The Book Review

The best-selling science journalist Mary Roach has written about sex and death and the digestive system — basically, all of the topics that children are taught to avoid in polite company. In her latest, “Replaceable You,” she examines prosthetics, robotics and other ways that technology can interact with human anatomy. 

On this week’s episode of the podcast, Roach tells host Gilbert Cruz how she comes up with her ideas and what keeps drawing her back to the bizarre, hilarious bits of trivia that the human body offers up.

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In last week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, host Gilbert Cruz and his fellow editor Joumana Khatib offered a preview of some of the fall’s most anticipated works of fiction. This week they return to talk about upcoming nonfiction, from memoirs to literary biographies to the latest pop science offering from the incomparable Mary Roach.

Books discussed in this episode:

“All the Way to the River,” by Elizabeth Gilbert

“Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” by Stephen Greenblatt

“Mother Mary Comes to Me," by Arundhati Roy

“Poems and Prayers,” by Matthew McConaughey

“The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us,” by John J. Lennon

“We The People: A History of the U.S. Constitution," by Jill Lepore

“Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel,” by Francis Wilson

“Joyride: A Memoir," by Susan Orlean

“Next of Kin,” by Gabrielle Hamilton

“Paper Girl,” by Beth Macy

“Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America,” by Jeff Chang

“Book of Lives," by Margaret Atwood

”The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding,” by Joseph J. Ellis

“History Matters," by David McCullough

“The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II,” by David Nasaw

“Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor,” by Christine Kuehn

“Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy," by Mary Roach

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.

Every fall brings the promise of some of the year’s biggest books and this one is no different. On this week’s episode of the Book Review podcast, the host Gilbert Cruz and fellow editor Joumana Khatib talk about several of their most anticipated titles as well as a few upcoming big screen adaptations. (Come back next week for our fall nonfiction preview.)

Books mentioned in this episode:

“The Secret of Secrets,” by Dan Brown

“The Wayfinder,” by Adam Johnson

“Clown Town,” by Mick Herron

“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai

“The Impossible Fortune,” by Richard Osman

“We Love You, Bunny,” by Mona Awad

“Shadow Ticket,” by Thomas Pynchon

“What We Can Know,” by Ian McEwan

“Trip,” by Amie Barrodale

“King Sorrow,” by Joe Hill

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.

Charlotte McConaghy’s latest novel, “Wild Dark Shore,” opens with an enigma: A mysterious, half-drowned woman washes ashore.

The stranger’s name is Rowan, and she has arrived on Shearwater, a remote island near Antarctica. The island, which houses an important seed bank, was once teeming with a community of scientists, but now the project is shutting down, the workers have left and the land lies quiet and deserted, everybody gone except for the Salt family, whose members are all lost in their own way. And all are hiding terrible secrets.

They’re not alone. Rowan herself has come to the island with a hidden purpose, putting this small community on a crash course for a long-overdue reckoning.

On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “Wild Dark Shore” with his colleagues Lauren Christensen and Elisabeth Egan.

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.

Summer is slipping away and we are on break this week. But we have a fantastic rerun for you — our conversation with Min Jin Lee from last summer, when her book "Pachinko" was named one of the "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" by a New York Times Book Review panel. She spoke about her novel as well as the book she's read the most times — George Eliot's "Middlemarch."

“I’m willing to say it’s the best English language novel, period. Without question,” Lee says. “George Eliot is probably the smartest girl in the room ever as a novelist. She really was a great thinker, a great logician, a great empathizer and also a great psychologist. She was all of those things. And she was also political. She understood so many aspects of the human mind and the way we interact with each other. And then above all, I think she has a great heart.”

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.