The Book Review

Xenobe Purvis’s slim but powerful debut novel, “The Hounding,” opens with a jolt: “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body. Marching up the river path, the villagers.”

How did we get here, with five young sisters living in 1700s England being hunted by an angry mob that suspects them not only of murder but also of the demonic ability to transform themselves into a pack of wild dogs? That is the tale “The Hounding” unfolds, in a gothic parable about male ego, cultural misogyny and the dangers of gossip run amok.

On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin discusses “The Hounding” with his fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib, Emily Eakin and Gregory Cowles.

Other books and works mentioned in this podcast:

“The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson

“The Sound of Music,” directed by Robert Wise

“The Testament of Yves Gundron,” by Emily Barton

“The Scarlet Letter,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch,” by Rivka Galchen

“Delicate Edible Birds,” by Lauren Groff

“Paradise,” by Toni Morrison

The podcast “Normal Gossip”

“You Didn’t Hear This From Me,” by Kelsey McKinney

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The journalist, novelist and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman is best known for writing about rock music and pop culture in astute essay collections like “The Nineties,” “X” and “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.” But Klosterman got his start in college as a sports journalist, and with his new book, “Football,” he has finally devoted an entire collection to the sport that has fundamentally shaped him alongside American society at large.

“I’ve unconsciously been thinking about football for most of my life,” Klosterman tells host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s episode. “I decided at some point, I do want to write a book about sports. You know, I’d always mentioned sports here and there in the culture writing I had done, or the kind of conventional pop culture writing I’d done, but I wanted to do a real sports book. And initially my idea was it would be about basketball — but over time it became very clear to me it had to be about football, for a variety of reasons. … It seemed as though if you’re going to do a sports book, particularly as it relates to society, there is only one choice in the United States.”

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

A new year means new books are on the way! So many new books. On this week’s episode, host Gilbert Cruz talks with fellow Book Review editors Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin about the upcoming fiction and nonfiction titles they’re most anticipating between now and April.

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

• “Vigil,” by George Saunders
• “Where the Serpent Lives,” by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• “Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings and the Rebirth of White Rage,” by Heather Ann Thompson
• “Five Bullets,” by Elliot Williams
• “Lost Lambs,” by Madeline Cash
• ”Half His Age,” by Jennette McCurdy
• “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” by Michael Pollan
• “On Morrison,” by Namwali Serpell
• “Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon,” by Toni Morrison
• “Clutch,” by Emily Nemens
• “Murder Bimbo,” by Rebecca Novack
• “Kin,” by Tayari Jones
• “Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks,” by Benjamin Hale
• “Lake Effect,” by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
• “Now I Surrender,” by Alvaro Enrigue
• “The Keeper,” by Tana French

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Virginia Evans’s debut novel, “The Correspondent,” was published last April and became one of the publishing industry’s heartwarming champions of 2025: a slow-burn success story that gathered momentum over the summer and fall and finally topped the New York Times hardcover best-seller list in December. For Evans, who had written and failed to sell seven previous novels, the book’s popularity has felt magical, as she explains to host Gilbert Cruz on this week’s podcast.

“I went on a kind of a brief book tour in the fall, meeting hundreds of people,” Evans says, “and … different bookstores were starting to say, this is becoming a thing, we can’t keep it in the store. We keep running out of stock. And then they were going back, reprint after reprint. So then I started to think, oh, it’s getting bigger. But I think, I just didn’t have a context. I still don’t understand publishing. So I thought every step of the way was the mountaintop. I keep getting a new mountaintop.”

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “What We Can Know,” is many things at once: It’s a science fiction imagining of a future world devastated by climate catastrophe; it’s a literary mystery about a scholar’s search for a long-lost poem; it’s a deep dive into complicated marriages; and it’s a meditation on how the past lingers and how history morphs with time.

“It’s the best thing McEwan has written in ages,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review. “It’s a sophisticated entertainment of a high order.”

In this episode of the Book Review Book Club, the host MJ Franklin discusses “What We Can Know” with his colleagues Sarah Lyall (who profiled McEwan for the Book Review this year) and Leah Greenblatt. You can follow along, and add your own comments to the discussion here.

Other Books mentioned in this discussion:

“Atonement,” “Saturday,” “On Chesil Beach,” “The Comfort of Strangers,” “The Cement Garden” and “Enduring Love,” by Ian McEwan

“Fleishman Is in Trouble,” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

“Fates and Furies,” by Lauren Groff

“Marston Meadows: A Corona for Prue,” by John Fuller

“How the Word Is Passed,” by Clint Smith

“The Stranger’s Child,” “The Line of Beauty” and “Our Evenings,” by Alan Hollinghurst

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.