gilbert cruz new york times book review

Gilbert Cruz Is Our Next Books Editor

The veteran Culture editor starts a new chapter. Read more in this note from Sam Sifton, Joe Kahn and Carolyn Ryan.

We’re thrilled to announce that Gilbert Cruz, our Culture editor, will be the next Books editor of The Times.

Gilbert spent the past four years bringing important changes to our arts report, diversifying its voices and story forms, shepherding prize-winning criticism, breaking news and overseeing a muscular service operation devoted to helping our readers discover what to watch next.

Now he’ll move to Books to focus his energies on three important pillars of coverage. The first is to reimagine The New York Times Book Review, the nation’s last stand-alone newspaper book-review section, for the digital age. The second is to increase and embolden our reporting on and criticism of ideas and intellectual life, the publishing world and all that lives within it. And the third is to build new muscles in service journalism that will help our readers choose their next books with ease and joy.

Gilbert emerged from a talented pool of applicants to show that he was exactly the right person to lead these efforts. He is a seasoned manager and a digital innovator, possessed of superb news judgment and a fount of ideas, and a wise practitioner of journalism that answers readers’ needs. A natural leader, he will push for provocative coverage and challenging ideas, and bring fresh perspectives to our books report.

Gilbert, who was born and raised in the Bronx, started his journalism career at the Tuscaloosa News in Alabama, before moving to Entertainment Weekly as an editorial assistant in the books department and, later, to Time and New York magazines. He came to The Times seven years ago as television editor and was soon asked to help launch Watching. Watching expanded the scope of service journalism at The Times. A promotion to Culture editor soon followed.

But books are Gilbert’s first love, as anyone who has listened to him talk about them on NYT Audio , read his brilliant exegesis of the essential Stephen King , or follows him on Twitter may have suspected. He is a lifelong passionate reader with deeply catholic tastes. We are excited to see him soar in this new role.

Since the departure of Pamela Paul in March, our colleagues in Books, led by John Williams, Tina Jordan and Juliana Barbassa, have continued to produce a brilliant report day after day. We are grateful for their hard and unrelenting work, and buoyant about the department’s future under Gilbert’s leadership.

As for Culture, the search for a new editor commences now. Sia Michel, who among other things edited the work of the last two winners of the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, will serve as interim editor of the desk.

Sam, Joe and Carolyn

Explore Further

Sam sifton joins masthead, overseeing features coverage, stella bugbee named styles editor, emily weinstein elevated to editor, food and new york times cooking.

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The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about... more

Listen now on

A scathing satire about race, publishing and identity politics, Everett’s acclaimed 2001 novel is the basis of the Oscar-nominated movie... more

Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “There There” centered on a group of characters who all converge on an Indigenous powwow... more

Dwight Garner discusses a new oral history of the venerable alt-weekly, Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out to Write.”

On this week's episode, a roundtable conversation about Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” a riff on “David Copperfield” that moves Charles... more

The early part of a year can mean new books to read, or it can mean catching up on older... more

A.O. Scott joins for a spoiler-filled conversation about both David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon" and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated... more

Molly Roden Winter and her husband have been married for 24 years. But since 2008 they have also dated other... more

It's gonna be a busy spring! On this week’s episode, we talk about some of the upcoming books we are... more

Every January, the director Steven Soderbergh posts a detailed list of his previous year's cultural consumption — every movie and TV... more

In our last episode of 2023, we convene to talk about James McBride's novel — one of the year's most... more

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;} 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...

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;} 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...

Our Critics' Year in Reading

The Times’s staff book critics — Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and Alexandra Jacobs — do a lot of reading over the course of any given year, but not everything they read stays with them equally. On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz chats with the critics about the books that did: the novels and story collections and works of nonfiction that made an impression in 2023 and defined their year in reading, including one that Garner say...

10 Best Books of 2023

It’s that time of year: After months of reading, arguing and (sometimes) happily agreeing, the Book Review’s editors have come up with their picks for the 10 Best Books of 2023 . On this week’s podcast, Gilbert Cruz reveals the chosen titles — five fiction, five nonfiction — and talks with some of the editors who participated in the process.

“The Bee Sting,” by Paul Murray

“Chain-Gan...

Talking Barbra Streisand and Rebecca Yarros

Book Review reporter Alexandra Alter discusses two of her recent pieces. The first is about Georgette Heyer, the "queen of Regency romance," and recent attempts to posthumously revise one of her most famous works in order to remove stereotypical language. The second looks at Rebecca Yarros, author of one of this year's most surprising and persistent bestsellers: the "romantasy" novel "Fourth Wing."

