with a rare genetic disease, one that means the child will die soon after she’s born. And this confrontation with reality, and with the consciousness of the baby in particular, during her the short life of the child, provides contrast for the narrator with her online existence, but it’s also a way for Lockwood to explore what she presents as this state of presence, of nowness, that she actually finds mirrored in the portal. There’s a lot of real philosophical thinking about what it means for us, day to day, to be on social media. But it’s done in this gorgeous language.

And Lockwood wants us to think deeper, ultimately, about what the internet is good for, the magic that it can produce, and the idea of this giant mind that vacuums everything, that ebbs and flows and creates its own kind of unique collectivity. I found it to be a beautiful and profound book. Emily, I know you also enjoyed it,

Yes, I really admired this book. A critic I like once compared the effect of reading Patricia Lockwood to transubstantiation, writing something like, “you’re looking at it on the page, and it’s becoming something else.” And of course that’s an apt allusion to Lockwood’s Catholic upbringing. If you’ve read “Priestdaddy,” her hilarious and brilliant memoir, you know that she grew up in rectories across the Midwest with a priest father, a very eccentric one.

But I think transubstantiation is also a kind of apt description of her style. More than almost any contemporary writer I can think of, language, in Lockwood’s hands, is deeply alive. It’s this protean substance that can be or do literally anything, which is why I think the internet, with its social media platforms and its jumble of imagery and associations, is perfect fodder for her. She can fashion this poetic narrative out of this material, this kind of cultural detritus, that is so revealing of who we are.

Gal called the book a prose poem. I told my colleagues, I think this is the “Waste Land” of 2021. And I wanted to read a short passage. Every passage in the book is short. The book unfolds in fragments, reminiscent of a Twitter post or an Instagram post.

And in this one, she’s inside the portal, her term for the internet, and she writes: “She felt along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let her out. This could not be forced. Outside, the air hung swagged, and the clouds sat in piles of couch stuffing. And in the south of the sky, there was a tender spot where a rainbow wanted to happen.”

I think this is such a characteristic passage. It’s describing an experience that is both felt — she’s groping her way inside the portal for the feeling of the day. And her writing always suggests a kind of synesthesia as a permanent state. Words, for her, have shapes and colors and sounds. And every concept, abstract or literal, has a kind of tactile component. But as beautiful as this is — and I think Lockwood is finely attuned to beauty — she is also attuned to absurdity and hilarity and finally, I would be remiss not to say, seriousness.

There is a seriousness of purpose beneath the play in this book. And I think that really is what Gal alluded to, a sort of meditation on the relative weight and meaning of experience, on and offline, that defines her life and, increasingly, ours.

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We are halfway through, which means it’s time for nonfiction. And our first nonfiction book is “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath,” by Heather Clark. Emily, we’ll stay with you on this one.

So this book, a biography of the poet Sylvia Plath, was published late in 2020. We were unable to consider it for Best Books last year. But as Pamela explained, according to our rules now, we were able to consider it this year. And it is a remarkable book. It’s an exciting book, a book that a lot of us at the Book Review found riveting to read. And it’s not at all obvious that it should be. After all, Plath has been the subject of so many biographies, as has her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, as has their relationship.

Also, “Red Comet” runs to more than 1,000 pages with footnotes. There are a lot of big books on our list this year. And 1,000 pages all for a woman who died by suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. So this book is a big and bold undertaking to write at such length about someone seemingly so thoroughly examined by scholars and critics and fans.

But Clark has found a fresh way into Plath’s life. And her goal, she says, is to rescue Plath from cliche, from her posthumous reputation as a kind of death-obsessed madwoman, a female hysteric. She writes that Plath has been so mythologized and pathologized and caricatured that we’ve lost sight of the qualities that distinguished her in life, a kind of rare intellectual and literary brilliance, what Clark calls, in a phrase I love, her “ebullient, brainy essence.” And that’s what we get in this book.

Clark declares at the outset that she thinks Plath is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century, which is quite a claim. But after reading the book, I was inclined to agree with her.

And I should say, quickly, that Clark is a scholar. She’s a professor of poetry at the University of Huddersfield in England. But this book is not at all academic. It’s scholarly in the best sense of the word. It’s deeply learned.

And the amount of research it incorporates is staggering. It’s all here. We get Plath’s baby words; her first poem, age 5; her first published poem, age 8; her IQ, 160, genius level. Her incredible high school English teacher in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Wilbury Crockett, who taught her for three years, during each of which the class read 40 to 50 works of great literature — he said he was astounded by her almost frightening talent, which is an impression she seems to have left on nearly anyone and everyone she met.

Of course, we get her years at Smith, then her formal thesaurus-influenced poetry in her early 20s, her time at Oxford, an incredibly textured portrait of her marriage to Ted Hughes, whose work she championed relentlessly, her psychological struggles, her late breakthrough poems, and through it all, this incredible work ethic, this unbending discipline that she had.

But I think the real achievement of this biography is to take these granular details, all the thousands of grains of sand that made up Plath’s life, and to animate them with her voice. This is what Clark does. Because the sheer amount of writing that Plath left, her journals and scrapbooks, her poems and short stories, her novel, “The Bell Jar,” and letters — so many letters — it’s dazzling.

