Burned By Books: Recent Episodes

New Books Network

A podcast for writers and readers who are obsessive about their books. Interviews with established and up-and-coming writers, and recommendations for the best in contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama. Chris Holmes. Chris is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

The riddles of desire, youth, old age, poverty, and wealth are laid bare in this radiant collection from a master of the form. From inner-city pawnshops to high-powered law firms, from the desert of California to the coast of France, The Flounder (Blackwater Press, 2023) paints a vivid portrait of how complex and poignant everyday life can be. Told in vibrant, incantatory prose, these moving, lyrical, and surprising stories teeter between desperation and hope, with Fulton showing us what lasts in an impermanent world. John Fulton is the author of four books of fiction, including Retribution, which won the Southern Review Short Fiction Award in 2001, the novel More Than Enough, which was a finalist for the Midland Society of Authors Award, and The Animal Girl, a collection of two novellas and three stories, which was a Story Prize Notable Book. His short fiction has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, twice cited for distinction in the Best American Short Stories, short-listed for the O. Henry Award, and published in numerous journals, including Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The Southern Review. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and is a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing. And his most recent book of stories is The Flounder. Recommended Books:

Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

Colin Barrett, Young Skins

Natalia Ginsberg, Family

William Trevor, Collected Stories

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Katherine Heiny about Games and Rituals: Stories (Knopf, 2023). The games and rituals performed by Heiny's characters range from mischievous to tender: In "Bridesmaid, Revisited," Marlee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaid's dress to work. In "Twist and Shout," Erica's elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In "Turn Back, Turn Back," a bedtime story coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actor's deception. And in "561," Charlene pays the true price of infidelity and is forced to help her husband's ex-wife move out of the family home. ("It's like you're North Korea and South Korea . . . But would North Korea help South Korea move?") Katherine Heiny is the author of Early Morning Riser, Standard Deviation, and Single, Carefree Mellow, a previous collection of short stories. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and many other places. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and children. Recommended Books and Podcasts:

Katherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

Elif Batuman, Either/Or

Elizabeth Crane, This Story Will Change

Celebrity Memoir Book Club (Podcast)

Cold Case Murder Mysteries (Podcast)

My Dad Wrote a Porno (Podcast)

Mission to Zyxx (Podcast)

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's 2017 and Leyla, a Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her failure.Increasingly distant from what used to be at arm's reach--writerly ambitions, tight knit friendships, a place to call home--Leyla attempts to find solace in the techno beats of Berlin's nightlife, with little success. Right as the clock winds down on the hold on her visa, Leyla meets a conservative Swedish tourist and--against her political convictions and better judgment--begins to fall in love, or something like it. Will she accept an IKEA life with the Volvo salesman and relinquish her creative dreams, or return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, her father's ghost still haunting their lives?While she waits for the German court's verdict on her future, in the pages of her diary, Leyla begins to parse her unresolved past and untenable present. An indelible character at once precocious and imperiled, Leyla gives voice to the working-class and immigrant struggle to find safety, self-expression, and happiness. The Applicant is an extraordinary dissection of a liminal life between borders and identities, an original and darkly funny debut. Nazli’s debut novel, The Applicant, was published on February 14, 2023. While writing The Applicant, Nazli worked as a cleaner, dishwasher, and bookseller in Berlin, South Bend, Chicago, and New York. She has taught and studied Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Denver. Her previous work has appeared in Narrative, The Threepenny Review, Bookforum, Second Factory, QSQOQST, books without covers, and The Chicago Review of Books. Recommended Books:

Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth

Ebru Ojen, Lojman

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton UP, 2022), Jeff Deutsch--the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world--pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualities like space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he also predicts--perhaps audaciously--a future in which the bookstore not only endures, but realizes its highest aspirations. In exploring why good bookstores matter, Deutsch draws on his lifelong experience as a bookseller, but also his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew. This spiritual and cultural heritage instilled in him a reverence for reading, not as a means to a living, but as an essential part of a meaningful life. Central among Deutsch's arguments for the necessity of bookstores is the incalculable value of browsing--since, when we are deep in the act of looking at the shelves, we move through space as though we are inside the mind itself, immersed in self-reflection. In the age of one-click shopping, this is no ordinary defense of bookstores, but rather an urgent account of why they are essential places of discovery, refuge, and fulfillment that enrich the communities that are lucky enough to have them. Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which in 2019 he helped incorporate as the first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling. He lives in Chicago. Recommended Books:

Lewis Hyde, The Gift

Leon Forrest, Divine Days

Toya Wolf, Last Summer on State Street

Pierre Hadot, Don’t forget to Live

W.B. Yates, “Words for Music, Perhaps”

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships--with friends, roommates, siblings--while trying to move forward into an uncertain future. In "That Is Shocking," a college student relates a darkly funny story of romantic humiliation, one that skirts the parallel story of a friend she betrayed. In others, young women long for friends who have moved away, or moved on. In "Cinnamon Baseball Coyote" and other linked stories about siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace, their years of inside jokes and brutal tensions simmer over as the three spend a holiday season in an amusing whirl of rivalry and mutual attachment, and a generational gulf widens between them and their parents. Throughout, in stories both lyrical and haunting, young women search for ways to break free from the expectations of others and find a way to be in the world. Written with crystalline prose and sly humor, the stories in I Meant It Once (Algonquin Books, 2023) build to complete a profoundly recognizable portrait of early adulthood and the ways in which seemingly incidental moments can come to define the stories we tell ourselves. For fans of Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, and Melissa Bank, these stories about being young and adrift in today's world go down easy and pack a big punch. A former bookseller at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, Kate Doyle has published her stories in No Tokens, Electric Literature, Split Lip, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. In 2021 she was selected from 1100 emerging writers as an A Public Space Writing Fellow, and she has received support for her work from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hawthornden, the Adirondack Center for Writing, NYU Paris, and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County. She currently lives in Amsterdam. Recommended Books:

Cara Blue Adams, You Never Get It Back

Alexandra Chang, Tomb Sweeping

Stephanie Vaughn, Sweettalk

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions--nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears. Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator's spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics. With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky's All-Night Pharmacy (Catapult, 2023) is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past. Originally from Moldova, Ruth Madievsky is a novelist, poet, and essayist living in Los Angeles. Her debut novel, All-Night Pharmacy, has been named a Most Anticipated 2023 Book by The Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Emergency Brake ,was the winner of the Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series and spent five months on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers list. She was the winner of The American Poetry Review's Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, The Iowa Review's Tim McGinnis Award for fiction, and a Tin House scholarship in poetry. Recommended Books:

Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate

Tembe Denton-Hurst, Homebodies

Mina Seckin, Four Humors

Maggie Milner, Couplets

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It's locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear. The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the "lone women" taking advantage of the government's offer of free land for those who can tame it--except that Adelaide isn't alone. And the secret she's tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory. Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women (One World, 2023) blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you've never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past--or redeem it. Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, five novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, The Changeling, and Lone Women, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of two comic books Victor LaValle's DESTROYER and EVE. His novel, The Changeling, will soon be airing on Apple TV+ starring LaKeith Stanfield. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in the Bronx with his wife, the writer Emily Raboteau, and their kids. He teaches at Columbia University. Recommended Books:

Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night

Nathan Ballingrud, The Strange

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ada--a woman from Montreal living reluctantly in Michigan--vanishes from her bed one night while her husband Danny is asleep beside her, her young son, Gilles, in the next room. Desperate to locate Ada before Gilles understands what has happened, Danny begins a search. But the feds are already involved: across the country and around the world, mothers are vanishing from their homes. Where did Ada go? What has she gone through? And how does the mystery relate to the forest that she seemed magnetically drawn to? Confronting the role of motherhood and the meaning of home in the wreckage of capitalism and climate change, The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (Catapult, 2023) is that rare, dazzling debut that is both thrilling and profound. It is a mystery, a play on myths of metamorphosis, and above all, a story of love--between husband and wife, mother and child--deeply troubled by the future we face. Molly Lynch is a writer. She grew up on the West Coast of Canada and lived in Ireland as a teenager. She worked in Europe and traveled extensively through the Middle East, before studying Literature in Montreal. She did an MFA in Baltimore during the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement and became involved in community activism against racist policing and apartheid. She now teaches creative writing as well as literature courses on social justice at the University of Michigan. Books Recommended:

Hanan Al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahara

Anne Enright, The Gathering

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate--and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create--will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe. Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu's palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art. Tania James is the author of Atlas of Unknowns, Aerogrammes, and Other Stories, and The Tusk That Did the Damage. Her stories have appeared in Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing, Granta, the New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and One Story, and have been featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. The Tusk that Did the Damage was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Tania lives in Washing D.C. where she is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. Recommended Books:

Hua Hsu, Stay True

Marcy Dermansky, Very Nice

Rita Chang-Eppig, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea

*A video of a period expert playing Tipu’s Tiger at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is available here Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne's family, her country, and herself. Anne Berest is the bestselling co-author of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Doubleday, 2014) and the author of a novel based on the life of French writer Françoise Sagan. With her sister Claire, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse. For her work as a writer and prize-winning showrunner, she has been profiled in publications such as French Vogue and the Haaretz newspaper. The recipient of numerous literary awards, The Postcard was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize, winner of the American Choix Goncourt, and it has been a long-selling bestseller in France. Tina Kover is the translator of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, and Anna Gavalda’s Life, Only Better. Her translations have twice been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award and she was the recipient in 2009 of a Literary Translation Fellowship from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Translators Aloud, a youtube channel that spotlights translators reading from their own work. She lives in the northeast of England. Books Recommended:

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: The Search for Six of Six million

Patrick Modiano, Scene of the Crime

Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise

Petra Rautiainen, Land of Ashes and Snow

Julya Rabinowich, Me, In between

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meg Howrey is the author of the novels They're Going to Love You, The Cranes Dance, and Blind Sight. She is also the coauthor, writing under the pen-name Magnus Flyte, of the New York Times Bestseller City of Dark Magic and City of Lost Dreams. Her non-fiction has appeared in Vogue and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She currently lives in Los Angeles.Meg was a professional dancer who performed with the Joffrey Ballet and City Ballet of Los Angeles, among others. She made her theatrical debut in James Lapine's "Twelve Dreams" at Lincoln Center, and received the 2001 Ovation Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical for her role in the Broadway National Tour of "Contact."Book Recommendations:Bojan Lewis, Sinking BellLeni Zumas, Red ClocksChris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner, and Like Happiness (forthcoming with Celadon Books). A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, Washington Square, Story, Bennington Review, Wigleaf Top 50, and Gulf Coast. She contributed to Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, a flash anthology by writers of color, and in 2012, she won the CutBank Big Fish Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry Contest. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015. Recommended Books:

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water

Billy Ray-Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

Alejandro Varela, The Town of Babylon

Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amy Fusselman is the author of five books. Her latest, The Means (Mariner Books, 2022), is her first novel. Fusselman’s previous four books, all nonfiction, have been translated into several languages. Her work has been nominated for The Believer Book Award and the University of Iowa's Krause Essay Prize. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other places. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches creative writing at New York University. Book Recommendations:

Holly Pelesky, Cleave

Violaine Swartz, Papers

Sheng Wang, Sweet and Juicy(Netflix Stand-Up Comedy)

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight (Mariner Books, 2022). Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University and will be the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College for the 2022-2023 school year. She was born and raised in South Florida. Recommended Books:

Sheila Heti, Pure Color

Claire Keegan, Foster

Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

Giada Scodellaro, Some of Them Will Carry Me

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kayla Maiuri holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Born in the greater Boston area, she now lives in Brooklyn. Mother in the Dark (Riverhead Books, 2022) is her first novel. Recommended Books: Anna Hogeland, The Long Answer

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Kevin Wilson about his new novel Now Is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco Press, 2022). Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South. Recommended Books:

Elizabeth Tan, Rubik

Gwendolyn MacEwan, Julian the Magician

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Lydia Millet about her new novel Dinosaurs (Norton, 2022). Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family. Recommendations:

Dan Flores, American Serengeti

Dan Flores, Wild New World

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Matthew Delmont about his new book Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022) Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of four books: Black Quotidian, Why Busing Failed, Making Roots, and The Nicest Kids in Town. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, NPR, and several academic journals. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his B.A from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University. Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, Tess holds a B.A. in English with an Honor’s Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. After graduating in 2015, she began an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. After earning her MFA, Tess worked alongside her former professor Jonathan Safran Foer, providing research and writing for his book of nonfiction about the climate crisis. We Are the Weather was published by FSG in 2019. As a freelance writer, editor, and research assistant, Tess’s experience also includes documenting the history of the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns; contributing a history of Westside, Atlanta to an urban revitalization plan by Thadani Architects + Urbanists; creating science content for the American Museum of Natural History; editing Bruce Rits Gilbert’s debut book, John Prine, One Song at a Time, a tribute to the folk musician written in the wake of Prine’s death from the novel coronavirus; and working as a fact-checker on Mysteries of Mental Illness, a PBS docuseries about the history of psychiatry in America. In 2021, the publishing houses Knopf (North America), Éditions Gallmeister (France), Guanda (Italy), and Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Germany) preempted Tess’s debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, along with her sophomore novel Honeydew. Recommended Books:

Hernan Diaz, Trust

Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea Barrett began writing fiction seriously in her thirties and published her first novel, Lucid Stars, in 1988. She’s particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction. Barrett, whose work reflects her lifelong interest in science and natural history, received the National Book Award for her fifth book, Ship Fever, a collection of stories featuring scientists, doctors, and naturalists. In 2001 she received a MacArthur Fellowship and was also a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. In addition to other prizes and awards she’s also been a finalist for The Story Prize and received the Rea Award for the Short Story. Today I talked to her about Natural History: Stories (Norton, 2022). Barrett has lived in Rochester, NY and in western Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing for fifteen years at Williams College. She and her husband, photographer Barry Goldstein, now live on the eastern side of the Adirondack Mountains, in the Champlain Valley. Recommended Books:

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature

A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book

Ed Yong, An Immense World

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Chelsea Martin's new book Tell Me I'm An Artist (Soft Skull Press, 2022). Martin's first novel, tell me i'm an artist, is published with Soft Skull Press. Her previous books include caca dolce (Soft Skull, 2017), even though i don't miss you (short flight/long drive, 2013), and others. She currently lives in spokane, wa with her husband and child. Recommended Books: Emma Bolden, The Tiger and the Cage

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A. M. Homes most recent book is The Unfolding (Viking, 2022). Her previous work includes, This Book Will Save Your Life, which won the 2013 Orange/Women’s Prize for Fiction, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collections, Days of Awe, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, the bestselling memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter along with a travel memoir, Los Angeles: People, Places and The Castle on the Hill, and the artist’s book Appendix A: A.M. Homes has been the recipient of numerous awards including Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYFA, and The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, along with the Benjamin Franklin Award, and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis. She was a Co-Executive Producer and Writer on David E. Kelly and Stephen King’s, Mr. Mercedes, Co-Executive Producer and Writer on Falling Water and has created original television pilots for HBO, FX and CBS and was a writer/producer of the Showtime series The L Word. Recommended Books:

Melissa Febos

Maria Popova, Figuring

—”The Marginalian”

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazon's Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications, the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and has spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Little Fires Everywhere has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. Recommended Books:

Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Woman of Light

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Today we're talking about his new book Less Is Lost (Little Brown, 2022). Books Recommended: A.B. Yehoshua, A Journey to the End of the Millennium Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Courtney Zoffness is the author of Spilt Milk, out now with McSweeney’s, and forthcoming in paperback in September 2022. Spilt Milk was named a best debut of 2021 by BookPage and Refinery29, and a “must-read” by Good Morning America. Also a fiction writer, Zoffness won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award, the most valuable international prize for short fiction, amid entries from 38 countries. She joined a list of winners that includes Anthony Doerr and Junot Díaz. Other honors include an Emerging Writers Fellowship from The Center for Fiction and two residency fellowships from MacDowell. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Guernica, No Tokens, and other venues, and she had essays listed as “notable” in Best American Essays in2018 and 2019. Zoffness holds graduate degrees from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona, and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught English at a dozen different institutions, including Yale University and the University of Freiburg (Germany), and delivered readings and talks at venues across the US and abroad. Currently she directs the creative writing program at Drew University. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Books Recommended:

Emerson Whitney, Heaven

Carmen Marie Machado, In the Dream House

Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vauhini Vara was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, as a child of Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in Oklahoma and the Seattle suburbs. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (W. W. Norton), is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize; reviewing it in the Times, Justin Taylor called it “a monumental achievement.” It will be followed by a story collection, This is Salvaged, in 2023. She studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Zyzzyva, and other journals. It has received an O. Henry Award, as well as honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Vara began her writing career as a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal; after nine years, she spent two years launching, editing and writing for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. Since then, her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Businessweek, and elsewhere. She is a Wired contributing writer and can sometimes be found working as a story editor at the New York Times Magazine. Books recommended:

Javier Marias, A Heart So White (Un Corazón tan Blanco)

Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She is a recipient of a Best American Short Stories 2020 award and fellowships from the Asian American Writers Workshop and the Iowa Writers Workshop. All This Could Be Different (Viking, 2022) is her first novel. Sarah’s Recommendations:

Halle Butler, The New Me

Akil Kumarasamy, Meet Us By the Roaring Sea

Dhumketu, The Shehnai Virtuoso

Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches

Make a donation to Bed-Stuy Strong. Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, her short fiction appears in The Normal School, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online and Ploughshares. Her debut novel Disorientation is out now from Penguin Press (US) and Picador (UK). Her short story collection Where are You Realy From? is forthcoming from Penguin Press in spring 2024. Books Recommended in this Episode:

Don Lee, The Collective

Brandon Taylor, Real Life

David Lodge, Changing Places

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julia May Jonas is a writer, director, and the founder of theater company Nellie Tinder. She has taught at Skidmore College and NYU and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Vladimir (Simon & Schuster, 2022) is her first novel. Books Recommended in this Episode:

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter In the Dark

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

Elisa Albert, Human Blues

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mohsin Hamid is the author of five novels -- The Last White Man, Exit West, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Moth Smoke -- and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations. His writing has been translated into forty languages, featured on bestseller lists, and adapted for the cinema. Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California. Mohsin Recommends:

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and has been translated into many languages. "In the Gloaming," a story, was chosen by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of The Century and was made into films by HBO and Trinity Playhouse. Her non-fiction reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many anthologies. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Associate Professor at Rutgers-Newark in the English department and the MFA program. Books Recommended in this episode:

Fellowship Point (Simon and Schuster, 2022)

Alice Recommends:

Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Quartet

Jean Stafford, The Catherine Wheel

Willa Cather, The Professor’s House

Joanne Beard, Festival Days

Mary Oliver, Upstream

Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Krantz is the author of the reported memoir, Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation and Non-Monogamy (Harmony, 2022). She is the host of HELP EXISTING, a new podcast offering help on, well, existing. She is one of Bustle’s three founding editors. At Bustle, she served as Senior Features Editor for three years, and Senior News Editor before that. She also worked at The Daily Beast as Homepage Editor, and at the nonprofit Mercy For Animals as Lead Writer. She’s the recipient of the Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights International Radio Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Radio Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Award for her work as an investigative reporter with YR Media. Rachel Recommends:

Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World

Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother

Susan Burton, Empty

Maureen Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca van Laer’s writing appears in TriQuarterly Review, joyland, Columbia journal, the Florida review, Salamander, Hobart, mokeybicycle, electric literature and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University. Shannon McLeod is the author of the essay chapbook Pathetic from Etchings Press, and her writings have appeared in Tin House, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, and Smokelong Quarterly. She lives in Virginia where she teaches high school English. Rebecca and Shannon join me to discuss their debut novellas, How to Adjust to the Dark and Whimsy, both out with Long Day Press. Books Recommended in this episode: How to Adjust to the Dark and Whimsy Rebecca Recommends:

Nate Lippens, My Dead Book

Naomi Washer, Subjects We Left Out

Shannon Recommends:

Chloe Caldwell, Women

Chantal V. Johnson, Post-Traumatic

Ursula Villarreal-Moura, Math for the Self-Crippling

Sebastian Castillo, Not I

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julia and I discuss her latest novel, Vigil Harbor, a story of the near future in which many of our current crises are amplified in terrifying yet recognizable ways. The Covid pandemic and its aftereffects are still felt, coastal communities are being swept into the sea, a violent wave of xenophobia and anti-immigrant anti-refugee sentiment stokes fire everywhere—such is the world a little more than a decade from now in Julia’s imaginings. Like so many of Julia’s works of fiction, it is the voices of the characters that populate this world that make the novel sing. There’s the architect, Austin Kepner, who obsesses over building houses that are made to withstand the furies of an angry planet’s weather. Margo, the sardonic, brainy teacher. Brecht, home from NYU after escaping a domestic terrorist attack, and so many other unique and compelling voices. Life in the small coastal town of Vigil Harbor is roiled by two unexpected visitors, one a stranger, and the other well-known to certain inhabitants. The result is a novel of many pleasures that unsettles even as it delights. Julia Recommends:

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

Elliott Ackerman, 2034: A Novel of the Next War

Stewart O’Nan, Ocean State

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With me on today’s show is Professor Elisabeth Anker, whose most recent book, Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022), works to understand how the idea of freedom, seemingly so fundamental to our understanding of the American experience, is often the very concept that allows for the brutal deprivation of the freedom of others. As she writes, “ugly freedom entails a dynamic in which practices of freedom produce harm, brutality, and subjugation as freedom.” Today we will be discussing Professor Anker’s theory of ugly freedom in the context of our unending crisis of gun violence in the United States. This show’s topic feels as essential as any that I have offered thus far. I hope you will find something hopeful in our conversation. Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shelly Oria has just produced an anthology of writings on reproductive freedom that is available now from McSweeney’s Books, in partnership with The Brigid Alliance. Spanning nearly every genre of writing, the collection greatly broadens the parameters for how we might speak of reproductive freedoms and fight for their continuation even in this particularly bleak time. She is joined by the novelist, Kirstin Valdez Quade, author most recently of The Five Wounds. It was an honor to talk to Shelly and Kirstin about their hopes and fears for a future after Roe vs Wade and the potential for writers to enter the fray as defenders of the right to abortion, but also to be issuers of a clarion call for the many other natural rights that are being trammeled upon. Please consider supporting I Know What's Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom by purchasing it directly from McSweeney’s or your local bookstore. The work within is moving, empathetic, horrifying, touching, and unforgettable. Books Recommended in this episode:

Peter Ho Davies, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

Torry Peters, Detransition Baby

Lydia Conklin, Rainbow Rainbow

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with novelist Marcy Dermansky. Hurricane Girl (Knopf, 2022) brings us another unforgettable Dermansky-character, Allison Brody, whose rashness and seeming detachment are matched only by her commitment to finding a place in the world that is truly her own. Allison has just fled an abusive relationship, albeit one that provided a great deal of privilege, and has spent her own savings to buy a cottage on the ocean. When that cottage is lost in a freak storm, what little control Allison had felt spins slowly out of reach, first with another violent interaction with a man that leaves her with severe brain trauma, and later in Allison’s suspicions that everyone around her would like her to be someone else. In classic Dermansky style, what could be a horror novel is in fact a comedy, often riotously funny even in scenes of intense dread and violence. The final product is a novel that entertains even as it disorients, forcing us to admit that Allison’s brain injury may in fact be a source of clarity and insight into a world that operates with a cruel illogic. Rufi Thorpe, The Knockout Queen. Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with debut novelist Peter C Baker. Planes (Knopf, 2022) is the story of a global crime unfolding principally in the domestic lives of two women, Amira, an Italian convert to Islam living in Rome, and Mel, a school board member in North Carolina. Amira is a direct victim of the crime of extraordinary rendition, her husband, Ayoub, having been abducted without criminal charges and taken first to Pakistan and then Morocco, where he was imprisoned and tortured. Ayoub’s eventual return to Amira is a lesson in how trauma comes like a wave for all those in its path. Mel’s life appears quieter. Her activist days behind her, she lives an ordinary suburban life, throwing herself into work on the school board and into a workmanlike affair that seems, at the surface, to have little effect on her family life. That is until the affair is discovered and her onetime partner on the school board is revealed to be deeply intwined with the rendition program that abducted Ayoub. Peter and I talk about how to write about torture outside of the torture room, our unwitting complicity with illegal rendition programs in the US, and our shared love of W.G. Sebald. Books Recommended in this episode: W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn Marlen Haushofer, The Wall Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with novelist Elif Batuman. The international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot now has a sequel. In Either/Or (Penguin, 2022), Batuman picks up the story as her character, Selin, returns for her sophomore year at Harvard. Either/Or, like its predecessor, is a novel of ideas wrapped in a campus novel, told in a voice so unique that you may never get over it. Elif and I talk Cartesian dualism, Voltron’s tardiness, the novel of ideas vs the thinking novel, eros defused over the body, and so much more. You can’t miss this episode. Books Recommended in this episode:

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

John William, Stoner

Nino Haratischvili, The Eighth Life

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with novelist Grant Ginder. In his latest dramady of familial disfunction, Let’s Not Do That Again (Henry Holt, 2022), Grant starts with political intrigue that bridges New York and Paris, mixes it with a wealthy and connected family in freefall, and ties it together with a transnational criminal coverup. The result is one of the most engrossing novels of the year. Grant’s work reminds us why the novel form can be both beautiful and ribald, literary and popular. I had such a wonderful time talking to Grant about how families inevitably disappoint, and how great writers can show how they manage to love each other despite themselves. Grant Recommends:

Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind

Jennifer Close, Marrying the Ketchups

Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Fernanda Melchor, finalist for the International Booker Prize, and author most recently of Paradais (New Directions, 2022). And Sophie Hughes, the English translator of Fernanda’s two novels, and winner of the Pen Translates Award. In a wide-ranging discussion, we touch upon the ways in which translation is akin to friendship, and how a translation can be the greatest interpretation of your work. Fernanda discusses her understanding of violence as inseparable from the story of humanity, and how she sees her style as that which persists after she has let go of the text, while Sophie addresses the question of the translator’s invisibility and the lexicons required for each new writer's work that she takes on. This episode features a bilingual reading from Paradais by Fernanda Melchor. It is not to be missed. Books Recommended in this episode:

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

José Agustín, De Perfil

Nona Fernandez, The Twilight Zone

Marianna Enriquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

Alia Trabucco Zerán, The Remainder

Andrea Abreu, Dogs of Summer

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Natasha Brown, winner of the London Writers Award, and author of Assembly (Little Brown, 2021), the story of a young black British woman, marked by success in education and work, who asks a fundamental question: does my country care whether or I live or die? At a mere one hundred and two pages, Assembly manages to evoke more feeling, more sensorial reality than many novels twice its length. Natasha has gone to the novel’s primary function—its vision into the inner life of a character—and she has brought it to bear on the precariousness of black life. The result is a work of literary fiction that is profoundly beautiful, with passages of poetic form and lyrical description of a world that her narrator experiences as ultimately negating. Negating of her agency, her accumulated wealth and status, her education, her citizenship, and ultimately of her bare life. Suffused with its contemporary moment, with references to the police killing of Philando Castille and the white nationalist resurgence in Britain, Assembly is fundamentally a reminder that the sun has yet to set on the imperial mindset, and that the black body and the black intellect still do not register within that logic. Natasha Recommends:

Meena Kandasamy, Exquisite Cadavers

Rachel Long, My Darling from the Lions

Hannah Sullivan, Three Poems

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness”

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Jennifer Egan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and author most recently of The Candy House (Scribner, 2022), the story of the intersections across space and time of characters desperate to understand their interior lives. At the hub of these stories, a machine capable of capturing and sharing memories, and even offering the possibility of joining a collectivity of consciousness. Jennifer Egan, as always, balances perfectly the profound intellectual problems of existence with characters who feel deeply real by virtue of their uncommon minds. We get to talking about how her process is one of discovery through the unconscious practice of writing, and the ways in which certain ideas of what the reader should feel and experience guide her structure. We discuss her creation of the futuristic machine in The Candy House that, in the end, fashions what only the novel can produce: a window into the minds and memories of another. On the subject of movement back and forth through time and place, Jennifer credits a marvelous children’s novel for the concept of parallel worlds into which characters can dip in and out of. In an incredibly wide-ranging discussion, we touch upon Dungeons and Dragons, the longest and possibly best 18th century novel, the possibility of reading The Candy House as the predecessor to A Visit from the Goon Squad, and so much more. Jennifer Recommends:

Lauren Groff, Matrix

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

Rye Curtis, Kingdomtide

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Caitlin Barasch, author of A Novel Obsession (Dutton Books, 2022), a debut novel about a young woman convinced that she must be a writer, but entirely uncertain that she has a story worth sharing. Her solution: concoct a real-life romantic triangle featuring her boyfriend’s ex and herself as the protagonists. Caitlin and I discuss how she goes about building anticipatory dread scene by scene, and how plotting is not a dead artform in the novel. We talk about the relationship between obsession and writing, the pleasures of writing awkward sex scenes, the need for more women characters behaving badly, failing to avoid social media in art, and so much more. Caitlin Recommends:

