How a Wildfire Sent Pico Iyer in Search of Silence
17 January - 42 minsDecades ago, after he lost in home in a California wildfire, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer started to go to a small monastery in Big Sur in search of solitude. On this week's episode he discusses those retreats, which he writes about in his new book "Aflame: Learning from Silence."
"It's true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery or convent and I felt a kind of longing, the way other people feel a longing when they see a delectable meal or a Pistachio gelato."
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Series Episodes
The Books We’re Excited About in Early 2025
And we're back! Happy new year, readers. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz and Joumana Khatib talk about some of the upcoming books they’re most anticipating over the next several months.
37 mins
10 January Finished
The 20th Anniversary of "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell"
The Book Review podcast is off for the holidays, but please enjoy this episode of the The New York Times's Culture Desk show from earlier this fall in which reporter Alexandra Alter talks to author Susanna Clarke upon the 20th anniversary of her masterful fantasy novel “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.”
16 mins
27 December 2024 Finished
Book Club: "Small Things Like These," by Claire Keegan
Clare Keegan's slim 2021 novella about one Irishman's crisis of conscience during the Christmas season, which was one of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, has also been adapted into a film starring Cillian Murphy. In this week’s episode, MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib, Lauren Christensen, and Elisabeth Egan.
51 mins
20 December 2024 Finished
Our Book Critics On Their Year in Reading
Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — staff critics for The New York Times Book Review — join host Gilbert Cruz to look back on highlights from their year in books.
31 mins
13 December 2024 Finished
Book Club: Dolly Alderton's 'Good Material' (Rerun)
Following our Top 10 Books of 2024 episode, we are re-running our book club discussion about one of the novels on our year-end list: Dolly Alderton's "Good Material."
46 mins
6 December 2024 Finished