And you feel that you’re in the presence of this rare and original human mind that witnessed and chronicled so much of mid 20th century literary life. I don’t think I’ve read a biography in which the subject felt so intimately alive on every page. And I know Gal also loved this biography and has some thoughts.

Sometimes you come across books that, just based on their subject matter, you know that you’re bound to love. And this one, when you see a book where, into page 200 or 300, she’s still 14 or 15 years old, I was like, how is this going to work? But the power of the book is actually — I think you said it, Emily — its granularity. It’s this kind of pointilist portrait of the artist. We see her developing almost day by day.

And what she’s struggling toward is self-expression. And I just love this extreme close-up that we get of how she develops her confidence. She learns to trust her own creative powers. It just feels so special the way Clark has put it all together. And we see all the setbacks and the successes. She’s not idealizing Plath in any way. We see her vanity and her insecurity. And more than anything else, we see this insatiable need to write, to create.

The other thing I really appreciated about the book was the larger canvas that Clark gives us, which is pretty amazing. We see a very fully-fleshed-out midcentury Cold War world in which Plath was operating, in a time of just very repressive conformity. We learn about how mental illness was treated at the time, and the way Plath’s own possibilities were just so confined, the walls against which she was pushing.

And all this makes you sort of root for her as a reader. I think you said it too, Emily. You feel like you get to know her so well. So that when this inevitable moment arrives — because if you know anything about Plath, it’s that she died by suicide — when that moment arrives, and I knew it was coming, of course, it still just filled me with such sadness at sort of losing her and her unique mind.

Gal, thank you. Our second book on the nonfiction side is “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America,” by Clint Smith. MJ, over to you.

I’m so excited that this book is on our list because I don’t think there’s any more pressing issue than how we talk about our history and our past. And Clint Smith, in this book, does it brilliantly.

“How the Word Is Passed” is not just about our history, it’s not just a dive into our history, but it’s a dive into how we tell the stories of our history. And Clint does that by visiting a handful of places in the U.S., from Monticello to Angola to New York City, and then one place abroad. And he looks at historical landmarks there. And he looks at how tour guides discuss the history, how visitors discuss that history, and what that conversation really looks like. What does it look like when we’re trying to understand what came before us?

In addition to just being very revelatory about some facts about these places — again, I mentioned New York City as it’s discussing the past, and specifically Black History, how these places were implicated in the American slave trade and how that reverberates to today — you learn more details and the atmosphere about what made these places, how they operated, and how we can still see them today.

I think Clint Smith’s superpower is not just his writing, but how he listens. And that comes through on every single page. Because Clint is not just telling you how people tell the story of his history, he is a character and he’s a central character in this book.

He’s telling you how people tell — specifically him, a Black man — this history. Which is to say you are looking at people processing their own understanding of history, telling it to someone, and then realizing their own comfort level of telling something. Maybe they exaggerate something or they downplay something. And you’re watching them grapple with the idea of history as it lives within them as they try to share it with someone else.

And I think Clint, as a writer and as a listener, is empathetic, he is rigorous, he is poetic. And as a result, this book, you come away with a very immersive understanding of what got us here as Americans. I know, Emily, that you loved this book as well.

I did, MJ. And I agree with everything you said. I will echo MJ by saying his timing is pretty impeccable given that we’re in the midst of a national, often painful and politically fraught, reckoning with the very history that he’s writing about.

Clint Smith is a poet and a journalist. And he’s also got a Ph.D. in education. And I think this is important to mention. Because although his book is about history, the history of slavery and its legacy today, his agenda is not so much didactic as it is documentary. What he’s really interested in is what we Americans choose to know, choose to retain or ignore, about our past.

And this is what he means by how the word is passed. He’s talking about our selective understanding, our selective memory: What do we, as a country, choose to know? So it’s a very subtle and sophisticated project that he’s undertaking. And he goes about it in such an unassuming manner, as MJ remarked. He’s a visitor at these sites, engaging people he meets along the way. And he does an incredible amount of listening and observing. Very little confronting or judging, even though much of what he encounters and records amounts to this dismaying catalog of willful ignorance.

I so admired his restraint. One of the most, I think, discomfiting visits he makes is to a chapel at a Confederate cemetery in Virginia where 30,000 Confederate soldiers are buried. And he tries to engage the tour guides at the cemetery in a conversation about how they present and discuss the Confederate army and the Civil War with their visitors. And he’s repeatedly politely rebuffed.

“I think you could take the Civil War aspect totally out of it and enjoy the beauty of the chapel’s Tiffany stained glass windows,” says one guide. And this is sort of a classic moment in the book where we get these kind of flickers of embarrassment and shame, but a kind of unwillingness to look at the source of that shame or that embarrassment. And I think this is the question that Smith keeps circling in this book. What is it that keeps us from looking at the actual facts of our history? And what will it take to get us to do that?

Emily, thank you. Our third book in nonfiction is “On Juneteenth,” by Annette Gordon-Reed. Greg, over to you.

In some ways, this book pairs naturally with “How the Word Is Passed.” There are overlaps, especially where Clint Smith visits Galveston and relates the history of Juneteenth, when word of emancipation finally reached Texas. So the books amplify and inform each other in places.

But what Annette Gordon-Reed is ultimately setting out to do is fit the story of Texas itself into the American story. And she does that in a series of essay-like chapters that offer a sweeping, multicultural history about the state’s Indigenous roots, and Latino population, and slavery, and the cowboy mythology.

All of that on the one hand, and on the other hand, it’s a personal history. It’s a memoir of her own childhood in East Texas. She was the first Black student to integrate her town’s white elementary school. So sort of a Texas version of Ruby Bridges, but without all the national media attention. And she gets into the teenage appeal of Six Flags Great Adventure, and illuminates what each of the Six Flags is.

She tells us that Texas students have two different units devoted to Texas history in primary school. I think it’s maybe 4th and 7th grades. For me, growing up in the New York suburbs, I learned nothing of Texas history except whatever mythology I picked up through pop culture, the Alamo and all of that.

And one thing that Gordon-Reed is doing here is undertaking to counter those myths with a fuller understanding of the state’s rich cultural heritage and vast geography. And she does that in an impressively small amount of space. Emily said there are a lot of giant books on this year’s list. At 141 small pages, this is not one of them. But it ranges so far and accomplishes so much.

It ends with a scene of a family Juneteenth celebration where her grandmother is making tamales, which brings together all of the book’s strands as an American story. She opens the book saying that she originally felt a little put out or possessive when she first heard of people outside of Texas celebrating Juneteenth. But one effect of this book, for me, was to make me think how shameful it is that everyone in America doesn’t celebrate Juneteenth as the next step in realizing the country’s founding principles.

So I just loved this book. I read it before the Clint Smith. And then, as I was reading the Clint Smith, I thought, well, do I love this book any less? And the answer is no. They really achieve different things. Pamela, I know that you liked this one too.

I want to talk about the book, as it stands on its own merits. But it is hard not to talk about it slightly in conversation with the Clint Smith because — and we had this conversation many times in our discussion — if the Clint Smith is more about how we receive history, how we recreate history, about oral history, I think that, for me, the Annette Gordon-Reed, “On Juneteenth,” while very personal, also is about the work of the historian and about how we write history, and about the fact that history comes not from what the story we wish we could tell about ourselves or about others, but the stories that the facts present. And so beginning with the facts, no matter how uncomfortable or difficult they might be, and then going from there.

And she tells a story in the book, a personal one, again, that illustrated this conundrum, which is her father often believed, deep in his heart, that Black people in Texas had a natural coalition with the Indigenous people of Texas, and that it was surprising to her to realize, as a historian, that in fact the Indigenous people in Texas often enslaved Black Texans. And so this was not the story that one would want to tell or want to believe, but it was one that the facts presented.

And so I thought that the book worked both as a series of essays — and I think Gordon-Reed said she modeled it on essays by James Baldwin and the mix of the personal and of her professional role — but really succeeded in using that kind of micro level to tell a much larger story about the history of slavery in this country.

All right, I’m going to go to a very different book, our fourth nonfiction book. It is “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City,” by Andrea Elliott. Liz, tell us about this one.

Well, this is another one of those really big books that we have been talking about. “Invisible Child” clocks in at 624 pages. I read it in less than 24 hours. It’s that kind of book.

If you’re a regular reader of The New York Times, you might remember Andrea Elliott’s five-part series from 2013 about Dasani, an 11-year-old Black girl living with her parents and seven siblings in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. And “Invisible Child” goes back to Dasani and to her family and tells us what happened in the next eight years in the time following the period in which Dasani was dubbed by her classmates, not always kindly, as Homeless Kid of the Year.

The book follows Dasani and her family from shelters to courts to welfare offices to therapy sessions to parties. It takes us across all the boroughs of New York City, with a both triumphant and heartbreaking detour to rural Pennsylvania. This is a book with many spoilers. So I don’t want to tell you why it is Dasani is in rural Pennsylvania.

The family’s ups and downs, their joys and disappointments, leave you with whiplash, worry and the kind of empathy that really only comes from the most meticulous reporting. As Elliott brings Dasani’s life into focus, she also zooms out. And we get a look at the cycle of poverty and homelessness and the homeless crisis. And she also takes a very close look at Dasani’s family history, including her great-grandfather’s role as a decorated World War II vet. He was a Buffalo soldier. So we sort come to understand how Dasani’s story fits into this larger picture.

Just on a personal note, I will say I think all of us here at the Book Review agree that it’s a lot of fun to be the person who reads a book a couple of months before it comes out. It gives you a kind of sense of knowing something that other people don’t know. But there are these occasional books that make you feel very lonely when you read them because you have nobody else to discuss them with. And for me, “Invisible Child” was one of those books.

As I read it in that one long and kind of feverish day, I kept texting my colleagues and saying, you have to drop everything and read “Invisible Child.” And so now I recommend that you do the same. And Lauren Christensen, I know that you followed my advice and read the book and loved it. So maybe you can tell us your thoughts.

You know, I think whiplash was a really great way to put it. There are moments of such overwhelming sadness and loss when an unjust system rips apart children from their parents time and time again. But I think what makes this book so powerful are really those moments of — I don’t want to say lightness, but the closeness between Dasani and her siblings and of course their father, but also their mother, in the face of unthinkable odds. This family will really stun you with its just insistent love and humor and a really superhuman tenacity.

Liz has summed it up so well. One thing I’ll just add is how moved I was by Elliott’s ability to balance journalistic rigor with so much heart. I think there are some instances when the journalist’s ideal of objectivity of removing yourself from a subject have to give way to the journalist’s humanity. And I think that shows through really brilliantly in this book. I think it was a decade she spent really ethnographically observing the day-to-day lives of a single homeless family in New York City. Elliott doesn’t just record their fates, she really, inevitably, impacts it. She doesn’t hide that fact. Sometimes, when these family members have no one else to turn to, Elliott is simply the only person who is reliably always there.

And she explains, in this really powerful afterword, that for families like Dasani’s — and really for any of us, to a degree — whether or not someone simply shows up, it can really mean the difference between life and death. So it’s just a remarkable achievement.

Lauren, Liz, thank you. We are up to our final book on the list and our second book in translation. The book is “The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency,” by Tove Ditlevsen. Dave, over to you.

Thanks, Pamela. This book is actually three short memoirs which were published in Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s. And now they’ve been published in a single volume in a translation by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Ditlevsen became famous as a poet, but then went on to also write fiction and nonfiction. And although this isn’t the first time her work has appeared in English, I suspect she’ll be getting a lot more attention after this year, when “The Copenhagen Trilogy” had many readers in its thrall. These memoirs cover Ditlevsen’s years from adolescence to her early career and her marriages, and then to her addiction problems in her 30s. She grew up working class in Copenhagen, left school at 14 to work various menial jobs. But she always harbored a desire to write and publish. And she pursues that with a resolve that is just absolute, and finds success fairly early on.

But by the third book she has some pretty disastrous marriages, the worst of which is to a doctor who initiates and then enables a very ruthless addiction to opiates. And the trilogy just runs you through a gamut of emotions. It’s like a full-service experience of funny and nerve-racking and unbearably tragic. But it’s never maudlin or syrupy. She’s a very controlled writer, even though her voice could cut through steel.

And throughout these books you get the sense of a writer really just struggling to understand human impulse, the crazy and sometimes catastrophic things that love can lead you to do and that addiction can lead you to do. But on the other side, there’s also the creative urge, which is maybe equally inexplicable and can reorder your life in inconvenient ways, and yet yield your best and most productive self.

In Ditlevsen’s case, I think we’re very lucky to have the product of that. John, what did you think?

I love these books too, Dave. And I’ll just say quickly, because a lot of the reviews rightly pointed out how harrowing this book is as a portrait of addiction in the third volume, and I just want to briefly say that the first volume, “Childhood,” I think doesn’t get the press that it should for its just absolutely brilliant and artless balancing of her vision as an adult of all the things that happened to her and her relationship with her mother and recapturing the sense of being that child in the emotional thrall to that relationship. And I still don’t quite know how she does it. She’s a very subtle and precise writer. And so this is a book I think I’ll reread over the years.

John, Dave, thank you so much. Every year, there are books that we deeply love that didn’t end up on our final list. But we love them so much we still want to share them with you. So I asked everyone to please just narrow it down to one favorite, which was very difficult for us. It was hard enough for us to get to consensus on the 10 Best that we just discussed. But we’ll each talk about one of our personal favorites. And I will start with Emily.

The book I want to mention is “The Magician,” by Colm Toibin, the Irish novelist. This is a work of historical fiction. It’s a novelized portrait of the German writer Thomas Mann. And like all of Toibin’s novels, it’s beautifully written and psychologically probing. It has similarities with Toibin’s novel about Henry James, “The Master.” That book was an acute psychological portrait of the novelist as a man thwarted by forbidden longings. And that’s a subject Toibin is very interested in, this idea of constraint, of repression, and its relationship to creativity, especially literary creativity.

And in “The Magician,” we get a subtle, deeply empathetic portrait of Mann, who is constrained by a similar forbidden longing. His attraction to men is his most closely guarded secret, and one that hovers over his life, his literary career, his politics, including his timidity about criticizing Hitler and the rise of fascism in Germany, and especially over his domestic existence, which includes six colorful — a couple of them truly flamboyant — children who are given just really indelible lines of dialogue in this novel, and his beloved and loving wife Katia, all memorably depicted in this wonderful book.

I have to confess two competing biases here. I’m not sure if they cancel each other out. But I have really always loved Kazuo Ishiguro. But I’ve also had a hard time getting into science fiction. So when I picked up “Klara and the Sun,” his latest book, and found out it was about a robot, I was just a little bit worried about which side I would end up on. But Ishiguro’s gift as a storyteller is really to just never get bogged down in mechanics or terminology or even in decorative flourish at the expense of narrative.

I think this book is such a perfect example of pure storytelling. The narrator, Klara, is what Ishiguro terms an AF, or an Artificial Friend. She is unconditionally selfless. Her manners and morals are all impeccable. And in fact, her character is so flawless that it can really only be the product of science, not of nature. And it’s such an interesting and fruitful decision that he made to tell the story through her lens. Because she just constantly reflects back to us very imperfect readers everything we human beings, of course, are not.

So the plot is: Klara’s purchased in a shop, by a very well-to-do mother, for her lonely human child named Josie, who is part of a class of young people who are destined to become, quote, “elevated” members of society. Unlike the other elite kids, Josie is not long for this world. She has an illness. Klara has to decide whether she can truly stand in for her human companion.

It’s a parable. But like I said, it’s just pure dramatic storytelling, and all in Ishiguro’s signature unadorned prose. It really just lives up to the best of his work. So I can’t recommend it enough.

Lauren, thank you. It’s so hard not to jump in and say, “Me too, I loved it too.” We all had to kind of parse these out. But there are many fans of all of these books.

It is my pleasure now to introduce the deputy editor of the Book Review, Tina Jordan. Over to you, Tina.

Hey, everyone. So people who know me know that I’m something of a crime thriller junkie. I probably read 100 or more a year. For some reason, it’s my idea of relaxing reading. And “Razorblade Tears,” by S.A. Cosby, was far and away my favorite thriller of the year.

In a nutshell, it’s about two dads, one Black, one white, who basically have two things in common. They’re both ex-cons and they both really struggle to accept the fact that their sons were gay. But when those sons, who are married to one another, are brutally murdered and the police seem to be fumbling the investigation, the dads join forces to investigate their deaths.

While, on one hand, this is sort of a high-octane crime caper, on another level it’s this incredibly emotional tale of redemption. And for all its grit and gore and hard-charging plot, it’s really a meditation on fathers and sons and on the ways that terrible grief and regret can affect us, physically as well as emotionally, as the very title of the book, “Razorblade Tears,” makes clear.

But it’s not mawkish in any way. Cosby just spins a great yarn. And while he’s doing it, he’s grappling with these big issues — homophobia, racism, poverty, class, you name it — but in such a big-hearted, cleareyed way, and with lines that just sort of stop you in your tracks on every page. I just want to leave you with an example of one of those lines. One of the dads is talking to the other dad. And he says, “Folks like to talk about revenge like it’s a righteous thing, but it’s just hate in a nicer suit.”

Tina, thank you so much. Such a fun book. And I feel like I can already picture the movie. Liz, over to you.

I would love to tell you about “Wayward,” by Dana Spiotta. This is a novel about a midlife insomniac and the mother of a teenager who spontaneously buys a fixer-upper in downtown Syracuse and moves into it. She’s running from something. Actually, she’s running from everything — her marriage, her kid, her age, her aimlessness, her — I hate to use the term midlife crisis, because it’s so tired.

But Spiotta brings a really fresh twist to this story. And what this woman finds is real and funny and honest and especially relatable If you live with a teenager whose resting expression is either benign tolerance or barely-concealed disdain.

“Wayward” reminded me of “Ladder of Years,” by Anne Tyler, that wonderful book about a woman who walks away from her family in the middle of a vacation and begins a whole new life. For me, both of these books, but especially “Wayward,” were very close to home.

Liz, thank you. Gal, tell us about yours.

Yes, so I want to talk about a wonderful work of reportage. It’s Eyal Press’s “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality.” So Press wants to explore this idea of dirty work. That’s the kind of phrase that he coins here. And these are the often deeply morally compromised jobs that someone in society is doing so that the rest of us, quote unquote, “good people” don’t have to.

And to give more grounding to this, he looks at three worlds in particular, at the guards and therapists working in prisons who are handling mentally ill people, at drone operators conducting deadly operations by remote control, and also workers on the kill floors of meat processing plants. These are the three worlds that he enters very deeply.

The most important contribution of this book, I could say, is just to give us a sense of this other inequality in America, this notion that there are some people forced to take these jobs — or they feel forced to take these jobs — that we don’t want to think about but are at the same time necessary.

And the other thing he does so well is, he gives us this concept of moral injury. We don’t really like to imagine that in American society, there are people that are suffering because they have to follow orders, orders that go against their moral compass, essentially. But he shows us that there are. And we step away from this book, or I stepped away from this book, feeling like you shouldn’t be looking away from them, and that you really need to grapple with the position that they’re in.

Gal, thank you. Greg, personal favorite.

Sally Rooney’s “Beautiful World, Where Are You” encapsulates kind of where she is in her career right now. Sally Rooney is a young Irish novelist. This is her third novel. And she has had to bear a burden of extratextual fame since her first novel, “Conversations With Friends,” landed and she was hailed as the voice of a generation. Her subsequent book, “Normal People,” was turned into a very successful streaming TV show. And so throughout her very young, very short career so far, she has had the weight, the outside apparatus of celebrity, placed on her.

And “Beautiful World, Where Are You” is a novel that, for the first time, now grapples with that. It’s a novel about a friendship between two young women. One is a very famous young novelist named Alice. And her friend and kind of intellectual peer, Eileen, works as an assistant at a small literary journal in Dublin.

The meat of the book is these long email exchanges between them about the nature of art, the nature of fame, whether novel writing is frivolous or whether it can sustain a culture, whether it has any role in culture with all of the distractions going on.

Sally Rooney grapples with capitalism, late capitalism, and its role in her characters’ lives. This is a book that goes there as well. It’s a book that, about 60 pages in, I told my 16-year-old daughter, “I think you would really love this,” and maybe 15 or 20 pages later, I said, “You’re not allowed to read this until you are 40.”

Because it’s also a book that is very sexy and very effectively sexy. It’s a book that veers into eroticism in the relationship that the writer Alice gets into with a warehouse worker that pulls in a lot of the themes of class and capitalism that she’s also playing with.