Then, staff critic Alexandra Jaco...

Why is Shakespeare's First Folio So Important?

In 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare died, two of his friends and fellow actors led an effort to publish a single volume containing 36 of the plays he had written, half of which had never been officially published before. Now known as the First Folio, that volume has become a lodestone of Shakespeare scholarship over the centuries, offering the most definitive versions of his work along with clues to his process and plent...

Happy Halloween: Scary Book Recommendations

You don’t need Halloween to justify reading scary books, any more than you need sand to justify reading a beach novel. But the holiday does give editors here a handy excuse to talk about some of their favorite spooky reads. On this week’s episode, the host Gilbert Cruz talks with his colleagues Tina Jordan and Sadie Stein about the enduring appeal of ghost stories, Gothic novels and other scary books.

Titles discussed:

“Ghost Hunters...

How Did Marvel Become the Biggest Name in Movies?

In 2008 — the same year that Robert Downey Jr. appeared in the action comedy “Tropic Thunder,” for which he would earn his second Oscar nomination — he also appeared as the billionaire inventor and unlikely superhero Tony Stark in “Iron Man,” the debut feature from the upstart Marvel Studios.

Downey lost the Oscar (to Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”), but Marvel won the day. In the 15 years since “Iron Man” came out, the Marvel Ci...

What Big Books Have Yet to Come Out in 2023?

On this week’s episode, a look at the rest of the year in books — new fiction from Alice McDermott and this year’s Nobel laureate, Jon Fosse, a journalist’s investigation of state-sanctioned killings in the Philippines, and a trio of celebrity memoirs. 

Discussed in this week’s episode:

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“Day,” by Michael Cunningham

“Absolution,” by Alice McDermott

“A Shining,” by Jon Fosse

“Romney: A Reckoniung,” by McK...

What It's Like to Write a Madonna Biography

Madonna released her first single in 1982, and in one guise or another she has been with us ever since — ubiquitous but also astonishing, when you consider the usual fleeting arc of pop stardom. How has she done it, and how have her various personae shaped or reflected the culture she inhabits? These are among the questions the renowned biographer Mary Gabriel takes up in her latest book, “Madonna: A Rebel Life,” which casts new li...

Audiobooks are the Best

You love books. You love podcasts. Ergo, we assume you love audiobooks the way we do — we hope you do, anyway, because this week we’ve devoted our entire episode to the form, as Gilbert Cruz is joined by a couple of editors from the Book Review, Lauren Christensen and Tina Jordan, to discuss everything from favorite narrators to regional accents to the ideal listening speed and the way audiobooks have to compete with other kinds of...

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479 episodes

The world's top authors and critics join host Gilbert Cruz and editors at The New York Times Book Review to talk about the week's top books, what we're reading and what's going on in the literary world. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp

The Book Review The New York Times

• 4.3 • 310 Ratings
• MAR 8, 2024

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

A scathing satire about race, publishing and identity politics, Everett’s acclaimed 2001 novel is the basis of the Oscar-nominated movie “American Fiction.”

• MAR 1, 2024

Tommy Orange on His "There There" Sequel

Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “There There” 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. This week, Orange visits the podcast to discuss his new work as well as the book he has read most in his life, Clarice Lispector's "The Hour of the Star."

• FEB 23, 2024

The Rise and Fall of The Village Voice

Dwight Garner discusses a new oral history of the venerable alt-weekly, Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out to Write.”

• FEB 16, 2024

Let's Talk About 'Demon Copperhead'

On this week's episode, a roundtable conversation about Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” a riff on “David Copperfield” that moves Charles Dickens’s story to contemporary Appalachia and grapples with topics from poverty to ambition to opioid addiction.

• FEB 9, 2024

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.

• FEB 2, 2024

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

A.O. Scott joins for a spoiler-filled conversation about both David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon" and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-nominated film adaptation.

• © 2023 The New York Times Company

Customer Reviews

310 Ratings

I miss John Williams and Pamela Paul, if the Top 10 Books of 2022 podcast is any indication of what is to come the podcast is in big trouble. This has been one of my weekly favourites and I lost interest after the second book - dry, boring and no personality. Please, fix this!

Thank you, Pamela. We have enjoyed your work on the show a great deal. Happy trails and take care!

