The New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The magazine's offices are located near Times Square in New York City.
Overview
The New York Times has published a book review section since October 10, 1896, announcing: "We begin today the publication of a Supplement which contains reviews of new books ... and other interesting matter ... associated with news of the day." In 1911, the review was moved to Sundays, on the theory that it would be more appreciatively received by readers with a bit of time on their hands.
The target audience is an intelligent, general-interest adult reader. The Times publishes two versions each week, one with a cover price sold via subscription, bookstores and newsstands; the other with no cover price included as an insert in each Sunday edition of the Times (the copies are otherwise identical).
Each week the NYTBR receives 750 to 1000 books from authors and publishers in the mail, of which 20 to 30 are chosen for review. Books are selected by the "preview editors" who read over 1,500 advance galleys a year. The selection process is based on finding books that are important and notable, as well as discovering new authors whose books stand above the crowd. Self-published books are generally not reviewed as a matter of policy. Books not selected for review are stored in a "discard room" and then sold. , Barnes & Noble arrived about once a month to purchase the contents of the discard room, and the proceeds are then donated by NYTBR to charities. Books that are actually reviewed are usually donated to the reviewer.
As of 2015, all review critics are freelance; the NYTBR does not have staff critics. In prior years, the NYTBR did have in-house critics, or a mix of in-house and freelance. For freelance critics, they are assigned an in-house "preview editor" who works with them in creating the final review. Freelance critics might be employees of The New York Times whose main duties are in other departments. They also include professional literary critics, novelists, academics and artists who write reviews for the NYTBR on a regular basis.
Other duties on staff include a number of senior editors and a chief editor; a team of copy editors; a letter pages editor who reads letters to the editor; columnists who write weekly columns, such as the "Paperback Row" column; a production editor; a web and Internet publishing division; and other jobs. In addition to the magazine there is an Internet site that offers additional content, including audio interviews with authors, called the "Book Review Podcast".
The book review publishes each week the widely cited and influential New York Times Best Seller list, which is created by the editors of the Times "News Surveys" department.
In 2021, on the 125th anniversary of the Book Review, Parul Sehgal a staff critic and former editor at the Book Review, wrote a review of the NYTBR titled "Reviewing the Book Review".
Pamela Paul was editor from 2013 to 2022, succeeding Sam Tanenhaus, who was editor from 2004 to 2013.
Podcast
"Inside The New York Times Book Review" is the oldest and most popular podcast at The New York Times. The debut episode was released on April 30, 2006 and the show has been recorded weekly ever since.
1983 Legion court case
In 1983, William Peter Blatty sued the New York Times Book Review for failing to include his 1983 novel, Legion, in its best-seller list. The New York Times had previously claimed that it based its "best-seller list" is based on computer-processed sales figures from 2,000 bookstores across the United States. Blatty contended that Legion had sold enough copies to be included on the list. Lawyers for The New York Times did not deny this, but stated that the content of the New York Times best-seller list is editorial in content, and is not an objective compilation of information. The court ruled in favor of The New York Times.
Best Books of the Year and Notable Books
Each year since 1968, around the beginning of December, a list of notable books and/or editor's choice ("Best Books") is announced. Beginning in 2004, it consists of a "100 Notable Books of the Year" list which contains fiction and non-fiction titles, 50 of each. From the list of 100, 10 books are awarded the "Best Books of the Year" title, five each of fiction and non-fiction. Other year-end lists include the Best Illustrated Children's Books, in which 10 books are chosen by a panel of judges.
1990s
1998
The Notable Books were announced December 6, 1998. The eleven Editor's Choice books were announced December 6, 1998.
Lorrie Moore, Birds of America
Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter
Richard Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth
Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
David Gates, Preston Falls
Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
Richard Holbrooke, To End a War
Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse
Graham Robb, Victor Hugo: A Biography
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
1999
The Notable Books were announced December 5, 1999. The eleven Editor's Choice books were announced December 5, 1999.
Richard A. Posner, An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton
Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories
Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
John Keegan, The First World War
Michael Frayn, Headlong
Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier
Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust
Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry
2000s
2000
The Notable Books were announced December 3, 2000. The 10 Editor's Choice books were announced December 3, 2000.
Jim Crace, Being Dead
Unknown, Beowulf (translation by Seamus Heaney)
Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius: A Memoir Based on a True Story
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate
Graham Robb, Rimbaud: A Biography
Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There In the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
2001
The Notable Books were announced December 2, 2001. The 9 Editor's Choice books were announced December 2, 2001.
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Paula Fox, Borrowed Finery: A Memoir
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang
Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
2002
The Notable Books were announced December 8, 2002. The 7 Editor's Choice books were announced December 8, 2002.
Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Lorna Sage, Bad Blood
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
William Kennedy, Roscoe
Timothy Ferris, Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril
2003
The Notable Books were announced December 7, 2003. The 9 Editor's Choice books were announced December 7, 2003.
Caroline Alexander, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
Monica Ali, Brick Lane
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Drop City
Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
Edward P. Jones, The Known World
Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
2004
The 100 Notable Books were announced December 5, 2004. The 10 Best Books were announced December 12, 2004.
Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One
David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Ha Jin, War Trash
Alice Munro, Runaway
Orhan Pamuk, Snow
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
Colm Tóibín, The Master
2005
The 100 Notable Books were announced December 4, 2005. The 10 Best Books were announced December 11, 2005.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Ian McEwan, Saturday
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master
2006
The 100 Notable Books were announced December 3, 2006. The 10 Best Books were announced December 10, 2006.
Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan
Rory Stewart, The Places In Between
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
2007
The 100 Notable Books were announced December 2, 2007. The 10 Best Books were announced December 9, 2007.
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Little Heathens
Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down: A Novel
Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
2008
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 26, 2008. The 10 Best Books were announced December 14, 2008.
Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Joseph O'Neill, Netherland
2009
The 100 Notable Books were announced December 6, 2009. The 10 Best Books were announced December 13, 2009.
Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
David Finkel, The Good Soldiers
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir
Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City
Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life
Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women
Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses
2010s
2010
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 24, 2010. The 10 Best Books were announced December 1, 2010.
Ann Beattie, The New Yorker Stories
Emma Donoghue, Room
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
Jennifer Homans, Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life
Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat
William Trevor, Selected Stories
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
2011
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 21, 2011. The 10 Best Books were announced November 30, 2011.
Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son
Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints
Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Essays
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Stephen King, 11/22/63
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
2012
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 27, 2012. The 10 Best Books were announced November 30, 2012.
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Robert Caro, The Passage of Power
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
Zadie Smith, NW
Chris Ware, Building Stories
2013
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 27, 2013. The 10 Best Books were announced December 4, 2013.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House
Alan S. Blinder, After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave
Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
George Saunders, Tenth of December: Stories
2014
The 100 Notable Books were announced. The 10 Best Books were announced December 14, 2014.
Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation
Roz Chast, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Lily King, Euphoria
Phil Klay, Redeployment
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life
Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
Akhil Sharma, Family Life
Lawrence Wright, Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp
2015
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 27, 2015. The 10 Best Books were announced December 3, 2015.
Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History
Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Rachel Cusk, Outline
Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child: Book 4, The Neapolitan Novels: "Maturity, Old Age"
Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk
Åsne Seierstad, One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
Magda Szabó, The Door
Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
2016
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 23, 2016. The 10 Best Books were announced December 1, 2016.
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom
Stefan Hertmans, War and Turpentine
Han Kang, The Vegetarian
Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs
Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Ian McGuire, The North Water
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
2017
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 22, 2017. The 10 Best Books were announced November 30, 2017.
Naomi Alderman, The Power
Ron Chernow, Grant
James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir
Richard Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us
Ali Smith, Autumn
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
2018
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 18, 2018. The 10 Best Books were announced November 29, 2018.
Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry
David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
Esi Edugyan, Washington Black
Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry
Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers
Tommy Orange, There There
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Leïla Slimani, Lullaby
Tara Westover, Educated
2019
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 25, 2019. The 10 Best Books were announced November 22, 2019. In 2019 for the first time, the 10 Best Books were announced prior to the 100 Notable Books.
Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier
Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House
Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
Ted Chiang, Exhalation: Stories
Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth
Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
2020s
2020
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 20, 2020. The 10 Best Books were announced November 23, 2020.
Fiction
Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible
James McBride, Deacon King Kong
Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet
Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies
Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half
Victoria Chang, "Obit"
Nonfiction
Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road
Barack Obama, A Promised Land
James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America
Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley
Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us
2021
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 22, 2021. The 10 Best Books were announced November 30, 2021.
Fiction
Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were
Katie Kitamura, Intimacies
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World
Nonfiction
Tove Ditlevsen, The Copenhagen Trilogy
Clint Smith, How the Word is Passed
Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City
Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth
Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
2022
The 100 Notable Books were announced November 22, 2022. The 10 Best Books were announced November 29, 2022.
Fiction
Jennifer Egan, The Candy House
Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
Namwali Serpell, The Furrows
Hernan Diaz, Trust
Nonfiction
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir
Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Linda Villarosa, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation
Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: a Personal History of Modern Ireland
Studies
In 2010, Stanford professors Alan Sorenson and Jonah Berger published a study examining the effect on book sales from positive or negative reviews in the New York Times Book Review. They found all books benefited from positive reviews, while popular or well-known authors were negatively impacted by negative reviews. Lesser-known authors benefited from negative reviews; in other words, bad publicity actually boosted book sales.
A study published in 2012, by university professor and author Roxane Gay, found that 90 percent of the New York Times book reviews published in 2011 were of books by white authors. Gay said, "The numbers reflect the overall trend in publishing where the majority of books published are written by white writers." At the time of the report, the racial makeup of the United States was 72 percent white, according to the 2010 census (it includes Hispanic and Latino Americans who identify as white).
See also
Books in the United States
References
External links
, home page.
The New York Times, October 10, 1896. Inaugural book review issue (announced on page 4, column 1)
Interviews with senior editors and writers at the NYTBR, by Michael Orbach, The Knight News, Issue date: 2/8/07 Section: Knight Life
The Man Behind the Criticism: Sam Tanenhaus (via Wayback Machine)
Question and Answer: Dwight Garner (via Wayback Machine)
Question and Answer: Liesl Schillinger (via Wayback Machine)
Question and Answer: Rachel Donadio (via Wayback Machine)
"Are The New York Times Book Reviews Fair?", Tell Me More, National Public Radio, August 20, 2010
"Secret Workings Of Times Book Review Exposed!", Choir, February 24, 2007
How The New York Times Book Review Chooses Its Reviewers
10 Things You Didn't Know About How the NY Times Book Review Works
Answering the Most Frequent Questions About the Book Review
Weekly magazines published in the United States
Book review magazines
Magazines established in 1896
Magazines published in New York City
The New York Times
Newspaper supplements