It in some ways is a very navel-gazing meta book, a famous novelist writing a novel about a famous novelist. But Sally Rooney writes beautiful, unadorned sentences that filter what you sense is her real life into art by playing with these bigger ideas.

John, over to you.

I want to talk about Christine Smallwood’s debut novel “The Life of the Mind.” Smallwood has written various accomplished cultural criticism for many years. And this is her first book, which is always kind of a brave move for a critic to make. This book is about Dorothy, an adjunct professor of English, who is recovering physically and emotionally from a miscarriage and also dealing with her academic job in what Smallwood describes as “the decadent twilight of the profession.”

This book is just carried along by Smallwood’s voice. I compared it to the work of Sam Lipsyte and Elif Batuman in the sense that she seems like one of those writers, based on this first book, who uses the novel just as an excuse, and a great one, for roving psychological and cultural observation through the eyes of this character.

And I flew through it. And I can’t wait to see what she does in the future.

Dave, tell us about one of your favorites of the year.

2021 was a Franzen year. I feel like he’s a comet that comes around once every decade or so, or once every half decade, and either gets everyone really excited or pisses them off.

This one, I really like. It covers one family, a mother, a father and four children, in suburban Chicago in the 1970s. And it’s just a richly wrought family drama.

But for me, the novel was also about a very important moral question, which is how do we do good in the world without our own self-interest getting in the way and ruining our intentions? Each member of the family is struggling with that question in their own way. But we also see it in America around them, which is fumbling its way through Vietnam and through a number of different domestic issues.

And Franzen is just able to balance all of that without turning away from the family dynamics. And it was a tough book to put down. And the title is “Crossroads,” by Jonathan Franzen.

Dave, thank you. MJ.

I want to talk about “The Prophets,” by Robert Jones Jr. It came out at the beginning of the year, and it just blew me away. It is a love story between two boys who were enslaved on a plantation. Their names are Isaiah and Samuel.

And the book is really about what their love does to life on this plantation. And it does a great many things. And the people on the plantation are warmed by it, they cherish it, they are jealous by it. At one point, someone tries to squash it. Other people try to steal it.

And the book is this kaleidoscopic look at how everyone is looking at these boys, a portrait of life of enslaved people on a plantation. And what I loved about this book is how it expands our understanding of enslaved people. Because they were just that, people. And when we talk about the horrors of slavery, we rightly talk about the tragedy, the horrific nature of it. But we don’t necessarily talk about the full range of humanity that enslaved people had and what they were able to feel. And that’s love.

And that’s one aspect that doesn’t get discussed that Robert Jones Jr. renders, beautifully, poetically, rigorously, in this book. You really see how the presence of this type of love, this all-encompassing, all-sacred love, raises the stakes for everyone, individually, on this plantation, personally on this plantation, humanly on this plantation.

And then, I don’t want to share any spoilers, but the book transforms in the last 50 pages. I was like breezing through it. I could not put it down. I’m still shook by the ending. So please come talk to me afterward about this book. But it is a remarkable book that I think is human and expansive and thoughtful and smart. And I would encourage everyone to go read it.

MJ, thank you. And thanks all of you. I’m going to add one personal favorite of mine, which is “Our Country Friends,” by Gary Shteyngart. This is being called a pandemic novel, and it is. And that sounds absolutely terrible, because we are still in a pandemic. And who feels like reading a novel about that?

And yet this book, I think, is one of Gary’s best, maybe even the best one. One of the things I love in a novel is a book that is fun and funny and makes me laugh. But one thing I like even more, possibly, is a book that makes me cry. This book does all of those things. It’s totally enjoyable, I also think a little bit profound. And I will let readers discover the plot and the story for themselves.

OK, I’m going to run down, one more time here, the full list. These are books that only a couple of us got a chance to talk about each today, but they were books that were truly broadly embraced across our team. This is a democratic process. There was voting, there was a runoff. So without further ado, once again, our 10 Best Books of 2021:

“How Beautiful We Were,” by Imbolo Mbue. “Intimacies,” by Katie Kitamura. “When We Cease to Understand the World,” by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West.

“The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois,” by Honorée Fannone Jeffers. “No One Is Talking About This,” by Patricia Lockwood. “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath,” by Heather Clark.

“How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America,” by Clint Smith. “On Juneteenth,” by Annette Gordon-Reed. “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City,” by Andrea Elliott.

“The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency,” by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

And there it is. The list will be published on nytimes.com today. And print subscribers, you can find it in your Sunday Book Review on December 12.

Remember, there’s more at nytimes.com/books. And you can always write to us at [email protected]. I write back; not right away, but I do.

The Book Review podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from HeadStepper Media, with a major assist from my colleague John Williams. Thanks for listening. For The New York Times, I’m Pamela Paul.

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Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | How to Listen

Earlier this week, several editors at The New York Times got together (virtually) for a live taping of the podcast to discuss the Book Review’s list of the year’s 10 Best Books. (If you haven’t seen the list yet and don’t want spoilers before listening, the choices are revealed one by one on the podcast.)

In addition to the 10 Best Books, the editors discuss on this episode some of their favorite works from the year that didn’t make the list. Here are those additional books the editors discuss:

“The Magician” by Colm Toibin

“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro

“Razorblade Tears” by S.A. Cosby

“Wayward” by Dana Spiotta

“Dirty Work” by Eyal Press

“Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney

“The Life of the Mind” by Christine Smallwood

“Crossroads” by Jonathan Franzen

“The Prophets” by Robert Jones Jr.

“Our Country Friends” by Gary Shteyngart

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] .

An earlier version of this article misidentified the author of “The Magician.” He is Colm Toibin. The book is about Thomas Mann, not by him.

How we handle corrections

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International Edition

Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York: Forensic study highlights migrant triumph

Tyler anbinder digs deep into real-life records to animate the social and economic strides made by the irish in the us despite arduous conditions and initial press demonisation as ‘lazy’ catholics.

The Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park is a Famine-era stone cottage: By defying nativist insistence they would be permanently lazy and poor, Anbinder argues the Famine Irish 'fundamentally changed how Americans viewed immigrants and the American Dream'.

“Any man or woman,” Margaret McCarthy wrote from New York in 1850, “are fools that would not venture and come to this plentiful country where no man or woman ever hungered, or ever will, and where you will not be seen naked.” Margaret had escaped an island where millions had been “half-naked, and but half-fed” even before the Great Hunger turned the country into what Kerry priest John O’Sullivan called “a living tomb”. As Ireland died at home, the promised land across the Atlantic was a last hope.

We have generally viewed the people Tyler Anbinder calls the million and more “Famine refugees” with condescending pity. Historians have characterised them as Fr O’Sullivan did, as “the most wretched people on the face of the earth”. Many died on “coffin ships” crossing the Atlantic, more soon after in the disease-ridden tenements of New York. Those who survived lived “gloomy” lives of poverty and “seldom rose” up the social ladder. Only in later generations, it has been widely assumed, did “Irish Americans” move “from rags to riches”.

Yet when Anbinder began sifting through the records of the Emigrant Savings Bank – founded by Irish people in 1850 – in New York Public Library, he found a very different story. In research that should reshape history on both sides of the Atlantic, Anbinder finds that large numbers defied the odds, transforming their lives and their new home.

Anbinder’s previous books have told the story of 19th-century immigrant New York, from the infamous Five Points to the Know-Nothing nativists who tried to keep the Irish out. But the Famine Irish’s American lives have long eluded historians, their names too common and their details too thin to trace through records. In the bank’s accounts, however, and especially in their identity “test books” (the first in the world to use mothers’ maiden names as security), he found a way to follow them.

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Dublin Literary Award 2024 winner Mircea Cărtărescu: ‘It’s one of the greatest prizes I’ve ever won’

Ulster’s Lost Counties: Loyalism and Paramilitarism since 1920 by Edward Burke

I’ll Fly You to the Moon

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With an army of research students, Anbinder created a database that could then be cross-referenced with genealogical information, census records, local newspapers and more. By working with economic historians Cormac Ó Gráda and Simone Wegge, he was able to confirm that the bank’s clients were broadly representative of Famine Irish arrivals in general. In the end, there were more than 1,200 men who could be tracked for at least a decade.

Many could never escape poverty and ‘the signs of alcohol’s destructive power were everywhere’

While about half started in unskilled work, more than 40 per cent of those would experience social mobility during their lives in America. A remarkable third would run their own business (a higher proportion than among “native” New Yorkers), while notable numbers ended up in “white-collar” and professional work. Those results stand in stark contrast to previous assumptions, and to recent research from Ó Gráda and Neil Cummins indicating that Irish emigrants in England did not see such social mobility for generations.

That experience perhaps explains the evangelicalism about America in letters home. Eliza Quin, who left Sligo in 1847, told her family that it was “the best country in the world”, a place where “it is easy making money”. People wrote that their wages were five or 10 times higher than they had been in Ireland, and that, as Bridget Rooney put it, “we are fed every day like on Christmas at home”.

Anbinder makes sure not to paint an unrealistically rosy picture, emphasising not just the squalor and danger of New York’s slums, but also the backbreaking and exploitative work. Irishmen laboured tirelessly on construction sites, gasworks and foundries where horrifying numbers died due to overwork and unsafe conditions. An incredible 70 per cent of the city’s domestic servants were Irish women (three times more likely to be working outside their home than white American women), who were paid “shockingly little” for endless hours.

Alongside wage labour were enterprise and hustle, as Irish people worked as everything from porters to peddlers. Thomas Field sold and then made umbrellas in Brooklyn, while Cornelius O’Sullivan built his savings by selling bottle corks. Chain migration led many into networks. Tyrone men from the Sperrin mountains carved out livings selling charcoal, while from a “Little Killybegs” on Mulberry Street, Donegal peddlers sold far and wide, some with great success – when Andrew Brice died in 1913, his estate was worth $4.5 million in today’s money.

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Further up the ladder were the third who began their American working lives in skilled occupations: artisans who had had just enough to escape starving semi-colonial Ireland. Cappoquin apprentice and Young Irelander Hugh Collender worked making window blinds before marrying the daughter of Michael Phelan, a celebrity billiards champion from Castlecomer. Collender & Phelan billiards tables became famous from pool halls to the White House, and Collender would die a millionaire.

Indeed while large numbers had been destitute, Famine emigrants to America were “disproportionately” from the “lower-middle ranks”. But “then, as now”, Anbinder writes, Americans wrongly assumed immigrants were “penniless paupers, the dregs of their homelands, when in fact such migrants have never made up a very large proportion of those who move to the United States”.

Irish immigrants were demonised by the press as “lazy” Catholics “with no plan, and no energy to form one”, except to “beg, and steal, and starve”. Such nativist bigotry would lead not just to the Know-Nothings, but also to the first US immigration controls, targeted directly at the Irish. But Anbinder emphasises how Black Americans “faced far more systemic barriers to socioeconomic advancement than any Irish immigrant”, not least around voting rights. Democracy meant that the Irish – and their votes – could not be ignored.

The book’s structure around the “social ladder” can make it at times repetitive, but it is hard to overestimate the importance and achievement of Anbinder’s work. His notes are meticulous, although the publisher’s elimination of note numbers simply makes it harder to follow the rich sources. Readers do not need to be protected from complexity, and many would surely like to have read more of the innovative economic history that Anbinder and his colleagues have undertaken with his data.

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The archival detective work and storytelling are engaging throughout, illuminating some incredible characters. Bartley O’Donnell from Limerick inflated his age to take advantage of the craze for long-distance race-walking as “the octogenarian pedestrian”. Kerry saloonkeeper Murty O’Sullivan invented relations to Irish patriots while organising a “Kenmare Guards” militia and the allegedly unbeatable “Kenmare Hurlers”.

Saloonkeeping was the “most lucrative” business open to the Irish, one that could bring “prestige and political prominence”. The life of failed saloonkeeper Thomas D Norris was “the very personification of the American dream”: the Killarney tailor opened two clothes shops, sold them to fund an Irish brigade in the civil war, fought to the end, ended up on the streets, and was eventually saved by political patronage, even delivering a message in Irish at a presidential inauguration.

People wrote home that their wages were five or 10 times higher than they had been in Ireland, and that, as Bridget Rooney put it, ‘we are fed every day like on Christmas at home’

As America expanded, “a land of opportunity beckoned”. Margaret McCarthy advised her relatives to “go west”. Those who left New York, Anbinder finds, had even more social mobility than those who stayed. With vast lands being “settled” as indigenous Americans were dispossessed, many Irish sought their own farms. John Griffin and his wife Ellen from Castlegregory ended up with a 2,000-acre ranch in California’s San Joaquin Valley that Ellen and her daughters would run profitably for decades after John’s death.

Anbinder rightly highlights the agency of women even when the records hide them behind their husbands’ names. He uncovers many extraordinary women’s stories, such as unmarried Kerrywoman Honora Shea who came over with her two children from different fathers. Honora sold fruit on the streets and saved $275 for her children, a nest egg of over $10,000 today.

There were tragedies too. Many could never escape poverty and “the signs of alcohol’s destructive power were everywhere”. Maurice Mariga drank himself to death after all his children died in a brief period. Infant mortality was horrendous: Galway woman Mary Ann Abberton and her piano-maker husband Anthony outlived 11 of their 12 children (despite Anthony once being a victim of a vicious attack with a meat cleaver).

[  First reliable maps track spread from US of potato blight that caused Irish famine in mid-19th century  ]

Despite the challenges, as early as 1878 American newspapers were marvelling at Irish success. “By all obvious reasoning”, the New Orleans Item wrote, “the Irish should have been a failure”, since they were unwelcome and “reviled”. But “step by step, they advanced”, and within a few decades their children were “second to none in the land”.

By defying nativist insistence that they would be permanently lazy and poor, Anbinder argues that the Famine Irish “fundamentally changed how Americans viewed immigrants and the American Dream”. “The Irish did more than help build America,” reflected Barack Obama – himself the descendant of a Famine migrant – in 2015. “They helped to sharpen the idea of America.”

Anbinder makes sure not to paint an unrealistically rosy picture, emphasising not just the squalor and danger of New York’s slums, but also the back-breaking and exploitative work

On this side of the Atlantic, the demographic devastation of the Famine decade remains the defining event of our modern history, even more so than the independence that only recently freed us from mass emigration. Its deepest scar still lingers: contrary to the far-right lie that “Ireland is full”, we remain unique in having a smaller population than we did in 1845. Anbinder’s revelation of the Famine Irish’s successes has profound implications for how we think about our past and present, home and abroad.

Our politics is now infected with the kind of anti-immigrant nativism the Famine Irish faced. Those who shamefully spread it, or cynically exploit it, want us to forget that it was once our migrant ancestors seeking refuge and opportunity, literally in their millions. Just like today’s migrants and refugees, they were not the “hapless beings” or lazy scroungers of bigoted imagination, but people writing their own story.

Christopher Kissane is host of Ireland’s Edge and a historian with the department of economic history at LSE

Further reading

Becoming Irish Americans: The Making and Remaking of a People by Timothy J Meagher (Yale University Press, 2023). Meagher explores how the Irish in America created a new Irish-American identity, and how it evolved through each successive generation.

The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine by Cian T McMahon (NYU Press, 2021). Using letters home, McMahon reveals the often-hidden experience of the harrowing passage to America.

Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the 19th-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy by Hidetaka Hirota (OUP, 2017). Hirota reveals the central importance of anti-Irish bigotry in creating America’s immigration system.

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