Miss the old program

I have listened to this podcast for many years but it’s just not interesting anymore. Too many popular commercial titles. Maybe you’re trying to expand your audience but you’re losing your hard core fans.

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News, Notes, Talk

The New York Times has found its next Books editor.

Today,  The New York Times  announced that current Culture editor Gilbert Cruz will be the paper’s next Books editor, replacing Pamela Paul , who left the role in March.

“Gilbert spent the past four years bringing important changes to our arts report, diversifying its voices and story forms, shepherding prize-winning criticism, breaking news and overseeing a muscular service operation devoted to helping our readers discover what to watch next,” wrote Sam Sifton, Joe Kahn, and Carolyn Ryan in a press release .

Now he’ll move to Books to focus his energies on three important pillars of coverage. The first is to reimagine The New York Times Book Review , the nation’s last stand-alone newspaper book-review section, for the digital age. The second is to increase and embolden our reporting on and criticism of ideas and intellectual life, the publishing world and all that lives within it. And the third is to build new muscles in service journalism that will help our readers choose their next books with ease and joy.

Gilbert emerged from a talented pool of applicants to show that he was exactly the right person to lead these efforts. He is a seasoned manager and a digital innovator, possessed of superb news judgment and a fount of ideas, and a wise practitioner of journalism that answers readers’ needs. A natural leader, he will push for provocative coverage and challenging ideas, and bring fresh perspectives to our books report.

Good luck to him!

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to the Lithub Daily

March 14, 2024.

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Morning joe, the new york times reveals 'the 10 best books of 2023'.

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Editor of The New York Times Book Review, Gilbert Cruz, joins Morning Joe to discuss the 10 best books of 2023 and the meticulous process behind their selection. Nov. 29, 2023

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The New York Times reveals 'The 10 Best Books of 2023'

Editor of The New York Times Book Review, Gilbert Cruz, joins Morning Joe to discuss the 10 best books of 2023 and the meticulous process behind their selection.

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NEW YORK — The New York Times on Thursday named Gilbert Cruz as its Books editor, tasking him with transforming the newspaper’s book review “for the digital age.”

Cruz has been the Culture editor at the Times since January 2018, in charge of arts and culture coverage, including the Arts & Leisure print section in the Sunday paper.

Cruz replaces Pamela Paul, who was the editor of The New York Times Book Review for nine years before becoming an Opinion columnist in April.

The Times’ book reviews and coverage of the industry are widely influential. The Times publishes the last stand-alone newspaper book review section, which has been in print since 1896.

“A natural leader, he will push for provocative coverage and challenging ideas, and bring fresh perspectives to our books report,” Times editors Sam Sifton, Joe Kahn and Carolyn Ryan wrote about Cruz in a note to the newsroom Thursday.

The editors said Cruz would reimagine The New York Times Book Review, the weekly print section, for a digital audience. They said he would also “increase and embolden our reporting on and criticism of ideas and intellectual life, the publishing world and all that lives within it,” as well as help readers choose books to read.

Cruz started at the Times seven years ago as the television editor. Before that, he was the editorial director at Vulture, New York magazine’s culture site.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/heres-a-dozen-books-from-2023-you-should-read-critics-say

Here’s a dozen books from 2023 you should read, critics say

As the year comes to a close, we’re sitting down with book critics to discuss some of the best books released in 2023. NPR’s Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan and New York Times books editor Gilbert Cruz share their favorite fiction and nonfiction picks with Jeffrey Brown.

”Absolution” by Alice McDermott

– Maureen Corrigan

“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride

“The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray

– Gilbert Cruz

“North Woods” by Daniel Mason

“The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder” by David Grann

“How to Say Babylon” by Safiya Sinclair

“Master Slave Husband Wife” by Ilyon Woo

“Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World” by John Vaillant

“Beware the Woman” by Megan Abbott

And more personal favorites…

Maureen Corrigan recommended “Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett and Gilbert Cruz suggested “Fourth Wing” and “Iron Flame” by Rebecca Yarros.

In his more than 30-year career with the NewsHour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times.

Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.

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A Provocative New Biography of Emerson Focuses on the Man

In “Glad to the Brink of Fear,” James Marcus frames the great Transcendentalist as a writer for our times.

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By Lawrence A. Rosenwald

Lawrence Rosenwald is Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English emeritus at Wellesley College.