Alyssa Nutting, Tampa

Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

Elena Ferrante, Days of Abandonment

Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Allegra Hyde, author of Eleutheria (Vintage, 2020), a debut novel about an idealist who comes face to face with the allure and pitfalls of utopian eco-communities. Allegra and I discuss the need for hopeful narratives of a possible future in an age of climate disaster, and how and why art is poised to craft those narratives. We talk about the “stench of perfectionism” that invades some intentional communities, the pleasures of dumpster-diving with Freegans, the beautiful art of terrarium making, trying to live the solution when the world isn’t listening, and so much more. Books Recommended in this episode:

Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun

Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible

Matt Bell, Appleseed

Amitav Gosh, The Great Derangement

Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers (Simon and Schuster, 2022), a debut novel about the current and future terrors of state-disciplined forms of motherhood. Jessamine and I discuss the genesis of this near-future dystopia, and how she never considers genre when writing. We talk about the deep well of ingrained ideologies about the mothering and protection of children against unseen dangers, the complicated layers of the novel’s Philadelphia settings, including the real-life campus that inspired the fictional school, surveillance of racial minorities by police and child protective services, and so much more. Jessamine Recommends:

“Where is your mother?” The New Yorker

“Foster Care as Punishment” The New York Times

Kim Brooks, Small Animals

Liz Moore, Long Bright River

Katie Gutierrez, More than You’ll Ever Know

Ling Ma, Severance

Alyssa Songsiridej, Little Rabbit

Chloe Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, editors of Anonymous Sex, a collection of 27 explicit sex stories unattributed to the 27 writers listed in the byline. Cheryl, Hillary, and I discuss how exactly you get writers like Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Makkai, Helen Oyeyemi, and Robert Olen Butler to contribute a story when the conceit is sex. We talk about the problem with stale erotica and the search for fresh language with which to talk about sex and desire, the necessity of understanding sex as culturally constructed, and so much more. Hillary Recommends:

Michael Cunningham, Flesh and Blood

----. A Home at the End of the World

Cheryl Recommends:

Fumiko Enchi, Masks

----. The Waiting Years

The Novels of Muriel Spark

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Andrew Lipstein, author of the debut novel, Last Resort. Andrew and I discuss ownership over stories, the blurring of the commercial and the literary in contemporary publishing, the dread that accompanies a story that grows out of your control, and so much more. Andrew Recommends: Natasha Brown, Assembly Sheila Heti, Pure Color Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Xochitl Gonzalez, author of the debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming (Flatiron Books, 2022). Xochitl and I discuss the unique narrative perspective that a wedding planner has on American privilege and inequality, the gentrification of Brooklyn, the rich and wealthy colonizers of Puerto Rico post- la Promesa, Nuyorican culture as the creole of NYC, and so much more. Xochitl Recommends:

Cho Nam Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: A Novel

Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost

----. The Family Chao

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Joanna Rakoff, author of the memoir My Salinger Year (Vintage, 2014). Joanna and I discuss the power of a novelistic memoir, breaking open literary New York, what it was like replying to J.D. Salinger’s fan mail, and working in true collaboration on the film adaptation of her memoir. Joanna Recommends: Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point Evan Hughes, The Hard Sell Sara Freeman, Tides Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there is such a thing as the American literary canon, then Percival Everett (The Trees, 2021) is at the center of it. The author of over 30 novels, books of poetry and short fiction, and children’s literature, for over thirty years Everett has been one of the great innovators of fictional forms. In our interview, we discuss how a novel about the history and present of racial violence, from the beginnings of lynching during reconstruction to the present day killing of unarmed black men and women by police officers, means something different in the Trump Era. We open up the question of whether or not literary arts are capable of being catalysts to the kinds of change that other movements have failed to enact. And Everett talks about the importance of an adapting and growing archive of the names of those killed in lynchings or extrajudicial killings, a list of names that he himself has attempted to write down as an act of remembering. Books Recommended in this episode:

Alan Le May, The Searchers

——-. Painted Ponies

Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers

Simone de Beauvoir

Jean-Paul Satre, Nausea

Robert Coover, Ghost Town

Percival’s Gallery Show to accompany The Trees Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back (University of Iowa Press, 2021). Cara and I discuss the joys of linked short story collections, the lack of adequate vocabulary to describe working people in the United States, the many moods of everyday life, and how humor works in her stories. These are stories of exquisite observation and the quiet beauty of everyday life. You Never Get It Back is a collection of linked stories that follows Kate, a young woman moving through her twenties and thirties, first as a research scientist and later as a budding writer. Kate is for this reader, the best of what makes us impossibly human—our need for others, matched against our desire to be meaningful as a singular person in the world. Cara Recommends:

Maria Gainza, Optic Nerve

Joan Didion, Play it as it Lays

Franz Kafka, The Trial

Sara Manguso, Very Cold People

Sara Majka, Cities I’ve Never Lived In

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Kalani Pickhart, I Will Die in a Foreign Land (2021), a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021. Russia is again amassing troops on the Ukrainian border. There are threats of more sanctions from the US and the EU, but those come with a tacit understanding that there is likely little that the world can do to stop Putin should he decide to invade. It is within this frightening context that Kalani Pickhart’s extraordinary novel, I Will Die in a Foreign Land, enters the scene. The novel itself is a beautiful pastiche of forms: novelistic plots mix with songs and folktales, manifests of passengers killed in downed planes or in the melee of protest, diaries and recordings, all working to build a feeling, the urge for a democratic voice to speak against violence and despair. Kalani and I discuss the burden of writing true in a work of fiction, and so much more! Books Recommended in this episode:

Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner

God Shot, Chelsea Bieker

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Katya Apekina

The Power of the Dog (Film), Jane Campion

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A conversation with booksellers from three of the most dynamic, exciting, and community-oriented independent bookstores in the country. Lisa Swayze of Buffalo Street Books (Ithaca, NY), Michelle Malonzo of Changing Hands Bookstore (Tempe, AZ), and Alena Jones of Seminary Co-op Bookstores (Chicago, IL) join me and my special co-host, professor Kasia Bartoszynska for a roundup of their favorite books of the year, and a fascinating look into indie bookstores during the pandemic. Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Benjamín Labatut, author of When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. Benjamin and I cover an enormous amount of ground in our wide-ranging interview: we touch on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal as a way of his writing; the failure of our societies to make room for overlapping, sometimes contradictory histories; his distaste for genre categories; the inevitable loss involved in translation; Chile’s frightening presidential election; and much much more. I know that you will be as enthralled and challenged and delighted by Benjamín’s capacious mind. Benjamín Recommends:

Juan Forn, Los Viernes

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Pascal Quignard, The Last Kingdom

Elliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing

J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

Georg Buchner, Lenz

Frantisek Vlacil, Marketa Lazarova (film)

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Pola Oloixarac, Mona (2021). Pola and I get to talking about the failure of the US university to live up to its massive influence, especially when it comes to making the lives of black and brown people better. We discuss whether writers are terrible people, or are they simply unfit for any other vocation? Pola introduces me to "me-search," the self-centered prancing of authors at literary conferences. And she helps me to see the folly of imagining writing as a solitary affair, instead imagining the work of the writer as a constant convening of friends. Books Recommended in this episode: Pola Oloixarac, Mona Pola Recommends:

Maria Gainza, Portrait of an Unknown Lady

Aldolfo Caseres, Borges (2023 in English)

Rafael Chirbes, Cremation trans. valerie miles

Edgardo Cozarinsky,Milongas trans. valerie miles

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Karina Lickorish Quinn, The Dust Never Settles (2021). Karina and I discuss the indigenous histories of Peru, the desire for more Spanish and indigenous languages to permeate her novel in English, on being English in Peru and Latina in England, and her awakening in the pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Books Recommended in this episode: Karina Lickorish Quinn, The Dust Never Settles Karina Recommends:

Maia Elsner, Overrun by Wild Boars

Leone Ross, One Sky Day

Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

Caleb Azuma Nelson, Open Water

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun (2021). Alexandra and I discuss the need for a more fecund climate imagination, the appeal of writing about California as a natural space under threat, Hollywood as a microcosm for America’s late capitalism, and her love for Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Books Recommended in this episode: Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun Alexandra Recommends:

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

James Bradley, Clade

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Jeffrey Meikle, American Plastic

Tristan Gooley, The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Clare Sestanovich, author of Objects of Desire (2021). Books Recommended in this episode: Clare Recommends:

Alice Munroe, Runaway

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

Keith Ridgeway, The Shock

Shirley Hazzard, Collected Stories

Yoon Choi, Skinship: Stories

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward (2021). Dana and I talk about how memory is stored in the architecture of cities, the unlikely villains of good novels, writing as a refuge, and the difficulty for women who step outside of expected roles. Books Recommended in this episode: Dana Recommends:

Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

Mona Awad, All’s Well

Joy Williams, Harrow

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Eleanor Henderson, author of Everything I Have is Yours (2021). Eleanor and I discuss the unforgivable failures of the American medical establishment, trying to find truth and care in-between the healers and quacks, deciding to open the closed book of a marriage to the world, and finding solace in the extraordinary memoirs of writers seeking mental and physical wellness. Books Recommended in this episode: Eleanor recommends:

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Porochista Khakpour, Sick: A Memoir

Esme WeiJun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias

CJ Hauser, Family of Origin

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies (2021), longlisted for the National Book Award. Katie and I discuss the International Criminal Court, its biases and tireless fight for justice, the charisma of its translators, the attraction to violence in the novel, the inscrutability of marriages, and so much more. Books Recommended in this episode: Katie Kitamura, Intimacies Katie recommends:

Anna Seghers, Transit

Adalbert Sifter, Rock Crystal

Olga Tokarczuk, The Book of Jacob

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Brian Hall, author of The Stone Loves the World (2021). Brian and I talk about blending science and math into the narrative of his novels, coming from a family split between artists and scientists, writing the sequel to his cult favorite, The Saskiad (1996), and much more. Books Recommended in this episode: Brian recommends:

Richard Powers, The Overstory

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas

Toni Morrison, Beloved

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue (2021). Hermione and I discuss not needing her characters to be ethical, the mysteries of beautiful marriages, privilege and its trappings, and reading Adorno by the pool. Books Recommended in this episode:

Theodor Adorno, an Introduction

Willa Cather, My Antonia

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where are You

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Jesse McCarthy, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?

Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

Clare Sestanovich, Objects of Desire

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Rebecca and I discuss the impact of a plague novel in the age of Covid-19, the drama and intrigue of prize juries, her archival work into the Act Up protests in Chicago, and the pleasures and complications of outside of what you know. Books Recommended in this episode: Rebecca Recommends her all-time nostalgic summer read: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Jack Wang, author of We Two Alone (2021). Jack and I discuss his debut story collection, We Two Alone, which Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “utterly remarkable,” the as-of-yet unwritten Great Hockey Novel, AAPI hate, and the new global novel. Books Recommended in this episode: Jack Recommends:

Nana Nkweti, Walking on Cowry Shells

Gil Adamson, Ridgerunner

Ling Ma, Severance

Te-Ping Chen, Land of Big Numbers

K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind (2020), a finalist for the National Book Award. Rumaan and I discuss how all fiction must now be climate fiction, being a promiscuous reader, the fallacy of writing from “your roots”, why there is no autofiction of black women’s experience, and the genius of J.M. Coetzee. Books Recommended in this episode: Rumaan’s novels: Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, Leave the World Behind Rumaan Alam Recommends:

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

David Gates, Jurnigan

Anita Brookner, Visitors

Michelle Houellebecq, Elementary Particles

Don Delillo, Running Do

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation (2020). Books Recommended in this episode: Miranda Popkey Recommends:

David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

Alex Higley, Old Open

Catie DiSabato, U UP?

Rachel Kong, Goodbye Vitamin

Framing Brittany Spears

Tale of Princess Kaguya, Isao Takahata (Ghibili Films)

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Gina Nutt, author of Night Rooms (2021), a linked collection of essays that use the horror movie genre as a catalyst to cultural understanding. Gina and I discuss the “final girl” trope in horror and the need for a #metoo moment for the genre, the terrible, beautiful humanity of Swedish horror films, and the process of coming to terms with our proximity to death and the swirling void that is always following in our wake. Books Recommended in this episode:

Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I’m Someone Else

Hanif Abdurraqib, The Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a live show, sponsored by Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, NY, Lauren and I discuss the opiating allure of social media, the impossibility of authenticity, and our desire for books without cellphones. Books Recommended in this episode: Lauren Oyler recommends:

The Faces, Tove Ditlevsen

On the Edge of Reason, Miroslav Krleža

The Princess of 72nd Street, Elaine Kraf

Mona, Pola Oloixarac

Dark Constellations, Pola Oloixarac

Savage Theories, Pola Oloixarac

The Divorce, Cesar Aira

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with debut novelist, Ellie Eaton, author of The Divines (2021). Ellie and I talk about class and race at English public schools, the genre of the campus novel, and the power and cruelty of teenagers. Books Recommended in this episode: Ellie Eaton Recommends:

Micah Nemerever, These Violent Delights

Dantiel Moniz, Milk, Blood, Heat

Torrey Peters, Detransition Baby

Emily Layden, All Girls

Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

Brandon Taylor, Real Life

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with celebrated Belarusian American poet, Valzhyna Mort. The publication of one of the collections poems, “Antigone, A Dispatch” in the New Yorker, brought attention to the anti-democratic tyranny in Belarus, where the most recent fair election was squashed by the Putin-puppet, Alexander Lukashenko. Music for the Dead and Resurrected (2020) is a testament to the voices and lives of her friends, family, and compatriots (especially her fellow artists) who have been brutalized in this anti-democratic power grab. Books Recommended in this episode: Valzhyna Mort recommends:

Carolyn Forché, In the Lateness of the World: Poems

Eduardo Corral, Guillotine: Poems

Victoria Chang, Obit

Michael Prior, Burning Province

Canisia Lubrin,The Dyzgraphxst

Joy Harjo, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry

Kevin Young (edit.) African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song

Ales Steger, Above the Sky Beneath the Earth

Galina Rymbu, Life in Space

Paul Celan, Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry: A Bilingual Edition

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Seeing the Body

Eliza Griswold, If Men, Then

Nathalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Song

Alice Oswald, Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea

Steven Leyva, The Understudy's Handbook

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of Remainder (2019), and Carl Fischer, author of Queering the Chilean Way (2016). Alia and I discuss the vote in Chile for a constitutional convention, her struggle with long haul Covid, and the inherited trauma of fascism. Also, I welcome Professor of Latin American Literature at Fordham University, Carl Fischer. Books Recommended in this episode:

Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season

Lina Miruane, Seeing Red

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Edan Lepucki, author of California (2014), Woman No. 17 (2017). Edan and I talk about being on the bleeding edge of the violent girl novel, being promoted by Stephen Colbert, the great California novel, and returning to one’s own “failed” novels. Books Recommended in this episode: Carolyn See, Golden Days

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here (2020). Kevin shares his recommendations for summer reading, including his votes for the best ever short novels, the line that he repeats every day, and the book that made him less afraid of what comes after death. Books Recommended in this episode:

Yiyun Li, Must I Go

Marcy Dermansky, Bad Marie

Katie Kitamura, The Long Shot

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Interviews with Bob Proehl, author of A Hundred Thousand Worlds and The Nobody People, and Miller Susen, author, director, and Educational Director at LiveArts, Charlottesville VA. Books Recommended in this episode:

Katharine Heiny, Standard Deviation

Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Alexandra Chang about her debut novel, Days of Distraction (2020). I introduce some distraction reads, some for when you want to wallow in the anxiety, and others for pure escapism. Books Recommended in this episode:

Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson

Days of Distraction, Alexandra Chang

Alexandra recommends: The Visiting Privilege, Joy Williams; The House is a Body, Shruti Swami; Luster, Raven Leilani

Distraction Reads: Escapism vs Punch-in-the-face’ism: Journal of a Plague Year, Daniel Defoe; They Came Like Swallows, William Maxwell; Severance, Ling Ma; Weather, Jenny Offill; The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Suzanne Collins; Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Lisa Swayze, the General Manager of Buffalo Street Book in Ithaca, New York. Buffalo Street Books is one of a handful of community-owned bookstores in the country. It survived the double plague of a Borders and a Barnes and Nobles in the same tiny city with them by reaching out to the community to buy ownership shares. We discuss her latest recommendations for reading during the pandemic, and I share my delight with the sub-genre of the “paranoid campus novel.” Books Recommended in this episode:

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Lisa’s Best of last 5 years: Ask Again Yes - Mary Beth Keane; The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai; History of Wolves - Emily Fridlund; The Mothers - Brit Bennett; The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead; The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich; Nothing to See Here - Kevin Wilson; On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong; Pachinko - Min Jin Lee; Red at the Bone - Jacqueline Woodson; Sing Unburied Sing - Jesmyn Ward; There There - Tommy Orange; Women Talking - Miriam Toews.

What to look for: This Town Sleeps by Dennis Staples; Book of the Little Axe by Lauren Francis Sharma; Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang; The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennet; Migrations by Charlotte McCongahy; And Lisa’s best book of the year thus far, The Death of Vivek Oji by Awkeke Emezi

The Paranoid Campus Novel: The Secret History, Donna Tartt; The Magicians, Lev Grossman; Catherine House, Elisabeth Thomas; Bunny, Mona Awad; Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints and The Twelve-Mile Straight (Ecco, 2011, 2017). Books Recommended in this episode:

Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

In the Land of Men, Adrienne Miller;

The Varieties of Romantic Experience, Robert Cohen

Ten Thousand Saints, The Twelve-Mile Straight, Eleanor Henderson

Three quarantine reads: Hex, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight; The Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo; Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices