The Book Review

For decades, the director Guillermo del Toro has built a career blending the grotesque and the beautiful in films like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Shape of Water” and “Pinocchio.” Now he’s earned his latest Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of “Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley’s classic novel. On this week’s episode, he talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about discovering the book as a lonely child, how it shaped his worldview and why this screenplay is the one he’s proudest of.

“I always felt the creature is me,” del Toro said of the first time he read the book. “I felt so alone at age 11, and so full of love to give and so full of rage to dispose of. It was a very complicated emotional scope for somebody that young.”

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Julia Quinn published "The Duke and I," the first book in the 'Bridgerton' series, in 2000. Seven books and a quarter century later, its adaptation remains one of the biggest series ever to air on Netflix. Quinn spoke to host Gilbert Cruz about the show, her books and why the heck that family has so many children.

"I don't even remember why I made eight kids," said Quinn. "I just, I wanted her to have a big family and somehow that's how many kids there were. And if I had planned on eight, I would've plotted things out better. There were a number of places where I really wrote myself into a corner."

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Keza MacDonald, the video games editor at The Guardian and author of the new book “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play,” chose to write her first book about Nintendo because it has been so central for so long to the culture of games. “It was the company that got me into video games,” she says. “I know that’s the same story that millions of other people have had as well." She speaks with host Gilbert Cruz about the iconic Japanese company as well as how the perception of gaming has changed over the decades.

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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.”

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