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GLAD TO THE BRINK OF FEAR: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson , by James Marcus

James Marcus’s new biography of the great Transcendentalist writer, lecturer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson opens with a sharp contrast. On the one hand, Marcus writes, there is Emerson as he is portrayed by others, the “irritating uncle at the feast of American letters,” the “cheerleader for the most conformist aspects of American life.” Then, there is Emerson as he truly is: the “great apostle of nonconformity,” and “anything but a Victorian relic.” Marcus proposes to portray the latter.

But that first Emerson is a straw man. Fine and diverse writers have been paying tribute to the apostle of nonconformity for a long time. Indeed, it’s safe to say that no intellectual writing on Emerson today imagines him as a Victorian relic, and certainly no one writing, today, in the journals to which Marcus himself, an accomplished editor, translator and critic, regularly contributes.

We are better off considering “Glad to the Brink of Fear” not as the first portrait of the real Emerson, but as part of a wider canon. This is, rightly, how we encounter new performances of a classic role and see it in fruitful counterpoint to its predecessors: Each interpreter of Hamlet, from John Barrymore to Riz Ahmed , shows us something new and vivid.

Marcus’s writing is lively and precise, vigorously colloquial. It is full of knowledge and affection. The voice is distinctive, and Marcus is autobiographically present in some of the book’s best passages — his visits to Emerson’s study and gravesite in Concord, Mass.; his communing with his subject over shared grief.

His portrait of Emerson, the man, is finely wrought; this Emerson has a body as well as a mind, and Marcus writes movingly about Emerson’s fears of blindness and tuberculosis. His Emerson is a man in relationships — with his enticing Harvard classmate Martin Gay; with his first wife, Ellen, ill with tuberculosis when they met, dead of “the red wheezers” at 19; with his second wife, Lydia, whom he renamed Lidian, and who put doughnuts up the chimney to feed a lurking rat.

This is also a man making a living. Marcus sets out what Emerson earned from his lectures and books (his Boston publisher did a poor job of distributing), the fatigues he endured on lecture tours, the astonishing variety of responses his talks evoked.

And finally, this Emerson is a man dealing with dementia. Marcus’s account of the disease has a loving, lacerating intensity. So does his portrayal of the fire that burned the family home in 1872, as the elderly Emerson looked on, benevolent and clueless, even throwing some of his own mementos back into the burning house. Marcus brings to life his final hours, Emerson's shock of recognition that death has come for him, his last, mostly incomprehensible words.

Marcus must reckon with the problematic and contradictory aspects of Emerson, too, and he admits it’s difficult. “I wanted my hero to behave like one,” he writes — an honest but dangerous confession.

It is not that Marcus does not see Emerson’s flaws; but at times it feels as though he softens them. Not always — he is impressively fair on Emerson’s slow movement toward speaking out against slavery — but often. Emerson’s deeply troubling justification of “Britain’s imperialist plunder of the Indian subcontinent” is described too flippantly as “wince-making.”

He also softens some of the great anti-Emersonian sentiments; he quotes Melville’s praise, but not the passage in a letter in which he claims that Emerson’s “gross and astonishing errors & illusions spring from a self-conceit so intensely intellectual and calm that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name.” Marcus leaves undiscussed Emerson’s failure to recognize that Thoreau was maybe a greater writer than he was, and to concede that his friend and fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller’s life in Europe fulfilled profound ambitions for a woman’s literary power and romantic partnership that Emerson’s Concord could not gratify.

And while he excels at drawing the man’s rounded humanity, Marcus’s portrait of Emerson as a writer often disappoints. Describing genius is always a challenge — but Marcus makes the challenge unnecessarily daunting. He does not, for one thing, consider the possibility that Emerson’s journals are his best form. (Disclosure: I published a book in 1988 claiming that they were exactly that — but the claim is not eccentric.)

Nor does he look at Emerson’s best poems — “Uriel,” for example, which Robert Frost called “the greatest Western poem yet.” He is interested in the biographically rich poetry, “Threnody” and “Terminus.” Marcus’s focus on the essays and lectures is also more biographical than critical, his analyses lively but familiar.

These are significant limitations. But to return to an earlier analogy: If this were a show — a staging of a masterpiece — I would pay good money to see it. Not because it is perfect or unprecedented, but because it is alive and provocative.

GLAD TO THE BRINK OF FEAR : A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson | James Marcus | Princeton University Press | 334 pp. | $29.95

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .